Poulet Antiboise – Antibes roast chicken

Poulet Antiboise, crostiniI’m back from a week at Disneyworld, where I actually lost weight, which should tell you all you need to know about the food there. Shouldn’t complain; it’s not every week you get to accompany your husband on a work trip to somewhere with rollercoasters, but there is only so much deep-fried food a girl can take. I ended up subsisting on toffee apples; a surprisingly effective weight-loss regime. More on all that in a later post; it was, after all, the Epcot Food and Wine Festival while we were there, so I do have something besides churros and overcooked steaks to write about.

Back to the matter at hand. The only recipe I’ve ever seen for Poulet Antiboise comes from Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food. In that desert-island situation that never actually happens, but that we all like to fantasise about, Elizabeth David’s are the cookery books I’d rescue from the hold of my sinking ship – and I wouldn’t use them to make fires with. That fate is reserved strictly for that useless brick of a book from Prue Leith’s cookery school.

A Book of Mediterranean Food is David’s first book, and is now available (in the link above) in a hardback edition with her next two, French Country Cooking and Summer Cooking – well worth buying rather than the paperbacks, which tend to fall to bits if you use them much in the kitchen. These books were the fruits of her period living in France, Italy and Greece, and they ooze sunshine and good times. David’s style is unlike the very didactic recipe writing, full of precise times and measurements, that everybody uses these days (usually at the insistence of those reading and cooking from the recipes – a few years ago I decided to start specifying amounts of herbs in grammes rather than handfuls or sprigs, for example, after one too many worried emails asking me precisely how much basil you can fit in a fist). Her recipes are descriptive and give a clear idea of flavour and method, but without always giving particularly precise measurements, timings or even ingredient lists; all of which should leave you, the creative cook, with a world of experimentation and enthusiastic improvisation to enjoy over each dish.

This is a gorgeous recipe, where a chicken is buried in a giant heap of softened onions in a big casserole dish, then roasted until the onions collapse and make their own sauce with the chicken’s savoury juices, and served with typically Provençal flavourings. Rather than stirring olives into the sauce and serving the lot with fried bread triangles as in David’s original recipe, I’ve made a sort of deconstructed tapenade to spread on grilled crostini, which works a treat alongside the chicken’s richness. I’ve decreased the battleship-floating amount of olive oil that you’ll find in the original, added some shallots to the mix and added cooking times, temperature and a weight for your chicken below. I followed David’s original instruction to add a tablespoon or so of cream to the sauce at the end of cooking, but I’d encourage you to taste it first and decide whether or not you think it needs it; it’s just as good if you leave it out, so it’s not made it into the ingredient list below. Some French sautéed potatoes are a great accompaniment to this dish.

To roast one chicken, you’ll need:

1 roasting chicken, about 1.5kg
6 large onions
5 shallots
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 heaped teaspoon cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper
10 slices from a ciabatta
5 anchovy fillets
2 heaped tablespoons capers, drained
15 black olives, stoned (I like Greek dry roasted olives that come in a jar, like Crespo, for this recipe – additionally, they’re wonderfully cheap)
100g stupendous tomato sauce or sundried tomato paste
A handful of parsley. Ha. Take that, measurement emailers.

Poulet Antiboise
Poulet Antiboise, immediately on emerging from the oven

Preheat the oven to 180ºC (370ºF). Ferret around inside your chicken and remove any lumps of poultry fat, seasoning it inside with plenty of salt and pepper. Leave it to come to room temperature while you prepare the onions.

Slice the onions and shallots thinly, and sauté them with the cayenne pepper in the oil until soft but not coloured in a heavy-based pan large enough to take the chicken. I use a 29cm oval Le Creuset number which is perfect for pot-roasting a chicken. They’re pricey, but well worth asking for as a Christmas present; mine gets an awful lot of use.

Remove the pan from the heat and add the chicken, burying it upside-down in the onions, which should smother it completely. Put the lid on and roast for 90 minutes (you don’t need to check or baste the chicken while it’s cooking), by which time the chicken will be cooked through and tender, and the onions will have collapsed.

While the chicken is cooking, prepare your tapenade. Chop the capers and olives roughly. In a small frying pan, fry the anchovies with a teaspoon of olive oil, poking occasionally with a wooden spoon until they have “melted”. Add the capers and olives to the pan and sauté for a few minutes to meld the flavours. Remove to a bowl.

Grill the slices of ciabatta and shortly before serving, spread each slice with a teaspoon of tomato sauce and a teaspoon of the tapenade. Sprinkle with parsley and serve alongside the chicken.

Piedmont peppers

Piedmont peppersThis recipe is based loosely around an Elizabeth David one my Mum used to serve up regularly as a cold antipasto when my brother and I were tinies. We couldn’t get enough of it, and I know he has his own version of the recipe too.

These peppers must be served at room temperature, when they are, unaccountably, much sweeter and juicier than they are when warm. The original version calls for bell peppers, but I’ve found that pointed Romano or Piquillo peppers tend to contain more in the way of fruit sugars and taste far better. (It goes without saying that the peppers you choose should be ripe – red, orange and yellow ones are all find, but avoid the green peppers when you go shopping.) If you have guests whose stomachs are made sensitive by peppers, advise them to peel the indigestible skins off before they eat, which should prevent any upsets.

This is a recipe it’s worth trying out on anchovy-haters, several of whom I’ve brought round using these peppers – not necessarily to a whole-hearted embracing of the anchovy, but at least to a whole-hearted embracing of it in this particular dish. The final result isn’t a fishy one, rather a deeply savoury, umami dish, full of sweet and buttery juices (you’ll use a lot of butter here – it’s worth it) to dip some good crusty bread into. If you love the sweet, fruity bite of a roast pepper (god knows, I do), you’ll find this is one of the best ways to showcase that flavour.

To prepare six peppers as an antipasto (how many you’ll eat depends on how much else you prepare, but you’ll find these disappear quickly) you’ll need:

6 Romano or Piquillo peppers
12 anchovies
3 plump tomatoes
6 plump cloves garlic
100g butter
olive oil to drizzle
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Cut the peppers in half lengthwise, discard any seeds, and chop each half into half again across the short edge. Lay the peppers out in a large baking tray (use two if you have to), the skin side down.

Chop the tomatoes into quarters and put a piece in each little pepper boat. Cut each clove of garlic into four fat slices and put one in each pepper, along with half an anchovy fillet. Cut the butter into small pieces and scatter them all over the dish. Sprinkle everything with a generous amount of salt and pepper, drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil over the whole dish and put everything, uncovered, in the oven for between 45 minutes and an hour until the edges of the peppers are browning. (The cooking time is imprecise here because a riper pepper will cook faster than a less ripe one – I find this recipe performs differently at different times of year and with different peppers, so you’ll have to use your judgement here.)

Remove the dish from the oven and leave it on the side, covered with a teatowel, until the peppers are at room temperature. Serve with plenty of the juices from the bottom of the dish drizzled over, and lots of crusty bread to soak them all up.

Bagna cauda

A miracle! The English summer actually seems to be taking itself seriously this year – we have blissy sunshine, bone-loosening heat and, in my village at least, a lovely smell of hay in the air. These conditions do not lend themselves well to lots of roasts and meaty things, so I looked to Provence and Piedmont for today’s recipe – a bagna cauda, rich with garlic and anchovies, for dipping hunks of bread, crudités and hot, steamed artichoke petals into. (There have been some fabulous and enormous artichokes kicking around the market in Cambridge this week – if you’re local, go and grab a few now.)

This bagna cauda has a texture a lot like mayonnaise, and it’s made in a similar way, but without any eggs. (The proteins in the cooked garlic and anchovies help to emulsify the oil and butter in the way that an egg yolk does in mayonnaise.) Like mayonnaise, it keeps well in the fridge and works amazingly well in sandwiches, so if you don’t polish off the whole lot in one go, just treat it as a flavoured mayo for next week’s packed lunches.

To make enough to serve six as a robust dip with bread, carrots, cauliflower, peppers, tomatoes, artichokes, asparagus, new potatoes…or anything else you can think of, you’ll need:

1 fat bulb garlic
Milk
1 tin anchovies
300ml extra-virgin olive oil
350g unsalted butter

Start by peeling the garlic. Choose the sweetest, fattest kind you can find – the Really Garlicky Company grow Porcelain garlic, which I think is the among the most reliable and delicious in the UK. They supply Waitrose, but if you don’t have a local branch, they also sell their garlic online. Pop the peeled cloves in a little pan, cover them with milk and simmer for ten minutes, until the garlic is soft and cooked through. Discard the milk.

Put the anchovies in a bowl with a cover and nuke in the microwave for 45 seconds. They should cook down to a paste. Scrape the anchovies into a saucepan (not the milk pan, which will have milky bits stuck to the bottom) with the garlic, and use the back of a fork to squish them together.

Chop the butter into little cubes about the size of the top joint of your thumb. Put four of the cubes into the saucepan with the garlic and anchovy mixture, and turn the heat on as low as possible under the pan. As soon as the butter starts to melt, start to whisk the contents of the pan with a balloon whisk. When the butter cubes are nearly melted, add four more, still whisking, and continue until all the butter is incorporated. As you continue to whisk, drizzle the olive oil very gradually into the warm mixture as if you were making mayonnaise. Eventually, you’ll have a thick, glossy bagna cauda. Remove to a bowl, plonk it down in the middle of the table, and get dipping immediately.

Ambrose Heath’s Anchovy Biscuits

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a few references to Edwardian savouries and a writer called Ambrose Heath this week. The savoury used to be a course served at the end of a formal English meal. Salty, umami and often highly spiced, the savoury was packed in by English gentlemen after dessert while they discussed hats and feudalism. A salty nibble was meant to cleanse the palate of whatever gelatinous pudding you’d just eaten so you could happily assault it with a cigar and too much port.

The savoury didn’t survive the period of rationing during and after the Second World War (a period which rendered English food completely joyless – it’s only started to recover recently). A grave shame, especially for those, like me, who lack a particularly sweet tooth; I’d far sooner eat a bacon sarnie than an ice-cream. Recipes for savouries are, these days, pretty hard to find, but I have several in a pre-war book by Andre Simon, and I couldn’t believe my luck when I found a copy of Ambrose Heath’s Good Savouries in a second-hand book shop last week.

Ambrose Heath was a prolific food writer: there are more than 70 books to his name. One of the first cookery books I owned was his book on sauces, which, along with his other books, appeals to the systematising, cataloguing part of my soul that lives somewhere on the autistic spectrum. His books are exhaustive and meticulous treatments of their subjects – there are multiple recipes with tiny tweaks for many of the dishes, alternative approaches and ingredient substitutions, and a lovely sense of a rather plump, happy man behind the pen. (And isn’t that a gorgeous cover illustration?)

Most of the savouries in this book are based around salty ingredients like ham, bacon, anchovy or bloaters; they’re usually spiced vigorously with curry powder or chutney, and are presented sitting on a fried crisp of bread, a puff of pastry or a hollowed roll buttered and baked crisp. This recipe for anchovy biscuits reads as follows:


To make the pastry for the cheese straws, Heath says you’ll need:

2oz plain flour
2oz grated parmesan
2oz butter
Yolk of 1 egg
A dash of mustard
Salt and pepper

His recipe will have you rubbing the butter into the flour/parmesan/mustard mixture, binding with the egg yolk and a little water, then baking for ten minutes. I changed the method a little, freezing the butter for 15 minutes and shredding it on the coarse side of the grater into the flour/parmesan mixture (to which I’d added a teaspoon of Madras curry powder), stirring everything together with a knife and binding the resulting mixture with the egg yolk and some ice-cold water mixed with four anchovies pounded in the mortar and pestle. I rested the pastry in the fridge for half an hour before rolling it out very thinly, cutting out 48 rounds with my smallest cookie cutter, and baking at 200°C for 12 minutes until golden. Rub the mixture in if you prefer, but grating in hard butter will give you a puffier, crisper result. I left out salt and pepper – the anchovies and curry powder will provide all the salt and spice you need.

To make the paste to spread on top of the biscuits, I pounded four more anchovy fillets, 1 teaspoon of curry powder (Madras again – Bolsts is my favourite curry powder, but you should use your favourite brand/ferocity), 2 tablespoons of parmesan, 1 tablespoon of chopped capers (in wine vinegar, not salt, which would just be too much with the anchovies), 1 tablespoon of oil from the anchovies and 1 teaspoon of smooth Dijon mustard in the mortar and pestle until smooth. This will give you enough to smear each biscuit with the tip of a knife – look to use a very tiny amount of the topping, which is strong and salty. If you are familiar with Marmite or Vegemite, you need to spread in about the proportions you would spread those on toast. Allow the biscuits to cool before spreading them or they will be too fragile to work with.

Pop the biscuits in an oven heated to 180°C for five minutes. The spread will go slightly puffy. Dress with a little parsley before serving warm. Rather than eating your anchovy biscuits at the end of a meal, I’d suggest you use them as nibbles with drinks – a very dry Fino sherry or a Dirty Martini will work beautifully against them.

Lamb loin fillet with caper butter sauce

I’m having some trouble writing coherently today because I have one eye (OK – two eyes) on the news – I’m obsessing somewhat about the US election, and I really, really hope the polls are accurate. The BBC is currently showing helicopter footage of a queue of voters in Virginia – it’s so long that a helicopter is the only way they can film it.

Here’s a really fantastic lamb dish to serve to someone you’re trying to impress. Loin fillets are seared in olive oil and roasted briefly, so they’re still lovely and pink in the centre, then served with a butter sauce made dense and salty with shallots, anchovies and capers. The anchovies give amazing savoury depth and richness to the dish and go fabulously with lamb, but when cooked like this they don’t taste fishy – in fact, they melt into the sauce so completely that you will be able to serve this to anchovy-haters with no problems.

To serve two, you’ll need:

2 lamb loin fillets
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 shallots
4 anchovies
2 teaspoons capers (use tiny ones in wine vinegar)
1 tablespoon cream
100g salted butter
1 clove garlic
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Fresh basil to garnish

Crush the garlic and rub it all over the lamb with the lemon zest, a little salt and plenty of pepper. Put aside for an hour at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 200° C.

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan until it starts to shimmer, and sear the lamb all over in it. The pan must be very hot – you’re aiming to brown the lamb to a lovely mahogany colour. Place the whole, seared fillets in a roasting dish and put in the oven for ten minutes.
When the lamb has had ten minutes in the oven, take it out and rest it in its cooking dish in a warm place for another ten minutes while you make the sauce.

While the lamb is resting, make the sauce. Melt the butter in the frying pan (over a lower heat now) and add the finely chopped shallots. Simmer the shallots in the butter for five minutes, then add the anchovies and cook, stirring, until they have melted into the sauce. Still over a low heat, stir in the cream and capers, then use a balloon whisk to beat the lemon juice into the sauce. Start with half the juice and taste as you add more until you have a sauce which is tart and buttery all at once.

Slice the fillets into medallions and arrange on the plate with a drizzle of the sauce and some basil to garnish.

Sweet pepper salad

Sweet pepper saladI’ve given quantities here for four diners, but you should be aware that this is one of those things that people will ask for seconds and thirds of, so cook a generous amount. This is a lovely sunshine-filled salad, assertively flavoured with garlic, fresh lemon juice, sweetly salty anchovies, and good olive oil.

The peppers are grilled and peeled before the salad is assembled. This makes them much more digestible (many people’s stomachs are bothered by the indigestible skins of peppers in quantity), and gives them a wonderfully satiny texture. Allow your peppers to macerate in the fridge overnight (or preferably for two or three days), and you’ll find that all the flavours in the dish meld sweetly into a gorgeous golden, silky whole.

To serve four, you’ll need:

6 peppers – use a mix of red, yellow and orange
½ a lemon
4 anchovies in oil
3 cloves garlic
8 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Start by cutting each pepper into three or four segments (you’ll be able to see the pepper’s ribs – just cut along these). Discard the stalk and seeds, and lay the segments out, skin side up, on the grill tray.

Grill the peppers until the skins are brown and blistering. Put all the segments into a plastic freezer bag and knot the top, then leave the bag alone for about twenty minutes. The peppers will steam gently inside the bag, loosening their skins. When the peppers are cool, unseal the bag and start to peel the skins off. You’ll find they come away easily. Do this over a bowl to catch any drips of sweet juice.

Cut the peeled segments of pepper into slim strips and put them in the bowl with the juice. Add the garlic, crushed or grated, the chopped anchovies, the lemon juice and the olive oil. Mix well, cover and refrigerate. The peppers will get better and better as they macerate, so feel free to leave them for up to three days – just remove them from the fridge a couple of hours before serving so they can come up to a toothsome room temperature.

Janssons frestelse – Jansson’s temptation

Jansson's temptationI’ve three Swedish recipes coming up over the next few days, since I’m pretty sure you’re getting sick of my endless riffing on Malaysian and Chinese things-with-rice. I’ve a soft spot for Scandinavian cuisine, which makes a lovely, hearty change when the weather starts to turn towards autumn. Swedish food is characterised by its use of dairy products, fish of all kinds, large game meats like reindeer, and preserved foods. You’ll find relatively few vegetables in Scandinavian cookery; the long winters preclude much that is green and leafy.

This potato dish, flavoured with onions and anchovy (which ends up surprisingly mild and creamy), is a traditional part of the Swedish smorgasbord, a buffet where cold and hot foods are served up in several courses. I was lucky enough to try an authentic smorgasbord in a manor house in rural Lincolnshire (I’ve lived, I tell you) when I was a teenager. The place was run by a Swedish couple, and offered a glorious and fresh spread of cold, cured or smoked fish (no lutefisk as I recall, but if you’re putting your own together, lutefisk would be very appropriate) as an opener. Sliced meats, cheese and a cucumber salad came next, followed by a third, hot course of those ubiquitous meatballs, stewed red cabbage, a venison casserole and a lovely, savoury gratin – Janssons frestelse. The restaurant is long gone now, but visits I’ve made later to Scandinavia have confirmed that what we ate that night was authentic and very well prepared. (The dish pops up in other countries in the region; I’ve eaten it as Janssonin kiusaus in Finland, and very good it was too.)

Although English recipes tend to use anchovies, spiced and preserved sprats (ansjovis in Swedish – you can see where the confusion came about) are usually used in this dish in Sweden. You can’t find these fat, oily little preserved fish for love or money in the UK, so a really good preserved anchovy is your best bet. Sainsbury’s do some absolutely glorious (and rather expensive) large anchovies preserved in oil with chillies in their world food section. These anchovies are very mild (you can eat them unaccompanied with your fingers, and they’re not too salty, just very, very tasty), and work very well here. Otherwise, any good French brand will do. It’s important that your anchovies are good quality ones, which will tend to have a softer, less fierce flavour – I know anchovy-haters who have been converted by this dish.

Stop press – I have been informed by a reader that Swedish ansjovis are, in fact, available at Ikea, of all places. Buy some next time you pop in for some shelving. Their Swedish meatballs are also fantastic.

I chose King Edward potatoes for their flavour and their ability to absorb the cream. This isn’t totally authentic – you’re more likely to find a more waxy potato in this dish in Sweden (I’ve even had it with new potatoes). I personally find that a floury potato works better for my own tastes, but you should feel free to experiment – if you want a waxier potato in the UK, Vivaldi would be excellent, as would Kestrel.

To make Janssons frestelse as a side dish for four to five people, you’ll need:

4 large potatoes (I used King Edwards)
1 large sweet onion
10 anchovies preserved in oil
1 pint double cream
½ pint milk (you may need a little less)
1 handful breadcrumbs
2 tablespoons grated parmesan
2 large tablespoons salted butter

GratinPreheat the oven to 225° C (475° F). Slice the potatoes thinly and make a layer of slices in a fish-scale pattern in a 2 pint gratin dish. (Some recipes call for potatoes cut in matchsticks; others for grated potatoes; others for thin slices. It doesn’t make any difference to the flavour, and you’re likely to find thin slices more manageable.) Slice the onion thinly and place a layer of slices on top of the potatoes, seasoning with pepper as you layer. You won’t need any salt; there is plenty of that in the anchovies. Lay out half the anchovies on top of the onions. Cover with a layer of potatoes, a layer of onions, more anchovies and a final potato layer. Pour over the cream, and sprinkle the top with the breadcrumbs mixed with the (totally inauthentic, so leave if out if you like) parmesan. Dot the surface with softened butter.

Bake in the oven, uncovered, for 30 minutes. The cream will have been absorbed into the potatoes and some will also have evaporated – top the dish up with some milk. Continue to cook for another 15 minutes, until the potatoes are tender and the breadcrumbs are crisp.

Pasta with anchovy crumbs and gremolata

A great no-money recipe for the end of the month, when all the money has gone on beer and skittles. You probably have all these ingredients in the storecupboard already. This is a fiercely savoury dish, where the contrasting textures of crisply fried anchovy breadcrumbs and the soft pasta come together to make something really special.

Gremolata is a bit like a salsa verde – a finely-chopped Italian mixture of herbs, lemon zest and something sharp like capers. It’s delicious with meats, and I love it with this pasta, where its freshness lifts the richness of the crumbs and infused oil.

It’s important that you choose a good, well-flavoured olive oil for this recipe. Although it is tempting to use the oil you fried the crumbs in for infusing the garlic and chilli, it’s best to use fresh extra-virgin olive oil instead. The heat that the breadcrumbs oil is subject to over the cooking period will change its flavour slightly, and you’ll find you achieve a much fresher, more aromatic flavour from the infusing oil if you use a fresh batch and only allow it to warm gently.

To serve two you’ll need:

2 slices white bread
8 anchovy fillets
4 fat cloves garlic
4 dried chillies
1 small handful parsley
1 small handful basil
Zest of 1 lemon
2 teaspoons capers
2 servings of your favourite pasta
Parmesan cheese to taste
Salt and pepper
Plenty of olive oil

Put the bread in the food processor and whizz until you’ve got coarse breadcrumbs. In a large frying pan, fry the anchovies in about half a centimetre of olive oil until they ‘melt’ and come to pieces. Add the breadcrumbs to the pan, stir them well to combine them with the anchovies, and add more olive oil to the pan until the breadcrumbs are just covered. (Don’t worry; we’ll be draining this oil later.) At this point, the contents of the pan will look like a wet mess. Turn the heat to medium and leave, stirring every minute or so: gradually the wet mess will turn into golden, crisp, anchovy flavoured crumbs (10-15 minutes). Turn the oil and breadcrumbs into a sieve and leave the sieve over a bowl for ten minutes for as much oil to drain out as possible.

While the crumbs are cooking, prepare the infused oil by crushing the garlic and frying it gently in a little olive oil until it releases its scent (about thirty seconds). Remove from the heat and add half a wine glass of extra-virgin olive oil to the pan. Bash the chillies in a mortar and pestle until they are flaked and add them to the oil. Return the pan to the heat and warm the oil gently, then leave it in a warm place to infuse until the pasta is ready to be served.

To prepare the gremolata, chop the herbs finely, and mix with the lemon zest and chopped capers in a small bowl. This is one of the rare occasions where I prefer capers preserved in a briny vinegar to the salted kind – use whatever you have to hand.

Cook the pasta as usual, drain and return to the pan you cooked it in. Pour over the garlic and chilli oil, then spoon into serving bowls. Dress generously with the crumbs and gremolata, check for seasoning, and serve with lots of parmesan cheese to grate over.

Anchovy and olive palmiers, tapenade

palmiersThese little party biscuits are incredibly easy to make – they employ what’s fast becoming one of my favourite modern conveniences, the refrigerated roll of puff pastry. There’s a particular charm in the way that no matter how squashed-looking they are when you put them in the oven, the magic in the pastry means that they’ll rearrange themselves into perfect rounded swirls (representing palm trees, hence the name) once the pastry starts to cook, without you having to exercise any particular artistic talent.

I like to make my own tapenade for these (I like it full of zip and garlic), but you can use a good shop-bought one if you like. Try experimenting with other ingredients; these palmiers are really excellent with sun-dried tomato paste, with pesto and with pounded artichoke hearts.

To make enough for nibbles for six, you’ll need:

Tapenade
100g stoned black olives in oil (Try to find something that’s not too salty in a flavourful marinade. I like Waitrose’s Spanish Couchillo olives.)
Zest of 1 lemon
4 fat cloves of garlic
3 tablespoons salted capers, well-rinsed
8 anchovies in olive oil
1 fresh red chilli
2 tablespoons olive oil

Pastry
1 pack puff pastry

Preheat the oven to 200° C. Put all the tapenade ingredients in a food processor and blitz until smooth enough to spread.

Lay out the rectangle of puff pastry with the long end facing you, and spread the tapenade all over the surface. (If you have any tapenade left over, try it on some toast as a snack – it’s delicious.) Roll up the side nearest you halfway towards the other side, then roll up the other side towards you to meet it. Using a very sharp knife, cut the rolled pastry into slices about half a centimetre thick.

Line a couple of baking sheets with baking paper and lay out the little pastry swirls, leaving enough room for the pastry to rise and puff. Bake for 20 minutes until crisp and golden, swapping the trays over halfway through. Serve warm with cold drinks.

Pissaladiere – French onion tart

We’re going to the Côte d’Azur later in September, where we’ve rented a big manor house with a gaggle of friends. I’m looking forward to the cooking – I’ve missed French market and supermarket produce since Dr Weasel and I left Paris to live in the UK again a few years ago.

I thought I’d cook some Provencale recipes before we leave, just so I feel properly prepared. There is nothing more Provencale than Pissaladiere.

Pissaladiere is a delicious, sharply savoury little tart made from crisp puff pastry, onions cooked until they are sweet and glossy, anchovies and olives. A traditional Pissaladiere would use a preserved fish paste called pissala rather than the anchovies. I did not have an empty Kilner jar and a few pounds of tiny salted fish, so this little tart employs some very delicious Provencale anchovies I found in Waitrose, marinaded in garlic and herbs.

To serve one person (double the recipe to serve two, but I shall be posting another tart for the other half of the puff pastry tomorrow which you might want to serve alongside this), you’ll need:

3 onions
½ sheet puff pastry from the supermarket chiller cabinet
1 large knob butter
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
Anchovies to taste
15 olives (preserved in oil, not salt)
10 salted capers, rinsed

Slice the onions thinly and saute them in the butter over a low heat until they release their sugar and turn golden and sweet (about half an hour). Don’t salt them; you’ll get all the salt you need from the other toppings.

Use a sharp knife to cut the rectangle of pastry in half. Set one half aside for tomorrow’s recipe. With the knife, score a line a centimetre from each edge of the pastry rectangle, so you end up with a smaller rectangle drawn inside it. The centimetre at the edges will be the puffy sides of the tart. Use a fork to make little holes in the inner rectangle. This will stop the part of the tart with the filling from rising.

Spread the soft, golden onions inside the inner rectangle. Lay the anchovies in a diamond pattern over them (you can slice them in half lengthways and use fewer for a less strong flavour; these particular anchovies were quite mild and mellow, so I left the fillets whole) and scatter over the thyme, capers and olives. I used a mixture of black, purple and green olives. Bake in a tray on a sheet of greaseproof paper at 200° C for 20-25 minutes, until the edges are golden and puffy, and the base is crisp.

This tart is delicious hot or cold. Try having one cold at a picnic, or making tiny Pissaladieres for a starter when you have a dinner party.