eggs – Gastronomy Domine

10th May 2011

Goat’s cheese and asparagus tart

Slice of asparagus tart — Asparagus tart

I kind of wish that supermarkets wouldn’t sell asparagus out of season – we’re all familiar with the tasteless, slightly limp kind whose sugars have long turned into starch, because the spears themselves have been bussed in from South America. Nothing’s going to taste good after that long in a cargo hold. It’s enough to make you forget just how good a sweet, fresh English stem of the stuff can be. The English season is short, but it’s worth ignoring asparagus for the rest of the year and waiting for early May. From now on, we’ll have about eight weeks of tender local asparagus in the shops.

I’ve got two great asparagus recipes for you this week. This tart is a doozy; it takes advantage of the lovely affinity between asparagus and goat’s cheese, and can be served hot or cold. I haven’t called it a quiche because I know some of you are squeamish about quiches…

To make one 20cm tart, you’ll need:

Shortcrust pastry – either buy a pre-made roll or make your own with:
175g flour
50g butter
25g lard
A little water

Filling
3 banana shallots
50g pancetta cubes
200g fresh English asparagus spears
120ml creme fraiche
3 eggs
1 heaped teaspoon thyme leaves
200g goats cheese log (I used Neal’s Yard Ragstone, which is pretty strong – for a milder flavour use a younger cheese)
1 tablespoon butter
salt and pepper

Asparagus tart, straight out of the oven

If you are making your own pastry, rub the fats into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, and add just enough water to make everything come together into a ball. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Roll out on a floured surface.

Use the pastry to line your 20cm tart dish, and pop the whole thing in the freezer to firm up for 30 minutes while the oven heats up to 200ºC (390ºF). While the pastry is chilling, fry the finely chopped shallots with the pancetta cubes in the butter, until the shallots are golden.

When the pastry has had 30 minutes in the freezer, prick the bottom a few times with a fork, line the base with greaseproof paper, pour in some baking beans to hold everything down, and blind bake (this is just a way of saying part-bake; you’re doing this so that the crust is crisp and cooked) for 20 minutes.

Remove the tart case from the oven and turn the temperature down to 180ºC (350ºF).

Arrange the raw asparagus spears, chopped into pieces, to cover the bottom of the pastry case. Sprinkle over the pancetta and shallot mixture with the thyme. Use a fork to beat together the eggs and crème fraîche with half a teaspoon of salt and plenty of black pepper until smooth, and pour the egg mixture into the case. Finally, slice your cheese log into ½ cm pieces and lay them on the top of the tart.

Bake in the cooler oven for 30-40 minutes, until the filling has set and the top is golden. Serve hot or cold.

11th March 2011

Smoked haddock, chive and mustard souffle

Smoked haddock souffle — Dr W, holding the light: "No! No! Quick! Oh God! It's shrinking! Quick! Take another! No!" As it transpires, this sort of thing does not create a calm atmosphere for photography.

There’s a reason you don’t see souffles on blogs very often. It’s not because they’re particularly difficult or prone to failure (to be honest, I find making a souffle much less of a faff than making a quiche). It’s because unless you’re making a reinforced, twice-cooked, single-portion sort of souffle, centimetres of gorgeous puffiness will subside between your getting the thing out of the oven and focussing the camera on it. Move fast with a souffle, and for maximum impressiveness, make sure everybody in the house is clustered around the oven when you take it out so they can do the “Ooo!” thing in the three seconds before it starts to deflate gently.

It will only lose a few centimetres’ height, but I wish I’d got a picture in a bit earlier. It looked fabulous on exiting the oven, rather than merely very fine indeed, as it does in the photo above. And, of course, it makes for a particularly fine supper, light in texture and dense in flavour all at once. A lovely springtime dish.

To serve 2-3 with a sharp salad and some good bread, you’ll need:

5 eggs
400g smoked haddock
350ml milk
50g butter (plus extra for greasing)
2 heaped tablespoons plain flour
1 heaped tablespoon creme fraiche
50g Parmesan cheese, grated (plus extra for dusting)
15g chives, snipped
1 scant teaspoon chopped tarragon
2 generous tablespoons grainy mustard

Preheat the oven to 190ºC (375ºF). Put the haddock (undyed, if you can find it – I couldn’t) in a small dish, and cover it with the milk. Put the dish, uncovered, in the oven for ten minutes until the fish is cooked lightly. Strain the milk into a jug, remove the skin from the haddock and use your fingers to flake the flesh, removing any bones as you go, and set aside. Grease the inside of a 2l souffle dish very generously, and sprinkle generously inside with grated Parmesan, rolling the bowl around to make sure the cheese sticks all over its inner surface. Separate the eggs, the whites in a large, very clean mixing bowl (any grease on your whisk or in your bowl will affect the lift you can get into your eggs), the yolks in a mug or small bowl.

Combine 50g butter with the flour in a saucepan, and melt them together into a roux. Make a white sauce by beating in the flavoured milk a little at a time over a low flame. Add the creme fraiche, mustard, 50g Parmesan, herbs and flaked haddock to the sauce with the separated yolks. Stir well to combine.

In your large, squeaky-clean bowl, use an electric whisk to beat the whites into glossy peaks. You’ll know when you’re there; tip the bowl. If the eggs are not whisked enough, they will move when the bowl moves.

Use a large metal spoon to add a spoonful of the whisked whites to the haddock mix in the sauce pan to loosen the mixture. Stir well. Now add a spoonful of the loosened sauce to the egg whites, folding it in with the edge of the spoon rather than stirring; you want to end up with as much air still in those whites as possible. Repeat, spoon by spoon, until all the haddock base is folded into the egg whites.

Pour the mixture into the greased and cheese-scattered souffle dish. Sprinkle the top with a little more Parmesan. Slide into the oven and cook for 35 minutes, until puffy, golden on top and a little creamy inside.

9th February 2011

Home-made mayonnaise and tartare sauce

This is the second post in an occasional series on fundamental recipes which form the basis of a number of other dishes. The first recipe I posted was for Béchamel sauce, and I’ve gone with sauce again today. I know that making mayonnaise at home is one of those things that scares people stiff: you’ll have heard stories about it splitting and curdling from almost everyone who has made it, and most seem to avoid making it at home, relying instead on a jar of Hellman’s. It’s true that splitting can happen to the best of us (mine actually split when I was preparing this post – my own fault for taking a short-cut with the food processor), but what most people don’t seem to realise is that a split mayonnaise is the easiest thing in the world to rescue.

Mayonnaise is simply an emulsion of oil stabilised with egg yolks (raw, so the usual health warnings apply for those in at-risk groups – you know who you are), with a little lemon juice or wine vinegar. The sort of oil you use will affect the flavour; mayonnaise made with a strong-tasting olive oil, as with most European mayonnaises, will be fragrant and piquant. Sunflower oil is traditional in Russia, and gives a very different flavour. Many commercial mayonnaise manufacturers use flavourless vegetable oils and spike the finished product with sugar and other flavourings. Experiment, if you’re that way inclined – I rather enjoy a grapeseed oil mayonnaise, which has a delicate flavour and a lovely green tinge.

You’ll find yourself using mayonnaise as the basis for a huge number of other classical sauces. There’s garlicky aïoli, which becomes rouille when saffron is added. Sauce rémoulade, which you’ll find in cuisines from Denmark to Louisiana, has flavourings which vary from country to country, but which almost always include anchovy, herbs and mustard. Thick American salad dressings – ranch, Thousand Island, blue cheese – all have their beginnings in mayonnaise. Argentinian salsa golf is based around mayonnaise (and ketchup, unfortunately). One of my favourite mayonnaise-based sauces is tartare sauce (sometimes called tartar sauce); you’ll find a recipe for it below. Mayonnaise is essential in a number of sandwiches – and there are plenty of recipes from devilled eggs to potato salad which employ hearty dollops of the stuff.

I think Hellman’s mayonnaise is pretty good stuff, and if you don’t have the time or inclination to make your own, it’ll serve in all the recipes I mentioned above. But a home-made mayonnaise is a different thing altogether, and you may find that family members who think they don’t like mayonnaise at all will be brought round if you make your own.

Home-made mayonnaise will keep in the fridge for a week. The recipe below will make about half a pint (enough for the tartare sauce and a potato salad, for which I’ll post the recipe on Friday), but if you need more or less, reckon on using another 200ml oil per every extra egg yolk.

You’ll need:

Mayonnaise
2 egg yolks
400ml olive oil (choose one you’d be happy to dip bread in and eat straight)
1 tablespoon smooth Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon lemon juice or white wine vinegar
1 large pinch salt

To whip up a bowl by hand, use a hand-whisk or electric whisk to blend the yolks, mustard, salt and vinegar in a large bowl. Whisking all the time, add the olive oil at first drip by drip, and as the mixture thickens, in a thin stream. You’ll end up with a glossy, wobbly bowlful of golden mayonnaise. Taste it – you may want to use more vinegar or salt.

You can make mayonnaise in the food processor, whizzing the yolks, mustard, salt and vinegar together, then drizzling the oil in while the blade turns. I find it’s actually less reliable this way, perhaps because unless you’re making gallons of the stuff, the machine can have trouble liaising all the ingredients right at the start, so the mixture is more likely to curdle. You’ll be able to tell – it won’t thicken, and the oil and eggs will separate. If your mayonnaise does curdle, it’s easy to rescue: just remove the curdled mixture to a jug, give it a stir and start again in a clean bowl with one new yolk and a teaspoon of mustard. Continue as you would as if you were starting from scratch, but use the curdled mixture with an additional 100ml oil instead of fresh oil.

To turn the mayonnaise into a piquant tartare sauce, you’ll need:

Tartare sauce
4 tablespoons mayonnaise
3 cornichons
2 heaped teaspoons nonpareille capers, drained of their vinegar
1 heaped teaspoon chopped parsley
1 shallot

This is as easy as anything. Dice the cornichons as small as you can, chop the shallots into tiny pieces and dice the shallot into pieces as small as the cornichon bits. Stir all the ingredients together and chill for an hour or so before serving to allow the flavours to come together. You’re probably used to tartare sauce with fish, but it’s also very good with breaded chicken and in sandwiches.

16th December 2010

Croque Madame

That Béchamel from Tuesday’s post was made with this sandwich in mind. The Croque Madame (literally “Mrs Crunch”, but that sounds considerably less elegant than the French) is one of the world’s great sandwiches, up there with the banh mi, the burger and the pan bagna. The best I’ve ever eaten wasn’t actually in France, but at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Las Vegas, where it was made with brioche and served with french fries to mop up the dreamy clouds of Béchamel and egg yolk. This one’s a little different, and makes up for the lack of decent brioche in rural Cambridgeshire by dipping the sandwich in an egg and cheese mixture before frying. Dreadful for the arteries, fantastic in the mouth. Gilding the lily, I served this with sauteed potatoes dressed with truffle oil and Parmesan cheese, and a very sharply dressed salad.

There is more effort involved in this sandwich than there is in slapping together your lunchtime BLT, but it’s absolutely worth it. This is a dish best eaten as part of a lazy Sunday brunch with somebody you love. It’s extremely rich, so that salad’s well worth having on hand to cut through the buttery, cheesy density of flavour. This is, to put it mildly, a bloody marvellous sandwich. Do try making one yourself.

To serve two, you’ll need:

4 thick slices good white bread
4 large eggs
100g Parmesan cheese
200g Gruyere cheese
200g cooked ham, sliced thinly (I like a ham I’ve cooked myself, but a good deli ham is fine here)
2 teaspoons smooth Dijon mustard
2 large knobs butter
50ml (or more, if, like me, you’re greedy) Béchamel sauce

Preheat the oven to 170ºC (340ºF), with a metal pan ready for your sandwiches on a high shelf. Have a pan of warm Béchamel sauce standing by.

Build the sandwiches by spreading the bottom slice with Dijon mustard, layering on the ham, and topping with the grated Gruyere. Put the lid on and give the sandwich a firm squash with the flat of your hand to pack it down a bit.

In a flat dish large enough to take a sandwich, beat two of the eggs with the finely grated Parmesan. Heat one knob of butter in a frying pan big enough to take both sandwiches until it starts to bubble.

Dunk each sandwich in the egg mixture, making sure both sides soak up some of the egg. Slide the sandwiches into the butter and cook for a couple of minutes on each side, until golden. Use a stiff spatula to remove the sandwiches to the heated tray in the oven, and cook for ten minutes to ensure all the cheese is melted.

While the cheese is melting, melt more butter in the pan you fried the sandwiches in, and allow it to bubble away until it is a nutty brown colour (beurre noisette, if we’re being precise here). Fry two eggs in the nutty butter so the white is just set and the yolks runny. Remove the sandwiches to warmed plates, spoon over a few tablespoons of Béchamel, and top each one off with a fried egg.

21st June 2010

Devilled eggs with bacon and chilli

A couple of weeks ago, I was footling around in the sun at Ciudad, one of my favourite restaurants in LA, with a Margarita and some devilled eggs. (This goes some way to explain the recent hiatus at Gastronomy Domine; I went away for a week and forgot my laptop, then caught something filthy from one of the insanitary people on the plane on the way home and spent all of last week in bed. To be honest, enforced absence from the internet has been great – I highly recommend it.)

I have some friends who claim they don’t like eggs, and whose idea of picnic hell is a plate of devilled eggs. This recipe, inspired by the two helpings of Ciudad’s spectacular and spectacularly expensive jalapeño and bacon devilled eggs that I ended up face down in, is not for them. If you are a fan of devilled eggs, you’ll be pleased to learn that these keep well, refrigerated, for a couple of days. They’re a great outdoor food – just pack them in the bottom of a plastic box before you go, and make sure you keep it the right way up.

To prepare 12 eggs, you’ll need:

12 eggs
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 tablespoons creme fraiche
½ pickled habanero chilli – or other chillies to taste
6 spring onions, white and pale green parts only
1 small handful each dill, parsley and chives
½ stalk celery
½ sweet dill pickled cucumber
8 rashers smoked streaky bacon (a sweet, dry cure is best here – try to get a reasonably thick cut too)

Start by boiling the eggs. Perfect hard-boiled eggs are as easy as anything – just cover all the eggs with cold water in a saucepan, and bring it to the boil with the lid on. As soon as the eggs boil, remove them from the heat, keeping the lid on, and leave to one side for 12 minutes. Put the saucepan in the sink and run cold water over the eggs for a few minutes until they are cold, then peel.

While the eggs are boiling, grill the bacon until it starts to crisp at the edges. Put all the ingredients except the dill pickle and bacon in the food processor, and whizz until you have a creamy paste.

Dice the pickle finely by hand. You’re chopping it rather than processing it so that it adds a bit of crunch to the eggs. If you’re in the UK, Mrs Elswood pickles, which are available in most supermarkets in the pickles section and sometimes in the kosher section, are excellent. (Like Betty Crocker and Sara Lee, the Mrs Elswood pictured on the label is a fiction – the name is a portmanteau of Elstree and Borehamwood, where the company is based. They’re still damn good pickles.) Dice the bacon finely with a sharp knife, reserving one rasher. Slice that rasher finely to use as a garnish and reserve. Add the diced pickle and bacon to the whizzed ingredients in a large bowl and taste for seasoning. You may find you don’t need to add any salt.

Halve the peeled eggs and pop their yolks out into the bowl with the other ingredients. Use a fork to squish the yolks into the creamy mixture, and stir vigorously to combine everything. Put the mixture in a piping bag with a medium nozzle and pipe dollops into the empty egg halves. Use a squeeze-down-up motion for the best results – you don’t need to twist the bag or nozzle as you work. If you don’t have a piping bag, just spoon the mixture into the eggs or pop it in a freezer bag with the corner snipped off and use that instead – it won’t look as pretty, but it’ll taste just as good.

Sprinkle some herbs and the reserved bacon over the top, and serve cold.

27th May 2010

Peach and mango meringue pie

This one’s for my friend Michael and his daughter, who are going in for a pie competition this weekend. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out – it really does taste as good as it looks. This pie is made with an all-butter pastry (none of your revolting shortening here, Californians) which is flavoured with lemon zest, and has a juicy filling that’s very easy to put together. I have been obsessing a bit about meringue recently, and the lovely puffy cloud that makes the lid of this pie is a beautiful and really delicious way to top things off.

Michael and Yael are cooking in the US, where weighing scales are not the norm – unfortunately, cup measures aren’t the norm here in the UK, and I have real trouble using them when I’m baking. As a result, I’ve measured by weight, not volume, below. For those who don’t have a set of scales at home, there is a decent conversion tool here.

You’ll need an 11 inch (28 cm) flan case with fluted edges and a loose base that you can push out, and some baking beans (some use ceramic beans – I just used half a pack of dried butter beans from the cupboard). If you plan on transporting your pie, you may prefer to use a foil dish.

To make one totally fabulous pie, you’ll need:

Pastry
225g plain flour
25g icing (confectioners) sugar
100g salted butter
Zest of 1 lemon
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons water (approx – see below)

Filling
4 large, ripe peaches (I used white peaches – choose the most fragrant fruit you can find)
3 ripe mangoes (I used Alphonse mangoes, which are my favourite)
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 level tablespoons semolina (cornmeal for Americans)

Meringue
6 egg whites
225g caster sugar
1 tablespoon white vinegar

Start by making the pastry. Sift the flour and sugar into a large bowl, and rub in the butter with your fingertips until you have a mixture resembling breadcrumbs. Try to keep things as cool as possible as you work; your pastry will be crisper and shorter if it stays cold. (My grandmother used to make pastry in a large bowl placed in the kitchen sink while she ran cold water around it – perhaps there’s a degree of overkill in this, but it does work well to help your pastry along in hot weather.)

Use a butter knife to stir the lemon zest, yolk and water into the mixture until you have a stiff pastry. You may need a little more water according to the weather; the behaviour of pastry varies horribly according to how much moisture there is in the air on any given day. Wrap the pastry in cling film (saran wrap for Michael and Yael) and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to rest.

While the pastry is resting, turn the oven to 200ºC (400ºF) and prepare the fruit. Quarter and peel the peaches, then cut each piece into three. Dice the mango in pieces the same size as the peach bits (I’m sure you all know the mango trick, but here’s a YouTube video of someone preparing a mango just in case you’ve not done it before). You can keep the fruit around the stone section to nibble off as a chef’s treat. Cover and set aside.

Roll the pastry out on a cool, lightly floured surface to fit your flan dish. (I have a marble slab for pastry that my Mum bought for me at a gravestone shop. Again, this is probably overkill. It’s also a bit sinister, now I think about it.) Line the dish with the pastry, use a fork to prick the base of the pie case all over, and cut a circle of parchment paper to fit in the bottom. Slip the parchment inside the pie and cover it with baking beans. Bake blind – that is to say, without any filling – for 20 minutes until the pastry is golden. Remove the beans and parchment and cook for another 5-10 minutes or until the base is dry and golden too. Turn the oven down to 150ºC (300ºF).

Prepare the meringue by whisking the eggs and vinegar for about five minutes until you have stiff peaks (the vinegar will not add a detectable flavour to your pie, but it will make the peaks of the meringue simultaneously crisp and chewy, like a baked marshmallow), adding the sugar a tablespoon at a time as you go. You should end up with a very stiff, glossy mixture.

Sprinkle the semolina into the base of the pie dish – this will soak up excess juices from the fruit. Fill the dish with the fruit mixture (depending on the size of your peaches and mangoes, you may find you have some left over to make a fruit salad with) and sprinkle over the sugar.

Spoon the meringue carefully all over the top of the pie in a dome, making sure there are no gaps, and use a spoon to tease it into lots of peaks on top. Put the pie in the oven at the cooler temperature (don’t worry if the temperature hasn’t quite settled down yet – a little bit of extra heat at the start of cooking won’t hurt it) and bake for 1 hour – 1 hour 10 minutes until the pie is an even gold colour all over and marshmallowy inside. Serve warm or cold, but do make it as close as possible to serving as you can manage to keep the meringue nice and high and puffy.

4th August 2006

English breakfast

I can guarantee you that no two Brits you speak to will define a proper English breakfast in the same way. The variations are endless; there are a million different ways to cure and cut bacon, different thicknesses and varieties of sausage, different sauces, different ways to prepare your egg (and different methods even when you’ve settled on a way to prepare it), the shouting match about whether the bread should be white, brown, fried, toasted or just sliced straight from the loaf and buttered…and then there’s the vexed question of tomatoes.

My kitchen cupboards are stocked with non-perishables for emergency overnight guests of all breakfast persuasions. There’s brown sauce for my brother and my Dad (I suspect I may not really be related to them) and variety packs of cereal for my god-daughter, none of which Mr Weasel or I ever touch. We very seldom eat a real cooked breakfast, but when we do, there is no better way to spend a Sunday morning. Spread out the newspaper, make sure there are plenty of napkins for the grease, and tuck in.

The greasy fry-up we recognise as a traditional breakfast here isn’t all that old; it’s a 19th century invention, meant to fuel up agricultural and factory workers who expected to be spending the day hard at work. It’s a nutritionist’s nightmare now we’re not working behind a plough, at a loom or down a pit, so is best reserved for special occasions.

Given that every family does a cooked breakfast completely differently, the following directions on making the perfect cooked breakfast will be very subjective. Please feel free to fight about the way you’d do it in the comments section.

In this house, the bacon must be a) streaky, b) smoked, c) cooked until shatteringly crisp and d) dry-cured. No bacon shall widdle nasty white clods into the pan when I cook it, thank you very much. Years of experimentation have revealed that the best way to achieve the perfect bacon (golden, crisp fat and a glassy-cracking texture) is to lay it all out in a single layer in a non-stick baking tray and set to cook in the oven at 180° for 20 minutes. Check for done-ness and give it five minutes longer if it needs it.

There must be a black pudding. Black pudding is a gorgeously rich and unctious sausage made from the blood and fat of a pig, bread, barley and oatmeal. You can find it pre-sliced or made up as a whole sausage. Remove the plastic skin when you’ve fried slices of the pudding until the outside is crisp and the inside gives delicately to your teeth.

Sausages were a point of dreadful conflict in our relationship for years, until we discovered Waitrose’s Free range pork, apple and honey chipolatas. Since then, we’ve been in a state of blissful accord on the subject of sausages. You’ll find these at the butcher’s counter, not on the shelves. Wimpole Hall and Home Farm, just outside Cambridge, also carries an excellent sausage. They’re sold in the gift shop in the stables, by the car park, but their supply is limited to what they can make out of their own pigs, and they won’t always have them when you visit.

The bread must be fried, and made from a grotty supermarket pre-sliced white loaf. Fry the bread in the fat which has come out of the bacon, adding a little extra dripping if you have any in the fridge, or some vegetable oil if you don’t. The fat must be blisteringly hot before you drop the slices of bread in; so hot that a few seconds is all that’s needed to turn each side golden.

The egg should be poached or fried. I usually fry it to avoid using another pan, but if we’re in a hotel somewhere, I am likely to ask for my egg to be poached. If fried, the egg should be sunny-side up, as in the picture and cooked in olive oil…and if the yolk breaks in the pan, the egg is spoiled and I shall cook another one.

I suspect the sauces are where people are going to have the biggest arguments about the way we do breakfast here. Worcestershire sauce is to be drizzled on the fried bread and the egg, but shall not touch anything else on the plate. A judicious dollop of ketchup goes next to the sausages, for careful dipping, and no sauce at all will sully the bacon.

No tomatoes. If I want vitamins on a Sunday, I shall take a pill.

19th March 2006

Bobotie

We were visiting some South African friends a few evenings ago, and were sent home, late and pleasantly hazy (at least on my part; Mr Weasel had to drive), with a packet of spices for making bobotie. This is serendipity; I’d already planned on making bobotie this weekend, as it had popped into my head the minute the same friends had invited us over. This bobotie, though, turned out even better than my old recipe, thanks in part to a slightly different method as described on the back of the spices, and also to the Cape Malay curry powder that was included in the pack of spices.

This curry powder is very different in character from the Bolst’s I usually use. It’s approximately Madras-hot, but it’s much heavier on the fenugreek than Indian curry powders often are. If any readers know where I can find some in the UK, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

I first came across bobotie when I was a little girl. I remember asking Mummy what we were having for tea that evening. ‘Mince and custard,’ she replied. I wasn’t terribly happy about the concept, but it was, in fact, delicious. I would recommend that you don’t introduce the creamy topping on the spiced meat to your family as ‘custard’. Although it is, strictly speaking, a custard made with milk and eggs but no sugar, your squeamish children will not thank you for pointing this out. Call it a delicious creamy sauce or something.

You’ll need:
3 tablespoons medium-hot curry powder (Cape Malay if you can find it)
500g steak mince
1 thick slice white bread
1 ½ cups milk
1 large crushed onion
1 teaspoon cumin, crushed
1 teaspoon coriander, crushed
1 teaspoon crushed garlic
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1 knob butter
2 large eggs
5 bay leaves
Juice of a lemon
Salt
½ cup sultanas
⅓ cup mango chutney (I like Sharwoods’ Major Grey)
2 teaspoons Garam Masala

Soak the bread in half the milk, then give it a good squeeze, retaining the excess milk. Crumble the bread and mix it with the beef and the curry powder. Leave to one side while you fry the onion so the flavour of the curry powder can penetrate the meat.

Melt the butter and use it to fry the onion, sliced finely, with the ginger, garlic, cumin and coriander until golden. Remove the onion and spices to a bowl, retaining the butter, and fry the meat, curry powder and bread mixture in the butter until the meat is cooked. Put in a bowl with the onion mixture, one egg, the lemon juice, salt, half of the remaining milk, the sultanas and the chutney. Mix thoroughly.

Press the mixture into a greased baking dish. Beat the remaining milk with an egg, and pour it over the top of the mixture. Press the bay leaves into the top (in South Africa you might use lemon leaves) then sprinkle with the Garam Masala. Bake at 180°C for 35 minutes, until the top is set and golden. Serve with rice and a salad.