Comfort and Spice – Niamh’s bacon jam

Niamh, salmon
Niamh and some of Frank Hederman's smoked salmon with cucumber relish on potato pancakes

My friend Niamh, who blogs at Eat Like a Girl, has just published Comfort and Spice: a beautiful recipe book, densely packed with recipes. (Important, this. Have you noticed how a lot of recent cookery books have a lot of pictures, very big text and surprisingly few recipes? Not this one.) If you’ve been following UK food blogs at all over the last few years, you’ve probably come across Eat Like a Girl. It’s one of my favourite UK cookery blogs: Niamh’s writing voice is just like her conversation, wry and full of energy; her photography is jealousy-inducing; and her recipes are, it goes without saying, bleedin’ marvellous.

Comfort and Spice, the new book in question, is the result of a year’s hard slog, and it’s full of new recipes which don’t appear on Niamh’s blog. The comfort’s all in the home-made butter, pork crackling, parma ham-flavoured salt and parmesan bone marrow that fills the book; the spice brings warmth and depth to the recipes – rose petals, cinnamon, lemongrass, Szechuan peppercorns and bay leaves in a flurry of international recipes.

The book is divided into smart chapters, which you’ll actually find useful in the kitchen. Quick suppers are always a useful resource, but best for me is the section on eight great big dinners – with pointers to what to do with the leftovers.

Crackling
Overnight-cooked pork shoulder

Niamh invited Dr W and me round for dinner with some other friends to try some bits from the book, and some recipes which didn’t make it in. All fantastic – bacon-infused vodka (not in the book – I hope the recipe turns up in a book or online soon) sounds mad, but made a simply superb bloody mary. Overnight-cooked pork shoulder with a spiced apple relish is pure Niamh: packed with flavour, trimmed with lovely bits of crackling, and sauced with real gusto. Irish potato pancakes with smoked salmon and cucumber relish are in the book, and I was quickly face-down in them, only to be diverted by something called bacon jam with the book’s blaas (one of the few yeasted Irish breads).

Now, if you’re not familiar with Niamh’s cooking, I can’t think of a better place to start than with the bacon jam, which is like a meaty version of crack. Seriously. Once you start eating it, it is basically impossible to stop; a very unattractive look, especially if there are eight other people trying to get to the bowl. It’s on her blog already, so didn’t appear in the book, and she’s given me permission to reproduce the recipe here. Go and cook it, and make sure that you’re alone when you eat it, because bacon jam smeared all over a salivating face is not attractive. Then go and buy the book to induce some more salivating.

You’ll need:

Bacon jam
Bacon jam, about to be shovelled into the gaping maw of Dr W

500g streaky bacon (it has to be streaky), chopped into small dice
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 red onion, finely diced
50g brown sugar
50mls maple syrup
50ml cider vinegar
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
250ml fresh brewed coffee (NOT instant – important)
2 chipotles in adobo (2 chillies – NOT 2 tins!), finely chopped

Sauté the bacon over a medium heat until starting to crisp.

Take the bacon out and fry the onion in the bacon fat until softening but not coloured. Add the garlic for about a minute.

Transfer the bacon, onion, garlic to a large pot with the rest of the ingredients (excluding the red wine vinegar). Simmer gently for one hour, adding a little water every 30 minutes if required (I only had to do this towards the end). Add the red wine vinegar in the last 5 minutes.

You can pulse the jam in a food processor briefly (to retain the course texture) although I felt it didn’t need it as the bacon was chopped quite small.

Ready to serve. Will keep in the fridge too although I doubt you will have any leftover.

Marmalade

I thought I’d missed the Seville orange season, which only lasts for a couple of weeks and starts around the end of January. I’d gone to the market in Cambridge last week, only to find they’d run out. Happily, another box turned up on Saturday, so I snapped up a couple of kilos.

Seville oranges are an unprepossessing fruit, knobbly and scarred-looking, and very puny when held beside the majestic, sterile, navel oranges in the next crate. But Sevilles sell out quickly for a reason. They don’t just make gloriously bitter, perfumed marmalade; they’re also a wonderful addition to recipes anywhere you might use a lemon, with their tart, fragrant juice.

Making your own marmalade is time-consuming; you’ll need to set the best part of a day aside for the project. It’s worth the effort, though – and my realisation that 14 jars of amber, jewelled preserves only cost me £7 (£3 for the oranges, £4 for the sugar) has left me full of self-righteousness. It’s also a great pleasure to be able to manage the recipe yourself so you can produce your preferred thickness of peel and syrupyness. I like a dense, thick-cut marmalade, of the sort that you just don’t seem to be able to buy these days. (So does my lovely Dad, whose name is on several of these jars.) A home-made marmalade, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had one, is much, much tastier than the shop-bought version. I am a purist when it comes to marmalade, and believe it tastes its best when it’s made with Seville oranges, sugar and nothing else. You’ll find no additions of grapefruit, whisky or ginger here – if you want whisky with your marmalade, pour yourself an accompanying glass.

Two kilos of fruit will produce about 14 jars of marmalade. Split the mixture between large pans if you don’t have a big jam pan (if you make a lot of preserves, a jam pan is a worthwhile investment). You’ll need:

2kg Seville oranges
3.5 litres water
4kg sugar

Get out your jam pan, and simmer the oranges in the water for 2 hours with a lid on. Remove the fruit from the liquid and slice the oranges in half. Use a fork (and a friend with a fork if you want to get this done quickly, because this is a somewhat tiresome job) to remove the seeds from the centre and put them in a bowl. Put the now seedless pulp from the oranges in another bowl with any juice.

Put all the seeds in a small pan, cover with water and boil vigorously to release the pectin in them for ten minutes while you prepare the skin.

You’ll be left with a pile of orange-skin shells. Chop them by hand to your preferred width – some prefer a very finely shredded peel. I like whokking great chunks. Combine the chopped peel with the pulp and put it all back in the water you simmered the whole oranges in with the sugar. Strain the seeds out of the little pan and add the resulting liquid to the marmalade.

Bring the marmalade, stirring initially to dissolve the sugar, to a rolling boil, with the lid off. After 15 minutes, dollop a teaspoon onto a cold saucer. Blow on it until it is cool and give it a poke with a finger to test the set. It probably won’t be ready yet – you’re looking for a wrinkly surface skin and a lovely amber colour. Test every 15 minutes. When you judge the set to be right (50 minutes/1 hour usually seems to be about right for a thick cut; shredded skin will come ready earlier) remove the pan from the heat, skim any scum off with a slotted spoon to prevent cloudiness, and pour into sterilised jam jars.

Peach and papaya jam

Don’t you hate it when the light starts slanting to remind you it’s autumn? This recipe catches the last of the really summery peaches and preserves them with a sugary papaya so you can enjoy them in the dead of winter with toast. I’m blowing my own trumpet a bit here, but I was simply amazed at how good this combination is – this is an extraordinarily good jam, packed with peachy aroma and body.

It’s nice here if you can find some white peaches (or nectarines) as well as some yellow ones. The fruit will be suspended in little chunks in the amber jam, and it’s nice to have a little variety in colour to look at. Peaches and papaya aren’t particularly rich in pectin, and they’re very, very sweet, so there’s less sugar here than you might expect; I have also added a supplementary apple with the juice of a lemon to add a little tartness and that all-important pectin for setting.

As with all jams, make sure you stir this constantly with a wooden spoon as it cooks to avoid burning the bottom of your pan. If you make a lot of jam (or even if you only make a bit), it’s a really good idea to spend a few pounds on a jam thermometer rather than relying on the cold saucer method, where you drip a little jam onto a cold object to see whether it’s setting properly.

To make about 2kg jam, you’ll need:

1 ripe papaya
2 ripe yellow peaches
2 ripe white peaches
1 small, tart apple
Juice of 1 lemon
Sugar (you’ll need to work out the weight – see below)

Sterilise some jars and a ladle.

Peel and seed the fruits. This is very easy with a peach – just quarter it and you should be able to peel the skin away with your fingers. Chop the flesh into chunks, being careful to reserve the juice. Weigh the fruit and any juice, and measure out some sugar weighing ¾ as much as the fruit. (In many jam recipes you’d use equal amounts of fruit and sugar, but these are very sweet fruits, and they don’t need the help!)

Pour the fruit, the lemon juice and the sugar into a saucepan with a jam thermometer, and bring to 110°C (230°F). The faster you can get it to temperature, the better the colour of the fruit will be preserved. Ladle the hot jam into jars, topping with a wax disc if you like, and seal immediately.

Greengage jam

Summer’s been a bit of a washout here, but it turns out that the hot start and wet middle and end of the season have meant that the plum harvest this year has been stupendous. (So has the wasp harvest, so be careful if you’re collecting your own.) I don’t have my own plum tree, but I’ve been scrumping plums from trees in a neighbour’s garden across the green that overhang a footpath, eating them at friends’ houses, and buying bushels of the things at the market.

Greengages are my favourite English plum. They’re (surprise!) pale green, extraordinarily sweet, and wonderfully juicy, with golden flesh when ripe. Like Victoria plums, they’re perfect for jam-making, keeping a lovely plummy fragrance when cooked down. They’re very obliging fruits; they’re full of pectin, so you won’t need to add any setting agents to the jam; and you don’t even need to stone them before cooking, as the stones will loosen themselves for you as the fruit cooks down, floating to the top of the jam so you can skim them off as they bob to the surface.

I like the pure plum flavour you get from this jam, but some people like to add a vanilla pod to the saucepan for some extra fragrance. For me, it’s not the best use of an expensive pod; this jam just employs greengages, water and sugar, and it’s none the worse for that. When selecting your greengages, try to find fruits which are ripe but not over-squishy, and reject any with bruises or mouldy bits, as this will affect the length of time your jam will keep once opened.

I find it hard to think about preserves (especially fruit ones) in terms of kilogrammes and litres, so I’m afraid you’ll need to dig out the imperial weights for this one. To make jam from 2lb of ripe greengages, making about 3lb jam, you’ll need:

2lb greengages
1½ lb granulated sugar
½ pint water

Sterilise some jars before you begin. Put the whole greengages and the water in a large pan, and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the fruits are very soft. Pour in the sugar, stir well and simmer hard, fishing out the stones as they bob to the surface, until the mixture reaches a jam set (it should measure 110°C on a jam thermometer; if you don’t have one, just dribble a bit of the jam onto a cold saucer and check that it’s reached a jammy texture). Skim any scum off the surface and pour into the sterilised jars, sealing immediately.

This is, of course, gorgeous on toast, crumpets or a croissant; my favourite thing to do with this jam is to dollop a big tablespoonful into the middle of a bowl of plain yoghurt for breakfast.

Fruit scones for cream tea

One of my sad, sad weekend hobbies is wandering around National Trust properties, buying a sack of books at the inevitable second-hand bookshop and then visiting the tea-room for a handsome cream tea, with fluffy scones, strawberry jam and plenty of clotted cream to slather on top. If you’re in East Anglia, the exquisite Oxburgh Hall, where you’ll find a number of embroideries worked by Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick, a priest hole you can clamber into and a very fine garden, has a really fabulous tearoom. Ickworth House (English wines, fantastic gardens, wonderful collection of fans) and Wimpole Hall (organic farm, hot-dogs made from the pigs you have just fed pig-nuts to in the barn) also do a very good line in cream teas – but to my mind Oxburgh’s intimate tearoom, housed in the hall’s old kitchens, complete with antique bread ovens and blue and white crockery displaying pictures of the hall itself, still takes the…cake. All the same, while it’s nice to visit Oxburgh once or twice a year (those gardens change gorgeously in character over the seasons), I can’t really justify driving an hour just for a cup of tea and a scone more regularly than that. Time to get baking.

I usually choose a pot of Earl Grey to go with my scones. So when, in the absence of a National Trust tearoom, I decided to prepare my own cream tea at home this weekend, I decided to use some very strong Earl Grey to soak the sultanas in before adding them to the dough. With a pot of tea, a jar of good strawberry jam (try Tiptree’s Little Scarlet or Duchy Originals Strawberry) and some clotted cream (increasingly available in supermarkets and delis – if you can’t find any, use extra-thick double cream rather than whipped cream, which has exactly the wrong texture), you’ll find yourself in possession of one of the finest things you can eat in the afternoon.

A quick note on the egg in the dough. I was lucky enough to have a box of bantam eggs a neighbour had given me, and used two – bantam eggs are tiny, very yolky and rich, and two are approximately the same volume as a single large hen’s egg. If you can find bantam eggs, I’d recommend using two in this recipe.

To make about 16 scones, you’ll need:

225g plain flour
2½ teaspoons baking powder
50g butter
25g caster sugar
1 large egg OR two bantam eggs
Milk (enough to make up 150ml when added to the beaten egg)
100g sultanas
1 large cup strong Earl Grey tea

Start by brewing the tea (make yourself a cup to drink while you’re at it) and preheating the oven to 220°C (425°F). When the tea is nice and strong, pour it over the sultanas in a bowl and leave them to plump up for half an hour while you prepare the dough for the scones.

Sieve the flour and baking powder into a bowl, and cut the softened butter into it in little chunks. Rub the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar.

When the sultanas have had half an hour in the tea, drain them in a seive and add them to the flour mixture. In a measuring jug, beat the egg. Top the beaten egg up with the milk until you have 150ml of liquid, and stir it gradually into the flour mixture (you may not need all of it), mixing all the time with a wooden spoon, until you have a soft dough that holds together but is not sticky. Try not to over-handle the dough so that your scones are light and fluffy. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to a thickness of about 1cm, and cut out rounds with a 5cm circular cutter.

Place the rounds onto greased baking sheets and brush the tops with any remaining milk/egg mixture (if you have none left, plain milk will do). Bake for 10 minutes until golden brown.

These scones are at their very best served as soon as they come out of the oven, split in half, spread with jam and cream. Once cooled, they’ll keep for a couple of days in an airtight tin.