Stichelton

It’s not quite as much a seasonal product as turkey, 90% of the annual national consumption of which is said to take place on Christmas day, but the holidays are also high season for the East Midlands producers of Stilton.

I had the opportunity to taste Stilton from one of the remaining artisanal producers, the 99-year old Colston Bassett Dairy, a few weeks back. It was mellow but deeply-flavoured, creamy-textured but not cloying—in every way a great cheese. But it was edged, as I’ve found to be the case on a number of head-to-head tastings, by an upstart from just down the road called Stichelton.

Stichelton is simply raw-milk Stilton, produced, bar a bit of technology, as this very old English cheese had been made for centuries before a listeria scare in 1989 led to mandatory pasteurisation. It’s said to have come out of a conversation at a Borough Market pub between Randall Hodgson, owner of Neals Yard Dairy and long-time champion of English artisanal cheese producers, and an American cheesemaker, Joe Schneider. They tracked down an ‘80s-era culture and convinced owners of a Holstein farm to partner with them with their quest to recreate the complex creaminess and sweetness of pre-pasteurisation Stilton.

To achieve this, Hodgson and Schneider have reintroduced traditional flavour-deepening methods, including the use of only minimal amounts of starter and rennet, hand-ladling the curds and allowing yeasts and bacteria to form a natural rind. The resulting cheese can’t be called Stilton, as EU regulations now prescribe both counties of production (Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire) and the use of pasteurised milk. (It takes its name instead from that given to Stilton village in the medieval Domesday Book.) And with far smaller production capacity, it can’t aspire to capture more than a tiny segment of even the top-end Stilton market. But it’s a real treat for those who are able to try it.

Stilcheton devotees describe the cheese as having a gentle nuttiness on both the nose and palate. The blueing is moderate and integrated, and the texture lush without becoming sloppy. I find it to be both quite savoury, almost meaty, and moreishly sweet. The finish can be fantastically long.

In London, Stilchelton can be bought at Neals Yard Dairy, La Fromagerie, the cheese counters at Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason, and several other independent shops. You can follow the cheesemakers on http://twitter.com/sticheltondairy.

Radicchio, fennel and orange salad

With each passing year, bitter flavours are featuring more prominently on our table: strong black coffee and marmalade on a weekend morning, Campari or gin and tonic to begin a leisurely dinner and endive or radicchio salads to sharpen the palate. Endive tends to feature when we have French meals, tossed with a mustardy walnut oil dressing and, on occasion, some toasted nuts, pears and blue cheese. Radicchio usually gets an even simpler treatment—just a sprinkle of good balsamic vinegar and a smaller one of Maldon salt.

This fall I tried growing radicchio from seeds given to me by an Italian colleague. The resulting leaves, while speckled with maroon streaks and tasting agreeing bitter, in no other way resemble either of the main varieties (one round and crinkly, the other with long, stiff leaves) available locally.

Unable to harvest enough leaves to serve friends coming for Sunday night pizza supper, we bought some particularly handsome radicchio di Treviso at a local greengrocers. The plump, unblemished fennel bulbs also on display gave us the idea to adapt a southern Italian recipe for fennel, orange and olive salad, using the radicchio both as a colourful base and to add bitterness. Laid out on a large white platter, the salad looked festive and elegant, so much so that our photographer friend snapped this quick shot with her iPhone.

Pizza will still be appearing through the abstemious month of January. But in the interests of continuing to fit into the new clothes I just bought in the States, large helpings of this salad will be as well.

Radicchio, fennel and orange salad

1 medium-sized radicchio, any variety

1 large fennel bulb

1 large orange

Lemon

Olive oil

Salt

Chives

Tear or slice the radicchio and arrange on a platter. Remove the core from the fennel and slice into thin moon-shaped pieces. Remove the peel, pith and interior membranes from the orange (preferably allowing any juice to drip onto the salad) and chop into small segments.

Place both the fennel and orange onto the radicchio bed. Dress with lemon juice and olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Chop or snip chives on top and serve.

Best of 2011

Ingredients of the year: corn tortillas and kalamansi limes

Tacos have made it into the bi-weekly dinner repertoire. Fillings vary: there has occasionally been spiced-up leftover brisket or shoulder of lamb, more often some beans. A cabbage salad is a new and popular addition to the table. Whatever the individual components, this is always fun to eat, its quality underpinned by proper tacos (ordinarily from here, though there are some being made in Brixton now too).

Amongst the many foolish things that the European Commission has done is to forbid the importation of these limes, far more intense and aromatic than anything I’ve come across. Bottled concentrates bring back at least some memory of drinking sweet-sour lime sodas across Malaysia, but I remain on the lookout for contraband.

Method: curing

When I lived in France, I would have no more made confit de canard from scratch than I would have baked my own croissants. But measured by an input-output ratio, this delivers an astonishing amount for very little effort: one pan, about 15 minutes of active time and a bonus jar of duck fat at the end.

Most exciting Brixton opening: Lab G

Our local maestro di gelato is a generous soul, a creative genius and a perfectionist, particularly when it comes to his exceptional pistachio and salted caramel flavours. This is the place we take people when we want them to appreciate just how astonishing the Brixton food scene is.

Best meal (London): Pied á Terre

I was lucky enough to eat at this Michelin 2-star twice in 2011. The food was beautiful to look at, and the kitchen is creative while still turning out plates that are hugely enjoyable to eat. The service was a surprise too: well-informed, generous and far from starchy. At lunchtime, it's not even shockingly expensive.

Best meal (everywhere else): Tek Sen

One of the few disappointing moments of our trip to Penang was finding this restaurant closed (some kind of temple festival) when we tried to make a return visit. This was revelatory food: astonishingly fresh yet amazingly complex in flavour. If there’s a single reason why we’re cooking and eating so much more Asian food now, it must lie in the effort to recapture what was on those plates.

Most-used cookbook: Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy

We had this out from the library on and off for the last 6 months; our permanent copy should be arriving in time for the beginning of Hanukkah. It’s yielded crispy, spicy chickpeas which are perfect with a G&T, our first proper dhal and introduced us to curry leaves. But the biggest game changer has been making our own chapattis, far simpler and tastier than I would have imagined possible.

Most enjoyable food shop: A & C Co Continental Grocers

I’m spending more time in the local Asian grocery these days, and I still make a trip to Borough Market most weekends. But this is the place that I stop into nearly 6 days a week, whether for some olives or nuts to start off dinner, to top-up store cupboard basics or for the things that no one else sells locally, like quinces or fresh bay leaves. These are the people who’ve held onto my extra keys, make me laugh at the end of a rotten day and are eager to have taste me the new cheese that’s just come in. I don’t think most people have a shop like this; I’m very lucky that I do.

Best experiment: growing tomatoes

Flowers and shrubbery may still hold very limited interest, but I’m now beginning to understand why people like to garden. I’m not sure that in the midst of the root rot saga of August and September, or when I was hauling home 40 litres of potting soil on the bus, that I wholly appreciated how satisfying it could be to grow my own food. But it gave me occasion to talk to my neighbours, and was a far better use of time than more Internet surfing. And I learned that even basic cherry tomatoes taste great when picked as the table is being set for dinner.

Black beans, eggs and salsa

Along with a whole range of dishes which used multiple parts of a pig, the 90s-era Cuban diners on the Upper Upper West Side of Manhattan did potent cafes con leche and plates of scrambled eggs and black beans which were big enough to make the next meal redundant. As well as being exotic and cheap, I was told by those with experience of such things that food like this was also very good for hangovers.

For the bright young things of Brixton, who seem to suffer with the same affliction on weekend mornings, the neighbourhood’s multiple Columbian cafes—which do a comparable line in vast servings of assorted meats, eggs and beans, washed down with lots of caffeine—appear to fill a useful niche. But even for those of us whose closest experience of a late-night party is the one that takes place far too often in the apartment upstairs, beans and eggs—minus the mixed meats—is also a popular weekend meal, easy, tasty and admirably inexpensive.

Canned black beans, a rare commodity in much of the country, can be bought in any of the dozens of the small Caribbean grocers nearby. Cooked down with onion, garlic, cumin, fresh coriander and a spoonful of chipotle en adobo (still not locally available; Brixton’s Latino population is probably the largest in inner London, but it’s largely Ecuadoran, Columbian and Venezuelan rather than Mexican), they make a fudgy, mellow partner for eggs of any variety. We’ve scrambled the eggs and used the two to fill leftover corn tortillas. Though my own fried eggs are variable at best, I think that a well-made one plopped on the beans provides nice textural contrast.

Today we played with an idea from another egg dish, shakshouka, where eggs are part-poached, part-baked in a thick sauce of tomato and pepper. We cooked the beans in a wide frying pan, leaving a bit of liquid, then made indentations for the eggs. The pan was covered, and the eggs left to half-set. We finished it all with a quick grilled salsa, made from some cherry tomatoes that improbably appeared at the farmer’s market. The result was somehow far better than the sum of its (simple) parts—and far too good for those neighbours.

No formal recipe needed, but a few notes:

• I’ve found that cooking the beans on a low heat in a frying pan—rather than a saucepan—allows them to soften slightly without turning into mush. I use a good splash of water and simmer them for 10-20 minutes.
• Toasting and grinding whole cumin seeds may seem unnecessary in such a simple recipe, but it makes a real difference to the flavour.
• A bay leaf makes a nice addition to the beans.
• Orangette has a good grilled salsa recipe.

Somerset and Potato Gratin

You know it’s going to be a good weekend when you’re met on arrival with hugs all around and a glass of your favourite champagne.

We were in North Somerset, 30 minutes or so out of Bristol, staying with G’s first year university roommate and his large and very welcoming family. The champagne—accompanied by a platter of blinis and salmon mousse—began an evening of copious food and wine, good conversation and a level of relaxation very rarely achieved on a Friday night.

The next day, having slept well under the watchful gaze of Justin Beiber (we had poached the seven year old’s room), we headed off on a country tromp. There was mud, stiles to climb over, lush green meadows and lots of sheep: all the things that the city folk expect out of a country walk. We ended up at a restaurant so seasonal, rustic and organic that the well-heeled, left-leaning readers of the Observer named it the UK’s best ethical restaurant. Other than its name, the Ethicurean, it wears its credentials lightly; the food did its setting ample credit.

Set in the conservatory of an old walled garden, much of the food is sourced on site or from nearby suppliers. The menu is small: terrines, salads, pies and platters of cheese and meat, served with local beers and ciders. Highlights included fantastically piquant chutneys and piccalilli (a traditional English vegetable pickle), off-dry Welsh cider and an Eccles cake, a flaky pastry filled with a warmly-spiced and not too sweet currant mixture.

After lunch, we ambled through the garden, where I discovered how Brussels sprouts grow, then into the orchard of dwarf apple trees. Home was through a series of corn fields, our progress hampered somewhat by our haul of mildly intoxicating beverages from the restaurant’s small shop.

We had been asked to cook dinner, a daunting task for a family that has eaten in serious restaurants and has shown us such exceptional generosity on many occasions. The opportunity to repay their hospitality was a welcome one, and the menu planning a massive highlight in an otherwise forgettable work week . We wanted the food to reflect how we like to eat, to demonstrate some effort, but not so much as to impinge on the relaxed atmosphere, and, most of all, to taste good.

We began with the Union Square Cafe’s bar nuts, buttery and warm, the sweetness offset by cayenne and rosemary. A simple salad followed: mustard-dressed leaves topped with blue cheese and walnuts. The main was duck confit; little more than some fresh herbs and a 24-hour run-up required. With that, we served gratin dauphinois and sautéed mushrooms. We finished with quince which we had poached in vanilla syrup until it was almost ruby-coloured, vanilla ice cream (not home-made) and sablé biscuits.

The duck and the quince are two of our favourite dishes at this time of year, while the nuts and salad have both made previous appearances. Sablé biscuits were a bit of a risk, as I’ve probably not baked more than a few batches of cookies since I was a kid. But it turns out, that with good butter, a reliable recipe, and some sea salt, there wasn’t much that could go wrong.

I had wavered on the gratin. Though the obvious accompaniment to the duck, my only experience was with eating it. But I should have known better than to doubt Julia Child. Her version—as adapted very slightly here--was hearty but not too rich, perfectly soft through the middle and appealingly crusty and bronzed on top. It may even be good enough to earn us some more invitations.

Gratin Dauphinois (Potato Gratin)

Adapted from Food 52 (who in turn adapted it from Julia Child)

Serves 6

Total time: 50 minutes: Active time: 20 minutes

Special equipment: mandolin or food processor with a slicing blade; shallow baking dish (about 9 inches long and 2 inches deep)

350 ml whole milk

2 garlic cloves

2 bay leaves (ideally fresh)

Butter

1 kg waxy potatoes

200 grams grated Gruyere

Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 220C. Put the milk in a small saucepan. Peel and smash one of the garlic cloves. Add it to the pot along with the bay leaves. Heat the milk gently until it comes to a simmer. Remove from the heat and let steep.

Peel the second garlic clove, cut it in half and rub the cut side around the inside of the baking dish. Rub butter inside the dish.

Peel the potatoes and slice with a mandolin or similar implement. Layer about a third of the potatoes into the dish. Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle a third of the cheese on top. Make two more layers in the same way.

Remove the garlic and bay from the milk and pour the milk over the potatoes. Bake the gratin for about 30 minutes, until it's browned and bubbly and a knife cuts through the potatoes easily. Let the potatoes cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Mussaman beef curry

It’s always a pleasure when the first foray into a new cookbook completely vindicates its purchase. We had talked about buying Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey for a long time, but I had thrown up all sorts of objections: that the recipes wouldn’t be as good as the two from the book we had already tried online, that they would be too complicated to be made regularly, that we should buy cookbooks written by life-long experts in particular Asian cuisines, not a catch-all associated with a (admittedly hugely informative and enjoyable) TV show, that our cookbook shelf was already full.

We may need to impose a one-in, one-out policy, but on the basis of last night’s dinner alone, this book well deserves a spot on the shelf. After this summer, I was particularly excited about the chapters on Balinese and Malaysian food, and had already bookmarked recipes for the fish curry with okra and tomato that was a favourite in Penang, and the different satays which I ate across Bali. The main dish we ended up choosing, however, was a Thai classic: beef mussaman curry.

The preparation began with a method I’ve never come across before: an initial two hour cooking of the meat with just coconut milk, cinnamon bark and black cardamom, the last of which lent a smoky, almost funky aroma. The fattiness of the coconut milk kept the meat moist, while the liquid reduced and took on a nutty flavour and hue. With about 45 minutes to go, cubed potatoes, fish sauce, tamarind, palm sugar and a curry paste were added. Combining relatively mild heat with warm spices such as coriander, cumin, cloves, cinnamon and mace, pungency in the form of shrimp paste, and freshness from ginger and lemongrass, the paste’s unusual mix of ingredients is explained by the dish’s apparent roots in the spices brought to southern Thailand by Indian and Indonesian traders. (The traders would seem to have brought their religion as well, as southern Thailand has a large Muslim population.) Roasted peanuts were added before serving.

Served with rice and a deceptively simple but delicious cucumber, chilli, shallot and coconut salad, this was a truly astonishing plate of food, the flavours ricocheting from richness and sweetness to sourness and heat, and back again. Unlike a Western stew, it’s not something I could just throw together: the spice paste alone had 14 ingredients, requiring stops at a local Chinese supermarket and Indo-Caribbean shop, and the use of a pan, the mortar and pestle and the food processor. But even the resident dish washer agrees that a little extra work is worth it if the outcomes continue to be this good.

Thai mussaman beef curry

Adapted from Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey

Active time: 45 minutes-1 hour; Total time: 4 hours

Special equipment: mortar and pestle OR spice grinder and food processor

The curry paste recipe will make enough for a second, slightly smaller curry (using 600-650 grams of meat). The paste can be kept sealed in the refrigerator for several days or frozen.

Curry paste ingredients and method

10 dried kashmiri chillies (I used hotter dried Thai chillies and decreased the number used by at least 1/3)

20 cardamom pods

2 tbsp coriander seeds

2 tbsp cumin seeds

16 whole cloves

5 cm cinnamon stick (If you are using a mortar and pestle instead of a spice grinder, leave out and add extra to the curry instead.)

2 pieces mace blade

200g shallots or onion

3 tbsp vegetable oil

25g garlic (3-4 large cloves)

1 tsp shrimp paste

25g ginger (thumb-sized piece)

2 lemongrass stalks

8 tbsp coconut milk

Seed the chillies and remove the cardamom seeds from their pods. Heat a small, heavy frying pan over a moderate heat. Add the chillies and all the dried spices to the pan and turn until they begin to smell aromatic, 1-2 minutes. Pour into spice grinder or mortar and pestle and grind to a fine powder.

Coarsely chop the onion or shallot. Heat the oil over a gentle heat in the same frying pan, add the onions and cook slowly, stirring occasionally, until fully softened and turning a dark golden, about 20 minutes. Add the shrimp paste and ground spices and fry for a few more minutes.Peel and roughly chop ginger. Remove tough outside pieces of lemongrass and cut into small chunks. Add these, along with the fried mixture, to the food processor. Pour in the coconut milk and process to a smooth paste.

Curry ingredients and method

850 grams beef stewing meat

400 ml (1 can) coconut milk

3 -4 black cardamom pods (replace with green if not available)

5-7 cm cinnamon stick

200 grams waxy new potatoes (use a bit more to feed an extra person)

2/3 quantity curry paste

1-1/2 tbsp fish sauce

2-3 tbsp tamarind concentrate

Scant 1 tbsp palm sugar

Handful roasted peanuts

Put the beef and just over half of the coconut milk in a heavy, lidded pan. Add the same amount of water, the cardamom, cinnamon and 1 tsp salt and bring to a simmer. Mostly cover and cook on a gentle heat for about 2 hours, stirring occasionally, by which point the sauce will be thick and well-reduced and the meat almost tender.

Cut the potatoes into chunks. Add those, along with the remaining coconut milk, curry paste, fish sauce, tamarind and sugar, to the pot. Taste for sweet-sour balance, adjusting the last three ingredients as necessary.

Simmer uncovered on a gentle heat for another 30-45 minutes, or until the beef can be broken apart with a fork, the sauce is integrated and the potatoes tender. Check seasoning, add peanuts and serve, ideally with a clean, tangy relish on the side.

Coulommiers

We’ve been eating mostly English cheeses recently, as the range and quality at our standard weekend shopping destinations (Borough and Maltby Street) are just fantastic. But a different itinerary yesterday brought me to La Fromagerie, probably the capital’s best source for perfectly-aged French cheeses. Somehow I managed to bring home only two: a small slab of St Nectaire that was escaping its rind but balanced mellow sweetness with a certain dirtiness, and a half of Coulommiers.

Even in Paris I didn’t often see Coulommiers, despite it being made in a town only 40 miles or so to the east. Here in London, I’ve found it only in a few high-end cheese shops. It may be that production is relatively small, or that it tends to get overlooked in favour of the not wholly dissimilar and far better known Brie and Camembert.

Depending on the version of the story, Coulommiers is either the progenitor of Brie or its descendant. Indeed Brie de Melun, the less popular of the two main Brie varieties, is produced just down the road in the town of the same name. Like Brie, Coulommiers is semi-soft, with a butter-coloured interior capable of becoming almost liquid when very ripe, and a bloomy white rind. It has the earthy, mushroomy tang of a good Brie, but alongside that there’s also a gentle nuttiness. Some find it a bit creamier and richer on the palate. It’s smaller than Brie too, with a whole cheese averaging just 500 grams.

Oddly, although it’s long-established and rooted in a particular town, Coulommiers hasn’t received AOC status. While this means that variation on the recipe is technically allowable, the only distinction seems to be between semi-industrial production, which uses pasteurised milk and ages for about a month, and artisal production, where the milk is raw and the maturation time doubled.

A final reason to seek it out? Even at the fancy-pants place where I bought it, a 250 gram piece was only £5. Given the prices of proper cheese (English or French), finding a tasty (relative) bargain is always a boon.

For Coulommiers in London, try La Fromagerie, Paxton & Whitfield or the financial district outpost of Parisian cheesemonger, Androuet.