Burwash Manor Farm Larder

Burwash Manor Farm (New Road, Barton, 01223 263423), just outside Cambridge, is host to a rather special selection of shops. We’d dropped in to pick up some peg rails from Providence, a Shaker cabinet and interiors firm run by a couple from New England. I then swung by Nest to check out the salvaged 1950s kitchen equipment and refurbished typesetters’ cabinets, grabbed a quick cup of tea and a toasted teacake in the tearooms, and finished the shopping day in the Larder, a delicatessen whose owners have a real eye for quality products.

The Larder benefits enormously from being on a farm; on the day we visited, three people were outside the shop in the rain cleaning and preparing asparagus straight from the fields. Asparagus is popping up a few weeks later than usual this year, because it’s been so cold. Grab some now if you can; the season is very short. (No pics of the asparagus for you today – it was so good it deserves a post of its own.)

Everything on offer is organic, much of it from small suppliers. A lot of the fresh produce comes straight from the farm. This does mean that sometimes the product you’re after might not be in stock, so if you want the sourdough starter (which always sells very fast), the fresh eggs from the cheerful-looking hens, or happen to be after a particular type of vegetable or fruit, ring ahead to check on stock. (Alternatively, just do what I do: roll up and pick from the enormous selection on offer, letting availability dictate what you’ll have for dinner.)

Local produce is strongly represented, with apples and juices from Coton orchard, just around the corner; wines from Chilford vinyard on the other side of Cambridge; local beers; and local pork pies and cheeses. Everything you might want from further afield is on offer, from organic Darjeeling tea to Ortiz tuna and soft chorizo for cooking. Loose produce is carefully labelled, so the buyer is aware of its source and its organic credentials.

I’m in awe of the owners’ ability to pick suppliers. The balance of locally and exotically sourced produce is really well-measured, and the products are chosen with a flair for flavour and quality; Valhrona chocolate rubs shoulders with Cox’s apple juice, paella rice and marinaded mussels. And the cheeses – oh, the cheeses. I think this picture can probably more eloquently describe the fantastic sprawl on offer than I can.

We bought a selection from the chilled cabinet for supper; some caperberries, some pork and apple chutney pies, and a little crottin of goat’s cheese with a piece of truffle pressed into the top, scenting the whole cheese. Some crusty bread and some tomatoes later, and we had an instant supper. Do visit if you get the opportunity; you’ll be unable to leave the shop with your hands empty.

Rhubarb and cream cheese cake

Before we begin, an apology. The photograph accompanying this post is horrendous. Deciding to photograph dessert after a long and riotous evening in good company with good wine was perhaps not my smartest decision this week. I kept a slice back to take a picture of this morning, but on waking discovered Mr Weasel, an insomniac when there is cake in the house, had got up at 6am and eaten it. I’ll make the cake again at the weekend and take some pictures which make it look more like something you’d like to eat – in the meantime, please be assured that this is an alarmingly delicious cake.

Rhubarb is in season in the UK at the moment. Buy it now, while it’s cheap – there are many things besides fool and crumble you can do with it. This is another cake which is essentially a huge cheat; a quick cheesecake topping is pressed into and cooked with boxed cake mix, prepared so it’s very stiff to counter the gorgeously soft cheese. It takes minutes to prepare and tastes glorious.

You’ll need:

1 box American yellow cake mix
4oz melted butter
2 eggs
1 large carton full-fat cream cheese
Icing sugar (enough to fill the cream cheese carton)
5 stalks chopped rhubarb
3 tablespoons caster sugar
2 tablespoons water

Combine the butter, eggs and cake mix until you have a stiff paste, and pack it into the bottom of a springform cake tin. Use a fork to blend the icing sugar and cream cheese, and press the sweet mixture onto the top of the cake mix, working with a spatula from the centre to make the cheese layer a little thicker in the middle and thinner at the edges. Place in an oven at 180°C for around 40 minutes, or until the top is turning golden and the cake does not wobble when shaken. Leave the cake to cool. It should have a depression in the top where the cheesecake mixture was thickest – this will act as a bowl for the rhubarb.

When the cake is cool, simmer the rhubarb, caster sugar and water together until the rhubarb is tender, pink and coming apart. Spoon the rhubarb into the depression on top of the cake, sprinkle with icing sugar and serve immediately. Don’t leave any in the fridge – it’ll make your husband get up early so he can eat it in secret.

Sticky grilled chicken with satay sauce

This was meant to be sticky barbecued chicken, but we in Cambridgeshire are living through history’s wettest drought (hosepipe bans, drought orders and torrential rain all in a very aggravating welter). The barbecue flame took one look at the sky and went out immediately when I rather foolishly lit it in the five-minute window of good weather on Sunday. Not to worry – this is a recipe which does very adequately under the grill too.

The recipe is one which was given to my Mum by a friend who very sadly died of breast cancer quite recently. If you cook it, it’d be great if you could perhaps look at buying some fabulous pink wellies from Breast Cancer Care, or giving them a donation.

Sue’s recipe comes with a bonus satay sauce which uses the marinade as an ingredient. When you’re making the sauce, be careful to simmer it hard to cook off any raw chicken juices. The marinade itself is extremely penetrating (a characteristic of many treacle or molasses-based marinades), so don’t marinade for more than six hours. Chicken kebabs are also very successful in this marinade. To cook two pounds of chicken pieces you’ll need:

Juice of a lemon
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons treacle or molasses
8 tablespoons light soya sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons tomato ketchup

Easy as anything – just mix all the marinade ingredients together and marinade the meat for five or six hours. Grill or barbecue until the marinade on the skin is beginning to caramelise.

For the satay sauce you’ll need:
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped finely
2 cloves garlic
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
2 teaspoons coriander (thrash to bits in the mortar and pestle)
3 tablespoons smooth peanut butter
¾ pint (or a can) coconut milk
2 tablespoons marinade (above)
Salt and pepper

Fry the onions, garlic and spices in the oil until the onions are soft and transluscent, then add the peanut butter, salt and coconut milk. Simmer for twenty minutes with two tablespoons of the marinade you used for the meat. Some of the oil will be released from the coconut as you cook – you can use kitchen paper to absorb it if you feel there’s too much. Season to taste.

This sauce is remarkably close to Malaysian satay sauces (without the lemongrass, and substituting the treacle for the palm sugar). Give it a spin – I think you’ll like it.

Gastronomy Domine is moving!

I’ve bitten the bullet and bought my own domain. All new posts (and all of the old ones) will now appear at www.gastronomydomine.com, so please update your bookmarks and point your browsers thataway.

I leave you with a photograph of Mooncake the cat, about to get into some serious trouble for evildoing.

Rösti with bacon and onion

You’ll read some tremendously complicated recipes for rosti, involving time-consuming methods like par-boiling and cooling before you grate, quick spells in the freezer, wrapping the grated potato in a tea towel and whirling it around your head in the garden, and so on. There’s none of that in this recipe, which is extremely easy.

There’s some dispute surrounding the boiling issue – it’s true that a par-boiled potato will make your rösti absorb sauces a little better. I’ve tried both methods and have found the difference to be minute. The raw potato method is faster and results in a deliciously crisp surface, giving to the pressure of your teeth like a thin layer of ice. The potato inside is soft and yielding – delicious.

Ashkenazi Jewish latkes are a similar kind of potato cake (without bacon, for obvious reasons). Recipes for latkes and other Hannukah foods abound in Evelyn Rose’s books – I’ve just managed to find a second-hand copy of the Entertaining Cookbook at an online bookstore for a quarter of the shudder-inducing price I’d been quoted elsewhere, so look forward to some recipes from it when it finally makes its tortured way through the Royal Mail.

I used Kestrel potatoes for these rösti. Kestrel are easy to grow in the garden, and have an excellent flavour. Be careful that whichever variety of potato you choose is a waxy-fleshed one. Don’t be alarmed by the amount of starchy liquid that comes out of your squeezed potato – you will get more than a mugful from 500g.

To serve four as an accompaniment, you’ll need:

500g Kestrel potatoes, peeled
4 rashers of bacon, chopped finely
1 small onion
3 tablespoons goose or duck fat (you can use any cooking fat with a good flavour, but goose or duck fat does create a particularly crisp surface. Bacon fat would be excellent in this, as would schmaltz.)
Salt and pepper

Grate the potatoes and onion finely. You can do this by hand, or in a food processor with a grating blade. Squeeze the grated potato and onion out, handful by handful, into a bowl and discard the juices. Mix in a large bowl with the bacon, and season.

Melt half the goose fat in a large, non-stick frying pan over a high flame, and add the grated mixture when the fat is sizzling hot. Pack the potatoes down into the pan firmly to create a dense cake, and turn the hob down to a medium heat for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, you’ll notice a change in the shreds of potato on the surface, which will now be transluscent and glossy. Take a large dinner plate and, using oven gloves, place it upside down on top of the frying pan. Turn the pan and plate arrangement upside down, so the rösti is neatly turned out onto the plate. Melt the rest of the fat in the pan, slide the rösti back in (the cooked side will be facing you) and leave for another 20 minutes.

This was delicious with a roast chicken, soaking up the buttery juices beautifully. Experiment with your rösti – try adding a grated apple, cheese, or fresh herbs. If there are only two of you, try making this larger amount and eat the remainder cold for lunch the next day.

Zesty roast chicken

How on earth have I managed to go for so many months without roasting a chicken? I found this beautiful free-range, maize-fed bird in Waitrose. It was calling out in a ghostly chicken voice to be stuffed with zingy, summer aromatics.

Roast chicken using this method is as easy as anything; you only need to spend a few minutes preparing the bird to go into the oven, and it produces so much buttery, herby, oniony juice that you don’t need to make a gravy.

Some people like to roast their chicken with the breast pointing downwards, in order to keep everything moist. You don’t get such a crisp skin with this method, though, so I prefer to roast the chicken the right way up, breast pointing skywards, and baste every ten minutes or so with the buttery juices.

You’ll need:

1 chicken
1 lime, cut in halves
3 red onions, sliced roughly
10 cloves of garlic, skin on
1 handful marjoram from the garden
1 stalk celery
3 tablespoons butter
Sea salt
2 teaspoons flaked dried chilis and freshly ground pepper (I used a grinder of Spirits of Fire mix from the Elements of Spice company in South Africa – a present, along with another five grinders of wonderful things, from our friends Greg and Sienne.)

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Put both halves of the lime, the celery (in pieces), one of the onions, the marjoram, half the garlic, a tablespoon of butter and a teaspoon of chillis and pepper inside the cavity of the bird. You may have to push quite hard, but persevere; it’ll all fit with a bit of squeezing.

Stack the remaining onions and garlic in the bottom of the roasting tin, and place the chicken on top. Dot the rest of the butter on the surface of the chicken, and grind the rest of the spices all over.

You should cook your chicken for 45 minutes per kilo, plus 20 minutes. Baste every 10 minutes or so, and rest the bird for 5-10 minutes when you remove it from the oven. It will have released delicious juices into the tray, which you can spoon over your accompaniments along with the now roast onions and garlic. I served this with a bacon and onion rosti, which soaked up the juices beautifully – watch this space for a recipe.

No sandwich in the world is better than the sandwich you make the day after roasting this chicken with the jellied juices, a little roast onion and the tender meat you’ve stripped from the carcass.

Crab pate with Melba toast

Something deep in the lizard-bit of my brain seems to be saying that I need to eat more fish. Ever alert to what my inner lizard is telling me, I’ve been eating a lot of seafood this week. And when the weather’s warm and humid, nothing is nicer than a glass of wine and some chilled crab pate on Melba toast.

Dressed crab is always curiously inexpensive in the supermarket – doubly curious, when you consider how delicious it is, and how easy it is to work with, all ready-shucked and packed in its own carapace, so you don’t have to be a chef at Hotels in Blackpool or a Michelin Star winner to be able to turn it into something incredible. To make enough pate for two smug fish-lovers, you’ll need:

1 dressed crab
2 tablespoons melted butter
Leafy parts of a stick of celery
½ teaspoon quince jelly (if you can’t get hold of quince jelly, use redcurrant)
1 teaspoon tarragon leaves
Small handful chervil
Juice of half a lemon
½ clove crushed garlic
Pinch of cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper

Put all the ingredients in the blender and whizz until you have a fine purée. Pack the resulting pate into a greased mould (I used a silicone muffin mould, which looks like a timbale mould in shape, but is easier to handle) and chill for an hour, until the pate is firm enough to turn out in one piece. Dress with chives and some more chervil.

The tiny amount of fruit jelly in this really brings out the strangely fruity sweetness of the crab. We ate the pate with Melba toast, which is delicious and looks dreadfully complicated. It’s actually simplicity itself. Just toast white sliced bread in the toaster as usual, and when it’s done, slice off the crusts. Separate the two sides of the slice of toast from each other by pushing a sharp knife through the soft bread in the middle of the slice, and grill the white side of each bifurcated toastlet under the grill until it’s golden and curling. Pour a glass of Semillion Chardonnay and get munching.

River Farm Smokery, Bottisham – home-made taramasalata

This sticky pair of sci-fi slippers isn’t some poor creature’s lungs. It’s my supper – a beautifully smoked chunk of cod’s roe from River Farm Smokery, a couple of miles outside Cambridge. Dan, the smokery’s production manager, contacted me a couple of weeks ago and whetted my appetite with a pack of some exceptionally fine smoked salmon. I dropped in on Thursday and bought a selection of the fish on offer in the smokery’s little shop. (I shall be back shortly to throw myself upon the meat counter and the smoked olives – everything I came home with was seriously, seriously good.)

Cambridge and Newmarket readers take note – this place is on your doorsteps, and if my experience is anything to go by, you don’t know it’s there. Dan keeps a blog about the smokery, on which there is a handy map, so you have no excuse. The shop also carries a really thoughtful range of delicatessen products, and if that’s not enough to convince you, the glorious smoked salmon actually costs less than it does at the supermarket.

Dan showed me around the smokery; I’ll go back soon with a camera. Hot and cold kilns, thick, fragrant tar, bags of oak chippings, eels, olives – and my God, the soft, downright seductive smell of all that smoke. Someone should bottle it and sell it. (It is my sad duty to report that Stilton cheesemakers have done the same and are trying to market the smell of feet as a ladies’ perfume.)

Alongside the smoked salmon, trout, eels and an excellent mackerel pate were more unusual offerings, including these roe – peeled and released from their tough skins in this picture, so you can make out the mass of tiny eggs. Dan says that he sells a lot of these roe for spreading as they are on toast. I decided to use them for taramasalata. Some taramasalata recipes will tell you to soak the whole roe before peeling, but I didn’t find that necessary with these, which weren’t over-salted. If you are in Greece, use pressed, salted grey mullet roe. If, like me, you have never seen a pressed, salted grey mullet roe, go with the smoked cod’s roe. It’s fantastic.

To serve four, you’ll need:

  • 4 slices white bread
  • ½ cup smoked cod’s roe, skin removed
  • 1 clove garlic
  • ½ red onion
  • Juice of 1 ½ lemons
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • Black pepper to taste

Grate the onion and garlic and put in the food processor with the bread, roe, pepper and lemon juice. Whizz until everything is smooth, and with the blades still whirring, dribble the olive oil into the mixture in a thin stream, as if you are making mayonnaise. When everything is amalgamated, transfer to a bowl, and refrigerate for half an hour for the flavours to meld. Serve with strips of pitta bread and raw vegetables. The taramasalata will keep in the fridge for around a week.

While you eat, consider the fact that despite the pink roe and the red onion, this is not remotely as pink as the factory-processed stuff you’ll get in supermarkets and, sadly, in many restaurants. There’s a reason for that. It’s called food colouring. Oh – and Alban, who asked me for more quick recipes, should be pleased to learn that he can make this in under half an hour, so no more excuses; get cooking.

Reach Fair 2006 – toffee apples

First of all, an apology for not having posted for a week and a bit. A visit from family, a series of busy evenings of unbloggable dinners (at the houses of friends who weren’t seeking Internet fame, at the University where the lights are dim and the meals a bit swillish) and finally a really, really nasty brush with salmonella all conspired to stop me posting. I’m better (and thinner – positively svelte, now I mention it) again now, and I and the seven colleagues who ate the coleslaw at the pub on Perne Road have called Environmental Health in.

Cast your minds back a week and a half.

Astute readers familiar with Cambridgeshire will have worked out by now that I live in Reach, a tiny village about fifteen miles from Cambridge, set around a large green. The village is complete with a Roman canal, a ruined Norman church (I’m looking at it out of the living room window as I type – see above for a picture taken at the end of March – the roundabout on the left is the view out of the front garden from the last week of April) and marks the start of the seven-mile Devil’s Dyke, a perfectly straight chalk earthwork which was put in as defence by Hereward the Wake’s lot. It is, you might gather, a village with a fair old bit of history.

In 1201, King John granted a charter to the village allowing it to host an annual fair on May 1. Historically, the fair had huge significance in the region, and was a big event for those wishing to trade in livestock and the goods which had come down the Roman canal (which, in 2006, is still navigable, although it’s not been used commercially for about a century). Back then, the fair was a three-day affair, drawing visitors from all over the east of England.

Eight hundred and five years later, the fair is still running every year, although now it’s an old-fashioned funfair which only opens for a day, with a merry-go-round, swingboats, hoopla, a coconut shy and a helter-skelter. The local schoolkids dance around a maypole, the village is infested with morris dancers and squeezebox players, mock battles are held on the playing fields, and there’s a hogroast.

There’s food everywhere you look; excellent local ice-cream, vans full of sweets, the coconuts nobody is winning because they appear to be weighted with lead. Our very splendid local pub also has a beer tent most years. These toffee apples are particularly magnificent, and they’re a staple of the fair. To make your own, you’ll need:

450 g soft brown sugar
50 g butter
10 ml malt vinegar
150 ml water
1 tablespoon golden syrup
6-8 medium-sized apples and the same number of good wooden sticks. (I’ve used pencils in emergencies – and no sticks for your toffee apple is, as far as I’m concerned, an emergency par excellence.)

Put the sugar, butter, vinegar, water, and syrup into a large pan with a heavy base. Stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved, then raise the temperature and then boil until the temperature reaches 143°C (soft crack on your jam thermometer). At this temperature a drop of the mixture in cold water will separate into hard threads which are not brittle.

Push the sticks into the clean apples. Dip the apples into the toffee and swirl them around for a few seconds until they are covered in the toffee. Leave to cool on a sheet of greaseproof paper.

I’ll leave you with a photo of the fair in the 1930s. See those people sitting on the verge on the left? These days, that’s my front garden.