Piri-piri prawns

Piri-piri prawns
Piri-piri prawns

Another quick and dirty one today. This recipe’s a great addition to a table full of tapas. Good prawns, sweet, fat and succulent, are at their best when treated simply. Here, they’re just flavoured with garlic, piri-piri chilli peppers and olive oil, and cooked very quickly.

I get a bit repetitive with the following whinge every time I blog about prawns, so skip this paragraph if you must – but the lack of availability of raw prawns with their heads and skins still attached in this part of the country (and, to be honest, in many other parts too) absolutely infuriates me. If you’re in Cambridge, you can sometimes find big, whole tiger prawns at Seatree on Mill Road (a fish and chip shop with a small wet fish counter). I’ve not had great success with the fish stall on the market, which smells far more strongly than a good fish seller should. Aside from this, you’re out of luck for dedicated fish sellers. Get into the supermarkets early and you might get lucky; there are sometimes raw prawns in the freezer cabinet too. Good luck with heads and shells, though; as you can see, I wasn’t able to find prawns with heads although I did get lucky withs shells. Both add flavour – there’s real depth of flavour in those shells, and the squishy bits that some people call brains (actually the prawn’s hepatic organ) are really delicious if you can get around the squick factor. Do not hang out with Chinese families if the squick factor is a problem for you. We tend to crunch those shells and suck the brainy bits out at the table, and it’s only partially because we think they’re totally delicious. At least ten percent of our motivation is to put off the people we’re eating with so they leave some extra prawns.

South African piri-piri peppers are botanically indistinguishable from Thai bird’s eye chillies (cili padi or phrik khi nu if you’re in an oriental supermarket). Use whichever you can get your hands on.

To serve two with crusty bread to dibble in the juices, you’ll need:

750g raw prawns with shells and heads on (500g if, like me, you couldn’t get your hands on heads and shells – mine had shells but had been decapitated.)
5 fat, juicy cloves garlic
2 bird’s eye or piri-piri chillies. These are very hot, but if you’re brave you can add another one.
4 generous tablespoons fruity extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 tablespoon parsley to scatter

If your prawns are frozen, defrost them thoroughly and dry them on paper towels.

Warm the olive oil over a medium flame in a large frying pan and throw in the roughly chopped garlic, Sauté, keeping everything on the move, until the garlic is softening and giving up its scent (about a minute). Add the prawns and chopped chillies to the pan and continue to sauté until the prawns have turned from grey to pink (3-5 minutes). There is nothing as good as the smell of prawns cooking with garlic – your kitchen will smell wonderful.

Season with salt and pepper, transfer to a serving bowl and sprinkle with the parsley. Eat immediately, while they’re still piping hot.

Asparagus and salmon croustade with chive beurre blanc

Asparagus and salmon croustade
Asparagus and salmon croustade

I’d be happy just to eat all of the new-season’s asparagus steamed or grilled with some butter or some parmesan – maybe with some hollandaise, some truffle oil or a squirt of lemon juice. But every now and then it’s nice to gussy things up a bit, so here is a downright swanky way with one of my favourite vegetables.

Don’t be scared of either the filo pastry crust or the beurre blanc. Both can appear to be quite intimidating ingredients, but filo (which you can buy ready-made at the supermarket) is actually very, very easy to handle; and if you follow the instructions below you’ll find the beurre blanc a breeze to make.

To serve 4 as a main course or 6 as a starter you’ll need:

Croustade
10 sheets filo pastry
150g unsalted butter
700g asparagus
500g salmon, or a mixture of salmon and another firm white fish
1 teaspoon tarragon
2 shallots
Salt and pepper

Beurre blanc
225g unsalted butter, cold from the fridge
2 shallots, sliced
1 bay leaf
3 peppercorns
5 tablespoons white wine
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar or sherry vinegar
1 teaspoon creme fraiche
4 tablespoons snipped fresh chives
Salt and pepper

Start by infusing and reducing the wine and vinegar for your beurre blanc. In a small pan, combine the wine, vinegar, the sliced shallot, the bay and the peppercorns. Over a medium heat, reduce the contents of the pan until you have only a tablespoon of syrupy liquid left. Remove the pan from the heat, discard the bay and peppercorns, and reserve the shallots.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC (350ºF) and steam the fish for ten minutes.

While the oven is heating, assemble the croustade in a metal baking dish about the same size as a single sheet of filo. Melt the butter and brush the bottom of the dish with a layer, then place the first sheet of filo on the buttered surface. Brush the top of the filo sheet with butter, add another layer of filo and butter the top of that, until you have built a stack of five buttered sheets.

Flake the steamed fish into pieces and chop the asparagus spears (discarding the woody ends) into pieces about the length of your thumb. Scatter the fish flakes and the asparagus over the filo. Dice the shallots from the beurre blanc mixture with the fresh shallots, and scatter those over too, along with a little salt, plenty of pepper and the tarragon.

Layer the remaining five pieces of filo, buttering each one as you go, over the top of the asparagus mixture. Use a knife to score the top sheets gently into squares in the size you want for serving. Put the croustade in the oven and bake for 35-40 minutes, until the top is crisp and a dark gold colour.

About 15 minutes before the croustade is ready to come out of the oven, make up the beurre blanc. Chop the cold butter into pieces about the size of the top joint of your thumb (there are lots of finger measurements in today’s recipe). Stir the creme fraiche into the wine and vinegar reduction you set aside earlier, and put it over a medium heat.

Drop three of the butter pieces into the reduction, and whisk until they are half-melted. Drop another three in and continue to whisk until the original three pieces have melted completely, then add another three. Continue to add the butter pieces three at a time, whisking hard, as the ones you have put in before melt, until the butter is all incorporated. Remove from the heat and stir through most of the chives, reserving two teaspoons to garnish. Taste for seasoning, adding extra salt and pepper or a little lemon juice if you think it needs it.

Use a sharp-edged spatula to divide up the croustade along the marks you made earlier, and spoon some of the beurre blanc over each serving with a little sprinkle of chives. Serve immediately.

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.

Smoked salmon and laverbread canapes

CanapesThe fine folks at Kinvara smoked salmon sent me a big goodie bag full of their organic Irish salmon last week. I get through quite a lot of smoked salmon at home (damn the expense, it’s full of brain-feeding, joint-lubricating goodness), and I was enormously and very pleasantly surprised at just how good the Kinvara fish was. The smoke is a gentle one, letting the flavour of the salmon itself sing, and the firm slices of fish have a robust and delicate flavour all at once. I don’t mention all the foods I get sent to try on this blog, but this one was a doozy, and I’ll be ordering more from them (smoked salmon by post – how splendid is that?) shortly.

Something this good deserved a special-occasion recipe, so here, just in time for the next party you host that’s posh enough for canapes, are some classy little nibbles to impress your boss with.

To make 20 canapes, you’ll need:

100g smoked salmon
50g pancetta cubes
1 x 125g tin laverbread (for more on laverbread, see this post – I am charmed by the fact that my spellchecker suggests that what I really wanted to type here was “weaverbird”)
75g medium or fine-milled oatmeal
1 large onion
1 jar salmon roe
1 jar lumpfish roe (or caviar, if you really want to push the boat out)
250g crème fraîche
Bacon fat (you really should be keeping a jar in the fridge; it’s amazing stuff for adding flavour) or olive oil to fry

Dry-fry the pancetta in a large, non-stick frying pan until golden, and remove to a mixing bowl, keeping the fat it has released in the pan. Chop the onion finely and saute it over a low to medium heat until dark gold and sweet. Dice the salmon and add it with the onion, laverbread and oats to the pancetta bowl.

Use a spoon to stir the mixture until everything is well blended. If you want to serve these canapes in the evening, you can prepare the dish up to this stage earlier in the day and refrigerate the mixture until you are ready to assemble them later on. Use your hands to make 20 little round patties from the mixture, and fry them in a couple of tablespoons of hot bacon fat or olive oil until golden, turning once (about ten minutes).

Arrange the crisp patties on a serving dish, and put a dollop of crème fraîche on top of each one. Spoon some salmon roe on half of them, and some lumpfish roe on the other half. Serve warm.

South-East Asian salmon curry

If you made a batch of the curry paste to cook the prawns earlier this week, you’ll still have half of it in a little bowl in the fridge. This is a very easy dish to cook, and many of the ingredients should already be sitting around in your storecupboard. Swap the green beans for another appropriate-feeling vegetable if you fancy, in keeping with the “what’s in the fridge” nature of this one.

My salmon was bought and frozen before Christmas. It was going to be made into gravadlax before I realised that the fillet I’d bought had, for some reason, been pre-skinned. A skinned salmon fillet’s a pest to cook with if you’re not doing something very simple with it – too much moving around and it’ll flake into bits. So a gentle poaching in a rich curry sauce is an ideal method for a fragile piece of fish like this. If your salmon has the skin on still, so much the better. Don’t bother to remove it before cooking.

To serve 4, you’ll need:

One large salmon fillet, about 2lb (900g), defrosted if frozen
Curry paste (see recipe)
1 large onion
2 large potatoes, chopped into 1in squares
50g green beans
1 can coconut milk
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
1 large handful fresh mint
1 large handful fresh coriander
Juice of 2 limes
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion into medium dice and fry it with the bay leaves, cinnamon stick and curry powder in a large pan until translucent. Add the curry paste to the pan and cook, stirring all the time, for five minutes. Pour over the coconut milk and tomatoes, and stir through the potatoes. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes without a lid, stirring occasionally.

Stir in the chopped beans and slide the salmon into the dish, making sure it is covered with the bubbling sauce. Put the lid on and continue to simmer for 12 minutes.

While the salmon is cooking, chop the mint leaves. When the time is up, stir the lime juice into the curry with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over white rice, scatter the herbs over each serving and get stuck in.

Dry prawn curry

I’m back from a couple of weeks mixing business with pleasure in Florida. More on what we ate later on – for now, here’s a recipe using a curry paste that sprang, fully formed, into my head while we were away.

I went out to Mill Road in Cambridge as soon as we got back to buy some lovely big prawns, still in their shells, at Sea Tree, a new-ish fish restaurant with the city’s only non-supermarket wet fish counter on the far side of the railway bridge; and some fresh spice ingredients at Cho Mee, my favourite of the oriental supermarkets on the town side. It made the whole kitchen smell of South East Asia. Serve the prawns with some fried rice (mine was based around three diced lap cheong, or Chinese sausages, fried until crisp, with spring onions, chopped snake beans, sesame oil and soy, then proteined up with a couple of eggs) or some plain rice and a flavourful stir-fried vegetable.

To serve two handsomely, you’ll need:

12 king or tiger prawns, shells and heads on
2 fingers fresh turmeric root (see below)
1 inch piece ginger
1 large shallot
3 large red chillies
5 fat cloves garlic
2 sticks lemongrass
30g coriander root
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
8 whole cloves
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 tablespoons soy sauce

You might not be familiar with fresh turmeric – it usually comes pre-dried and ground in little pots, by which point it has lost the greater part of its slightly bitter, prickly flavour and intense aroma. The picture here should help you identify it if you’re in a shop that stocks ingredients like this (an Indian or oriental supermarket should be able to help you out). Those roots are about the size of your little finger. Be aware that the yellow of the turmeric stains just as badly, if not worse, than the dried stuff does – this is curcumin, an antioxidant that is supposed to be wildly good for you. It’s also wildly yellow. So get ready for daffodil fingernails – they’ll scrub clean eventually, but it’ll take some work. I’ve also used the very aromatic roots of coriander from the same shop, which usually come attached to the leafy herb and are very inexpensive.

Use a sharp knife to peel the turmeric and ginger. Remove the skins from the shallot and garlic and chop the lemongrass into chunks. Put the lot in the bowl of a food processor with the dry spices, the chillies, the soy sauce (I used Kikkoman) and some flavourless oil. Whizz until you have a nearly smooth paste.

Remove half of the paste to a container, cover with more oil and pop in the fridge to use later on. It’s worth always making too much curry paste – it hangs around for a week or so very nicely in the fridge, you can use it in plenty of different recipes, and it’s infinitely less faff than making it as you need it. Put the prawns in a large dish and cover with the remaining half of the curry paste. Set aside to marinade for 45 minutes to an hour.

When you are ready to cook the prawns, heat some more vegetable oil (about half a centimetre’s depth) in a large frying pan to a high temperature. Add the prawns – carefully, they’ll sizzle – to the oil with what marinade sticks to them and fry without moving them around the pan until the top side, not in the oil, has turned pink. Add whatever curry paste remains in the marinade dish to the pan and turn the prawns over. The shells on the side which has been in contact with the oil should have opaque patches alongside the translucent pink. Continue to cook until the other side of the prawns has opaque skins and the curry paste is brown and sticky. Serve immediately – and if you’re bold, you’ll eat the shells and suck the good stuff out of the heads.

Smoked salmon hash

A quick and dirty breakfast dish. This is just perfect for Sunday mornings in bed with a tray, the papers and a very good friend. This hash is all made in one pan, salty from the salmon, studded with tart capers and stickily sweet from the sweet potatoes. A good squirt of lime juice to counter that sweetness and a spoonful of herby crème fraîche – who could ask for more?

If you do plan on making this for breakfast, it’s worth chopping the potatoes and making the crème fraîche the night before so you can operate on autopilot in the morning without having to go anywhere near sharp knives.

To serve two (with some leftovers – we like leftovers round here), you’ll need:

3 large sweet potatoes (make sure these are the ones with golden flesh)
3 large shallots
250g cold-smoked salmon
1 handful chives (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
1 handful parsley (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
½ handful tarragon
200g crème fraîche
2 heaped tablespoons rinsed capers
Juice of 2 limes
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 eggs
Salt and pepper

Start by making the crème fraîche. Just stir in the chopped herbs, keeping some aside to garnish the finished dish, 1 tablespoon of the capers, 1 raw chopped shallot and the juice of a lime. Set aside in the fridge and stir before serving.

To make the hash, dice the peeled potatoes and cut the remaining shallots into slices. Fry in a large pan over a medium heat in the butter and olive oil mixture, stirring regularly, until the edges of the potato pieces are caramelising and turning a golden brown.

Check that the sweet potato is cooked through (poke with a chopstick to test for softness) and tip the salmon and remaining capers into the pan. Toss with a wooden spoon until the salmon is all opaque, then sprinkle over the juice of the remaining lime. Check for seasoning. Spoon the finished hash into serving bowls, dress with the reserved herbs, add a tablespoon of the crème fraîche and top off with a fried egg.

Paper-baked trout with beurre blanc

Talking food on the phone with my Mum last week, the subject got on to sauces. It turns out that we share a favourite – beurre blanc, a deliciously fatsome emulsion of melted butter suspended in reduced wine infused with herbs and shallot. After putting the phone down, I headed straight for the fridge.

Being fatsome, beurre blanc works best as a sauce for very lean dishes. I steamed trout en papilotte – inside a little bag made from greaseproof paper – in the oven, with more herbs and wine, then spooned the beurre blanc all over it. (I also spooned beurre blanc all over some home-fried potatoes, which are not pictured because only people who do not fear imminent death via clogged arteries should eat beurre blanc spooned all over home-fried potatoes.) It was ludicrously good.

To serve four, you’ll need:

Trout
Eight trout fillets
4 bay leaves
4 sprigs tarragon
4 sprigs parsley
4 thin slices of lemon (with skin)
2 shallots
White wine
Salt and pepper

Beurre blanc
225g unsalted butter
1 shallot
1 bay leaf
3 peppercorns
5 tablespoons white wine
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon double cream
Salt and pepper

Make sure the butter is chilled, and preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Cut out four large squares of greaseproof paper and four squares of tinfoil. Lay the pieces of greaseproof on top of the tinfoil squares, and lay a bayleaf, half a sliced shallot, a slice of lemon and a sprig of parsley and tarragon in the middle of each. Place two fillets of trout on top of each pile of herbs and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of wine over the fish and fold the paper and tinfoil over to create a little packet, sealing it tight with the foil. There should be a bit of room for the steam to circulate in each packet, so don’t wrap the fish up too tight. Put all four little packets on a baking sheet and put in the oven for 20 minutes.

As soon as the fish goes in the oven, start making the sauce. Put the wine and vinegar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with the sliced shallot, the bay leaf and the peppercorns. Bring to a simmer and reduce until there is only 2 tablespoons of liquid left. Sieve the liquid to remove the shallot, bay and peppercorns, and return to the pan off the heat. Get the butter out of the fridge and cut it into cubes about the size of the top joint of your thumb.

Lower the heat, and put the pan back over the low flame. Add a teaspoon of cream to the wine reduction and use a whisk to incorporate it into the liquid. (A note here – adding cream is, strictly speaking, cheating. The cream stabilises the emulsion and will stop your sauce from breaking and splitting. Proper chefs will scoff and tell you that the addition of cream means your sauce is no longer a beurre blanc. Scoff right back at them, but make sure you take your time over it so that by the time they return to their own, cream-free beurre blanc pans, their own sauce will have split.) Whisking vigorously, add the butter to the pan, three cubes at a time. When they are half-melted, add another three, still whisking hard. Repeat until all the butter is incorporated and remove from the heat. Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper.

The fish should be ready at around the same time you finish the sauce; if the timer goes before you’ve finished the sauce, don’t worry about it. The fish won’t mind an extra five minutes in the oven.

Some people like to open the little parcels of fish at the table – the burst of fragrant steam from the punctured parcel is a fantastic opening to the meal. Spoon over the beurre blanc and some fresh parsley, and serve plenty of new potatoes or mash to help you soak up all the delicious sauce.

Italian tuna dip

This is a lovely starter for lazy days when you’re eating outdoors. I like to dibble crudités (especially sweet batons of carrot) and good bread in this tuna dip. It’s also very good spread on toast or crostini, and, cold or warmed through, makes a good strong sauce to dollop on bland cooked fish.

Apologies for the horrendous photo – by the time I realised how rubbish this looked, the bowl had been licked clean, so there was nothing to photograph.

To serve two as a starter with crudités and bread, you’ll need:

1 small can tuna (in oil, brine or spring water), drained
2 anchovies
2 teaspoons Marsala
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
1 heaped teaspoon grainy Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon fennel seed
1 tablespoon finely chopped oregano
½ teaspoon finely chopped rosemary
1 teaspoon finely chopped sage
1 teaspoon thyme
1 tablespoon finely chopped basil
1 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped mint
1 small clove of garlic, crushed
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon honey

Bash the fennel seed lightly in a pestle and mortar, and chop the herbs. Chop the anchovies very finely. Put all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix well until the dip ingredients all come together to form a rough paste. Add a little more olive oil if you prefer a looser texture, and taste for seasoning. Serve chilled as a dip or crostini topping, or warm through in a small saucepan to use as a sauce.

Fisherman’s pie

They tell me it’s brain food. I remain unconvinced – I am absolutely no better at doing sums than I was before I cooked this, but I am deliciously full and thinking hard about marine biology.

This is a lovely take on fisherman’s pie, a thousand miles away from any variant you may have eaten in the school dining hall. Some of the fish is fresh, some smoked, and this gives it a deep, warm background without overdoing the smoky flavour. Sweet peas and prawns are balanced by a hit of lemon juice and nutmeg, and creamy mash makes a golden lid for the whole thing.

Although this is a fish dish, you’ll find it keeps well overnight in the fridge. This amount made two filling suppers for two greedy people with a sharply dressed green salad. I used frozen haddock fillets here, but you can use any firm, flaky white fish, frozen or fresh.

To serve four, you’ll need:

500g haddock fillets
200g smoked haddock
100g smoked salmon
100g peeled prawns, raw if possible
150g butter
50g plain flour
570ml milk
50g frozen peas
2 eggs
2 teaspoons capers in white wine vinegar
Juice of ½ lemon
A few gratings of nutmeg
1kg potatoes (choose a floury variety like King Edward)
3 tablespoons double cream
Cheddar cheese to sprinkle

Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F).

Lay the haddock (defrosted if frozen) and smoked haddock in the baking dish you plan to make the pie in – it should have a capacity of between 1.5 and 2 litres. Pour over half the milk and dot with 25g of butter. Season with plenty of pepper and bake for 20 minutes. Pour the liquid from the baking dish into a measuring jug, top up with the remaining milk and reserve. Remove any skin or bones from the cooked fish and flake it into large pieces in the baking dish.

Hard-boil the eggs, and quarter them. Combine them in the baking dish with the flaked fish, drained capers, the frozen peas, the prawns (raw or cooked, but defrosted if frozen) and the smoked salmon. (I used Waitrose’s flakes of hot-smoked salmon – if you can’t find hot-smoked salmon use the regular variety and use scissors to cut it into bite-sized pieces.)

Peel the potatoes and set them to boil as usual for the mashed potato topping. While the potatoes are boiling, melt 75g of the butter in a saucepan. Stir in the flour and cook over a medium-low flame, stirring, for four minutes. Add the milk and fish cooking liquid a little at a time, stirring well after every addition until the sauce thickens. Continue until all the milk mixture is incorporated, and bring to a low simmer until the sauce thickens again. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and stir in the lemon juice and a grating of nutmeg. Pour the sauce over the ingredients in the baking dish.

Mash the potatoes well with the cream, 50g of the butter, another generous grating of nutmeg and plenty of salt and pepper. Spread or pipe the potatoes over the ingredients in the baking dish, and sprinkle with Cheddar cheese.

Bake for 40 minutes, until the cheesy top is a golden brown.