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Cassoulet

No photos of this one, since cassoulet à la Liz, once dished up, turns out to look totally unlovely; and I really don’t want to scare you off, because it tastes divine. I hope you made the duck confit (I have cunningly recycled the picture here from that recipe) from a few weeks back, which, along with its fat, forms an important part of this dish. If you didn’t, though, you can usually find tins of excellent Castelnaudry confit in good delis in the UK (I’ve also seen it in Waitrose).

Cassoulet is one of those social-climbing dishes, which began life as a French peasant dish full of preserved meats and dried beans, and now gets sold for vast amounts of money in swish restaurants. You can buy tins of cassoulet, but a cassoulet you have made at home is even better, especially in mouth-feel. It’s a wonderfully warming dish, and it’s fantastic to serve to friends; somehow it’s an especially cheering and convivial thing to eat. You can serve it up as is, or with crusty bread and a salad. I’ve used Japanese panko breadcrumbs here, which are not at all French. I’m developing a slight addiction to them – wonderfully crisp, with a slightly malty flavour and a perfect balance between absorbency and crustiness, they’re terrific for topping baked dishes or making breaded coatings for baked or fried meats. If you can’t find any, normal white breadcrumbs, whizzed in your food processor, will be absolutely fine. If you’re in France, try to pick up some of the wonderful long, white haricot beans (haricots blancs lingots) which are traditionally used in cassoulet and have an amazingly creamy texture. They’re hard to find in the UK, so I have fallen back on standard haricots, which are a shorter bean. They are still excellent in this dish.

Thanks not least to Iris Murdoch (whose A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which contains a very stressful cassoulet incident, managed singlehandedly to put me off making cassoulet myself for about fifteen years), cassoulet has a bit of a reputation as a complicated, work-intensive dish. It’s really not all that bad; most of the work is done by your oven, with you stirring occasionally to help the slow-cooked beans become tender and creamy, and while there are short bursts of frying, skimming and stirring, you can easily fit all the other things you have to do in a day at around the long cooking time. Packed with moist pork belly, fat duck legs and garlicky sausage, this isn’t for days when you’re worrying about your blood pressure – as always, my philosophy on these things is that the rush of endorphins you get when eating something that tastes this good more than cancels out any health negatives, and hey – I understand beans are good for you.

To serve six, you’ll need:

500g haricot beans
2 large onions
2 sticks celery
1 carrot
5 cloves
1 bouquet garni
1 large sprig rosemary
1 large sprig thyme
3 bay leaves
6 fat cloves garlic
1 tablespoon herbes de provence
¼ bottle white wine
4 tomatoes, chopped roughly
400g slab pork belly
3 confit duck leg and thigh joints
6 garlicky sausages (if you can find saussice de Toulouse, they’re traditional here, but any very dense, meaty sausage will be good)
Japanese panko breadcrumbs OR bog-standard white breadcrumbs to sprinkle

The night before you want to eat, soak the beans in plenty of cold water. In the morning, drain the beans, discarding the soaking liquid, and put them in your largest casserole dish (you’ll need plenty of spare room in there for the cooking liquid, the other ingredients and the eventual swelling of the beans) with the bouquet garni, the rosemary and thyme, one of the onions, halved and studded with the cloves, the carrot, halved lengthways, one stick of the celery, two of the bay leaves and two of the garlic cloves, peeled and left whole. Chop the pork belly, complete with its rind, into 1 inch chunks, and add it to the saucepan. Pour over cold water to cover the contents of the pan by a couple of inches, and bring to the boil, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface.

When the pot is boiling, lower the heat to a simmer and put the lid on. Ignore it for an hour and a half while you brown the sausages in a tablespoon of the fat from the confit in a frying pan. Remove them to a plate, and use the sausage pan to fry the remaining onion, garlic and celery stick, chopped finely, until soft, in another large tablespoon of duck fat. Preheat the oven to 180° C.

Remove and discard the herbs and vegetables (except the garlic and the bouquet garni) from the beans mixture and drain and reserve the liquid (now stock) from the casserole dish. Return the beans and pork to the casserole, adding the onion, garlic and celery mixture, the chopped tomatoes, the remaining bay leaves, the sausages and the confit duck legs. (Don’t worry about scraping off any fat clinging to the legs – it’ll just add to the wonderful texture.) Pour over the wine and add the reserved stock from the pork and beans to just cover the mixture. Add a tablespoon of salt. Bring the contents of the casserole to a simmer on the hob and put it in the oven for two hours with the lid on, stirring every half an hour.

When the two hours are up, there should be no visible liquid; the whole cassoulet should have an even, creamy texture. Taste for seasoning – you will probably need to add extra salt. Sprinkle the top of the cassoulet with the panko crumbs or breadcrumbs, and cook for another 20-30 minutes with the lid off, until the crumbs are brown and the cassoulet is bubbling through it in places. Serve up, making sure everyone gets a bit of duck, a bit of sausage, and a bit of pork with their creamy beans and crusty top.

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Plevna, Tampere, Finland

I’ve just spent a few glorious computer-free days in Tampere, about 200 miles north of Helsinki. The snow is deep, the sausages are plentiful, and the best of the local beer is flavoured with birch tar.

Tampere, like most Finnish cities outside Helsinki, has surprisingly few Finnish restaurants. Every other restaurant seems to be a burger place or a kebab shop. Our flight got in very late, and the only open restaurant in our hotel was Amarillo (every Finnish town has a branch of Amarillo – some have two), a Finno-Tex-Mex. Remarkable stuff, like nachos made by people from the Frozen North who appear to have seen a picture of some nachos once upon a time. They came with bits of smoked Finnish sausage, smetana and soft Finnish cheese. Surprisingly tasty, but not nachos like you’ve ever seen them.

Happily for those looking for honest Finnish stodge that hasn’t been interpreted through a Mexican filter, Plevna, a microbrewery in an old cotton mill by the city’s rapids (incidentally, this was the first building in the Nordic countries to be lit by electric light back in 1882), produces some seriously stodge-tastic drinking food and some breathtakingly good beers. We’ve suggested to them that they send a couple of barrels to this year’s Cambridge Beer Festival. You’ll find local favourites like perry, cider and sparkling mead on the drinks list, along with light-(ish) choices like wheat beers and pilsners. Things start to get seriously, seriously good with the stouts, porters and syrupy dark lagers, which seem perfectly adapted for a cold, snowy Finnish March. There’s a long list of hearty, beer-friendly food like reindeer steaks, sausages, pork knuckles and rostis with mushroom sauces.

Each of the menu items has a little number at the top, indicating which of the beers on the list will be best alongside it. Portions are enormous – the Hop Grower’s Board (the bock is recommended with this starter) here, with rolls of smoked ham and beef, a local garlic brie, creamy prawn tartare, pate and lovely sweet Finnish pickled cucumber is meant to be for one person. We split it between two. A goat’s cheese salad arrived for one of the friends we were dining with. It was a bowl of salad about the size of his head with a whole, hand-sized grilled cheese perched on top.

The main food event at Plevna is the sausages. You can try Tampere’s local speciality, mustamakkara (Tamperelainen on the menu), which is a black pudding, crisp on the outside and moist with rye grains in the middle, traditionally served with a spoonful of lingonberry jam. It’s delicious, and at €9.50 it’s one of the cheapest things on the menu. (Mustamakkara also pops up at every hotel breakfast buffet in town, and it’s a great way to start the day.) You can choose from a selection of several German-style sausages, and if you’re unable to make a sausage decision, you can just ask for the sausage pan, full of bratwurst, Thuringerwurst, herb and cheese sausage and little sausages stuffed with pearl barley. It’s served with a creamy potato gratin full of bacon, and I defy you to finish the whole dish. Spoon over some of the sweet Finnish mustard (a real treat, this mustard, and I’ve come across Finns on holiday in England who keep tubes of it in their pockets when they are invited to barbecues – look out for toothpaste-like tubes marked sinappi in supermarkets) and enjoy.

It wasn’t the recommended beer, but #11, the Rauchbier James was a wonderful accompaniment to the smoky sausages. It’s a smoked, tarry drink; dark, fruity and syrupy. Don’t worry about tomorrow’s headache – you can deal with it in the sauna while you sit back and plan another meal.

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Sausage, squash, sage and lemon risotto

This risotto is perfect for those days when you’re feeling in need of a bit of love and comfort. The sweetly caramelised squash works perfectly against rich, savoury sausagemeat, and aromatics like fennel, sage and lemon lift the whole affair.

Find the best sausages you can for this – preferably something with a garlicky bite. I’m currently having a love affair with Waitrose’s pork and fresh garlic sausages, but if you can find Italian sausages with fennel and garlic, they’ll be an authentic and tasty base for your risotto. As always, I’m going to stamp my foot and insist you use Carnaroli rice for your risotto – I talked about the difference between rices here a couple of months ago if you want to read some more about it.

To serve four, you’ll need:

320g Carnaroli rice
1 litre hot chicken stock (home-made if possible)
1 large glass white wine
500g good sausages
1 large onion
1 medium butternut squash
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh sage, plus a few leaves to garnish
Zest of 1 lemon
Juice of ½ lemon
1 large handful grated parmesan
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Slit the sausages and pop the meat out into a bowl, discarding the skins. Dice the onion finely, and peel the squash, cutting the golden flesh into 1-2 cm cubes.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pan over a medium flame. Saute the sausage meat with the onion and the fennel seeds, crushed in a pestle and mortar, until the meat is crumbly and starting to brown. Remove the sausagemeat and onion to a plate, and in the same pan, saute the squash in some more olive oil until it is soft, the edges starting to caramelise and turn brown. Fish out a few cubes of squash and reserve them to use as a garnish. Return the sausage and onion to the pan with the squash, and tip the rice in. Stir well to make sure that the rice is coated with any oil in the mixture.

Pour the glass of wine into the pan and stir until it is all absorbed into the rice. Add a ladleful of the hot stock to the rice and bring, stirring, to a gentle simmer. As the stock is absorbed, add another ladleful while you stir. Continue like this for about 18 minutes, stirring and adding gradually to the liquid in the pan, until the rice is soft, tender to the bite and velvety.

Stir the lemon zest, the chopped sage, the parmesan cheese and the lemon juice through the risotto. Garnish with the reserved squash and some whole sage leaves to finish.

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Christmas stuffing and chipolatas

I mentioned the other day that you’re best off not stuffing the cavity of a turkey or, for that matter, a chicken – it increases the cooking time to an unacceptable length, and quite honestly, stuffing is just nicer prepared outside the bird, where it has a chance to go crispy on the outside. The trimmings are one of the most important parts of a Christmas dinner, but they can be a bit of a faff to prepare, so I like to assemble and cook mine on Christmas Eve, and heat them up at the last minute on Christmas Day – you really can’t tell that the stuffing and chipolatas have been reheated, and they’re absolutely delicious.

Buy the very best chipolatas you can find. I was in Yorkshire for Christmas, and went to Booths, which is a simply fantastic supermarket. Quality and choice here is better than at any of the supermarkets we have here in Cambridgeshire (even Waitrose); I ended up with a pack of chipolatas flavoured with chestnut purée which were as good as any butcher’s sausage. Unfortunately, Booths only operates in Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumbria and Yorkshire, so the rest of us are stuck with having to make a trip to the butcher’s for the chipolatas and for the sausage meat which goes in the stuffing, which should be of the best quality you can find.

For Christmas trimmings (or trimmings for any poultry or game you happen to be roasting for a non-Christmas occasion) you’ll need:

Stuffing
85g Paxo sage and onion stuffing mix (I know, I know – bear with me here)
250g good-quality sausage meat
1 Braeburn apple
2 banana shallots
1 pack vacuum-sealed chestnuts
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh sage
75g butter
Boiling water
Salt and pepper

Chipolatas
16 chipolata sausages
16 strips pancetta

Paxo stuffing mix? Well, despite the memories you may have of childhood Paxo made up by your grandmother to the packet instructions (dusty, squashy and very little fun), it works really, really well when you combine it with sausage meat. The recipe for Paxo is more than a hundred years old; it was invented by a Manchester butcher in 1901. I’m using it here because the wheat and barley rusk that forms the crumbs contains a bit of raising agent, which will make the texture of your stuffing very light, with a crisp outside – and the dried sage and onion are actually really good against a porky background.

Put the stuffing mix in a large mixing bowl with the butter, and pour over boiling water, according to the packet instructions. Stir well and cover with a teatowel while you chop the apple, shallots and chestnuts into small, even dice, and chop the sage finely. When you’re done, the stuffing mix should be cool enough to handle. Use your fingers to mix the sausage meat very thoroughly with the stuffing mix, then add the chopped apple, shallots and chestnuts and sage with a little salt and some pepper, and mix with your hands until everything is evenly distributed. Form into spheres about the size of a ping-pong ball and lay on well-greased baking trays. (The stuffing balls will almost certainly stick a bit, but you can prise them off relatively easily with a stiff spatula.)

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Wrap each sausage in a strip of pancetta. You don’t need to secure these with a toothpick (as well as saving you time, this also avoids any Christmas day toothpick-embedded-in-palate accidents). Arrange the sausages on another well greased tray.

Bake the sausages and stuffing balls for between 35 and 45 minutes (the cooking time will depend on the characteristics of the sausages and sausage meat you have chosen). The stuffing balls should be browning and crisp on the outside, and the pancetta crisp and golden. Remove from the trays when cooled, and move the stuffing balls and wrapped sausages to oven-proof bowls. When you come to serve them, just reheat at 180°C (350°F) for 12 minutes.

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Toad in the hole with onion gravy

Our friend Simon (the same Simon that hates tofu) is a man of set habits. Every Friday, he makes toad in the hole for supper. He has been doing this for about fifteen years now, and has developed some strongly held feelings about how the perfect toad is constructed. I quote directly from a very involved post he wrote about doing the Listener crossword a while ago – the toad recipe pops up somewhere in the middle when he gets briefly stuck on 29 across.

“All these celebrity chefs publish recipes for toad-in-the-hole, and they are, without exception, rubbish. Most involve too many eggs, and end up the texture of leather. So, here is the definitive recipe – bear in mind I’ve made this every Friday night for about 15 years, so I know what I’m talking about…

Get a metal baking tin, preferably non-stick. Rectangular is best, about 30cm by 40cm. Put a pound of Tesco’s Finest Pork & Herb sausages in it, along with a large splash of vegetable oil (or a lump of beef dripping if you’re daring.) Put it in the oven at 200 degrees C (180 degrees if fan-assisted) – no need to preheat, just bung it in from cold.

Put 4 oz of cheap plain flour into a glass jug. Add a pinch of salt, and break in an egg. Add about a quarter of a pint of full-fat milk, and whisk to a smooth paste – the best tool is a French whisk, those things that look like a big metal spring. Once you’ve got a smooth paste, add another quarter pint of full fat milk and whisk like mad to get some air into it. Leave to stand for 20 minutes, by which time the sausages should be browning and the fat should be hot.

Rapidly remove the pan from the oven, pour in all the batter, and quickly return to the heat. Leave for about 25-30 minutes, until the pudding has risen and is golden brown. Remove from the tray and serve with lashings of HP Fruity sauce. Vegetables are unnecessary. The quantity above serves one, with a couple of cold sausages left over for breakfast on Saturday.”

I am grudgingly grateful, because Simon’s Yorkshire pudding batter, which forms the ‘hole’ part of a toad in the hole (sausages, for some reason, are the ‘toad’ bit – English food etymology baffles me) is bleedin’ terrific. Simon – your basic proposal is sound, I applaud your use of beef dripping and the batter is, admittedly, fantastic – but HP Fruity? Tesco’s Finest sausages? Vegetables are unnecessary? I made my toad in the hole to Simon’s basic recipe using some sausages from the butcher’s, but stirred a tablespoon of grainy Dijon mustard and a teaspoon of chopped sage into the batter just before pouring it into the tin. I also made an onion gravy to moisten the lovely puffy batter so that I could avoid the HP Fruity, and stir-fried a thinly sliced Savoy cabbage with some lardons of bacon fried until crisp. We found that with the gravy and bacon-spiked cabbage, the amounts above were more than enough for two. (This is not to say we did not clean our plates. Toad in the hole just invites you to overeat.)

Onion gravy is fantastic stuff. It’s a delicious and incredibly savoury way to lubricate those meals that don’t produce much in the way of liquids themselves (try some with a pork chop or over naked, hole-less sausages some time). Just make sure you’ve got some decent stock hanging around. If you don’t have any home-made stock, try Knorr’s concentrated liquid stock in the brown bottles – it’s really pretty good. To make enough for two, you’ll need:

2 large onions
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon beef dripping (or goose fat)
2 teaspoons plain flour
300 ml chicken stock
1 glass white wine
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce

Melt the beef dripping in a frying pan and saute the sliced onions with the salt for about half an hour, until they are turning a lovely brown. Sprinkle the flour over and stir well to make sure it’s distributed well around the pan, and pour over the stock, stirring slowly all the time. Pour the wine in and bring to a gentle simmer for five minutes, until the gravy is thickened and the alcohol has burned off. Stir in the soy sauce and serve.

I much prefer to use dark soy for gravy-browning purposes – those browning granules you can buy don’t add anything at all in the way of flavour, where dark soy will give a rich background (which doesn’t taste recognisably Chinese) to your sauce along with its great colour.

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Frickadellen – a fabulous meatball

Sometimes, the best recipes come about by sheer accident. This was one of them, and if you make anything from this blog this month, you really should think about making these moist little meatballs – they’re fast, completely delicious and very easy. So easy I feel a little ashamed.

Frickadellen, a Teutonic cross between a meatball and a burger, are little patties made from white meats, usually veal and pork. I had been poking around in the fridge, wondering what on earth to do with half a bowl of olives, some randomly purchased vegetables and some bread which was on the verge of going stale, and came up with this. The results really had no business being this good. Clearly the little god who works the refrigerator light was smiling on me. Try making these the next time you feel the need to sacrifice a wilting lettuce and an about-to-burst tomato to him.

You’ll need:

1 pack good sausages
1 egg
3 slices soft white bread
1 red pepper
6 spring onions
2 cloves garlic
½ cup olives
A grating of nutmeg
2 dried chilis
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
2 chicken breasts

Skin the sausages, and put them in the food processor with everything except the chicken breasts, and whizz until you have a rough paste. Add the chicken breasts and pulse until they’re chopped roughly, mixed in with the other ingredients. Form round patties about the size of a ping-pong ball and saute (I used some bacon fat left over from breakfast’s patented hangover cure, some very crispy bacon sandwiches). Turn regularly for between 10 and 15 minutes, and serve hot with rice and a salad.

The olives keep everything moist (use black or green ones preserved in oil, not in salt, and make sure they’re de-stoned); the coriander seeds pop, full of flavour, in your mouth; the bread gives the meatballs a beautifully tender texture; and the red pepper makes everything sweet and juicy. Delicious.

My guilt at the easiness of preparing these meatballs was soon realised. I had a sneaking suspicion that food this good should involve suffering. It just wasn’t my suffering – immediately afterwards, Mr Weasel, washing up, nearly chopped his thumb off on the Magimix blade. It now has three macho-looking stitches (administered by my Dad, a GP with a delicate touch and a good line in sympathy for the poor sod who has to live with his daughter). No photographs, in that I am hoping that you will want to keep coming back to read this blog, and I suspect you’ll be put off by extreme clinical detail.

Happily (I think), Mr Weasel has said that he’d cheerfully chop most of the other thumb off if it means he can have these Frickadellen a second time. I think that’s probably as good a recommendation as I’m going to get. Enjoy these, but be careful about what sharp-edged, curved bits of steel might be lurking under the bubbles in your sink afterwards.