Christmas was a boar

I needed to make Christmas dinner for six this year, and wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Last year I did the whole turkey, roast potatoes, red cabbage, spouts with chestnuts malarky that seems to be expected. Even using Mary Berry’s superb guidance (on the whole, prepare and cook everything you can in advance – including par-roasting the potatoes), it was still an incredible faff with countless pots and pans and dishes and a real drama to get everything warm to the table on time. This year I wanted zero effort.

The solution was a wild boar ragu with papardelle pasta. The ragu could be prepared a few days in advance (and, indeed, only improved with flavour) and is sufficiently unusual to look like I was making an effort, while the pasta was freshly made but shop-bought, and just cooked in boiling water for three minutes.

Christmas dinner.

I’ve been eager to make a boar ragu for years now, after a long autumnal holiday in a very rainy Tuscany where there was little to do but sit inside (and little local, seasonal food aside from boar).This dish also has another unintended consequence – simmered as it is in red wine and spices, throughout its long, slow cooking time the entire kitchen is enfused with a Christmassy fug of mulled wine. What could be more evocative of Christmas?

There are thousands of wild boar ragu recipes lurking out there on the internet, but so much about cookery these days seems to be about over-complicating the very simple. Good cooking should be simple at heart, so I stripped the recipes down and combined a mix of ideas to come up with the very easiest recipe I could. I’m not very into reducing down tomatoes when cartons of passata cost less than a pound, and I adapted the recipe to work with Tim Wilson’s oven-roast approach to stews, which has forever proven a more effortless way to make any stew, chili or ragu (and also minimises the washing up).

I swear, apart from ensuring you're organised enough to remember to put together the marinade 12 hours before you want to cook (and ideally several days before you want to eat it), this is utterly the simplest boar ragu recipe I’ve seen while also being a total winner with my husband and in-laws on Christmas Day.

The recipe below makes enough for six pretty hungry people.

1. Put the meat in to marinate
Choose your boar meat – I used leg, but shoulder is probably just as good – and cut off any large lumps of fat and skin (smaller bits of fat are fine, they will vanish into the finished sauce, but no need to make it too greasy). Cut the meat into bit chunks – say a couple of inches square – then put into a glass bowl with the wine and aromatics, stir, cover and chill for at least twelve hours.

Here are the quantities I used:

• 1.5kg boar meat (or about 3 pounds) – prepared as above
• A bottle of cheap Chianti
• 300ml of cold water
• 1 or 2 large onions (or 3-4 small ones), chopped up smallish
• 2 tablespoons of dried juniper berries, crushed lightly to loosen but whole
• 1.5 teaspoons peppercorns, crushed lightly to loosen but whole
• 6 large bay leaves
• 3 sprigs of rosemary

That all sounds like a faff to pull together, but it’s really very easy. The precise volumes of each aromatic matter very little so don’t get anxious about that. Feel free to add a pinch more of your favourites.

  

2. Twelve hours later, cook the meat

Put the oven on to 180C, then drain the meat in a colandar, catching the marinade in a bowl for later use. Pick out the meat and dry it off with kitchen paper. It will now be pink and squishy and look fairly repellent. Have a lot of kitchen paper to hand, this is messy business.

Coat the bottom of a large, deep roasting tray in light olive oil – just a series of good glugs – warm briefly in the oven then tip in the meat, stir to coat the meat and then roast for 15-20 minutes in the oven until browned all over. You may wish to stir mid-way to keep things moving.

  

Remove from the oven and add the following, in this order:

• 1-2 tablespoons of plain flour – sprinkle over the meat, and stir well
• 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
• Half a small carton of passata – just glug it out by feel, then stir well again.
• The marinade, with all of the aromatics included – and give it a good stir again

Take a piece of baking parchment or grease proof paper slightly larger than the roasting tin and scrunch it up, then unfold and lay across the surface of the food (pushing down so it is in contact - chefs call this a cartouche but that seems a little pretentious). Then seal the whole tin with wide foil so no steam can escape and return to the oven for about an hour an a half to braise. Remove the coverings and leave in the oven for another half hour to reduce the sauce down.

3. Shred the meat and finish the sauce

Pick all of the large lumps of meat out from the juices and shred on a chopping board – I did this with a knife and fork, roughly chopping and tearing to leave good texture.

If the sauce still looks a bit thin then reduce it down a little: leave it bubbling on the stove top while you shred the meat (although of course it will all thicken when you return the shredded meat to the sauce).

Remove the rosemary stalks and bayleaves from the sauce, put the meat back in, season to your taste with lots of salt and pepper (it can take a lot of salt, and mellows when it is resting, but you can add more later if you want to play it safe), stir through and then let cool, chill and store for at least a day in a covered container to mull over.

4. Shortly before you want to eat, assemble

Put the sauce to warm in a saucepan, cook your papardelle in another pan. Papardelle is just really wide tagliatelli, so use that if you can’t get papardelle. You can make your own pasta if you care enough about that sort of thing, althought the fresh stuff I got wrapped in paper from Waitrose was delicious.

5. An optional garnish, if you don’t mind washing an extra pan

At this stage I had a third pan going, but only because I really wanted the dish to be infused with the delicious taste of rosemary, which is how I remembered it tasting when I dined alone one evening at the 14th century La Cisterna hotel in San Gimignano.

I gently warmed some olive oil in a frying pan and added the leaves from about three sprigs of rosemary to cook through and mellow in the oil. This made a not-especially fresh but very aromatic garnish, in a recipe where coriander or parsley wouldn’t really work.

I couldn't eat a whole one.

6. A fresh crisp salad, should you need one

The sauce and pasta makes a great dish, but I also made a simple salad to add crunch and freshness to an otherwise soft and rich meal:

• Green apples – granny smiths, cored and sliced super-thin and dipped in water with a squeeze of lemon to stop them browning
• Fennel – slice super-thin with a bread knife
• Walnuts – chopped into lumps
• Watercress – for bulk
• Fennel fronds – for decorations

Some might like to add a dressing to all of that, but everything else was wet enough already and I didn't want to mess with the freshness. Squeeze on some lemon if you must.

So serve all that up at the kitchen table on any cool day of the year, the whole room embraced in a cloud of mulled wine, and I defy you not to think it's Christmas.


Attribution: photograph of boars by 'anakkml', courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net. I recommend freedigitalphotos.net for all of your boar photo needs. 

Eggs Haemoglobin

Eggs modifier always makes a splendid weekend brunch, whichever of the species you happen to choose. Eggs Benedict started it all of course, spawning such hamless variations as Eggs Florentine (spinach), Royal (smoked salmon), Neptune (tuna) and that mass-produced, bastard half-cousin Eggs McMuffin. Whatever you stick between the egg and the toasted muffin, it generally turns out pretty superb.

I decided to try adding my own variation to the canon, and looked to the traditional British fried breakfast to find the ideal filling: black pudding. This was not mere fancy, my family has the stuff in its blood. As a wee boy, my grandfather used to make his pocket money mixing black pudding up in the back of the butcher's shop, stirring the giant cauldren of boiling blood and fat while the butcher tossed in the oats and spices, waiting for the mix to congeal. As childhood memories go, not exactly Cider With Rosie.

I'd planned on buying a full black pudding link, chopping it into big cubes and making a fashionable tower of fried bloody goodness. Unfortunately, I got to Waitrose too late and they only had the wider individual slices of Bury pudding left, languishing in their little plastic packets in the bottom of the chiller cabinet . I soon cheered up when I realised the slices were almost the exact same size as the muffins. Clearly, Eggs Haemoglobin was simply meant to be.



I used super-healthy wholemeal muffins for this dish, and in that vein my hollandaise sauce also needs particular mention: while one ideally wants the blood pudding congealed, this is not true of the blood pumping through one's arteries. Silky and decadently rich as real hollandaise may be, it is nevertheless an emulsion of eggs and clarified butter and so about as healthy as smoking a carton of filterless Gauloises for breakfast. As this was meant to be hangover recovery food, an alternative was necessary.

My version of the hollandaise uses a savoury custard made from virtually fat-free yoghurt, and so the science is completely different to the traditional emulsion of fats: egg yolks are whisked into the yoghurt and then slowly heated together in a bain-marie, allowing the yolks to form a network of proteins which holds the rest of the ingredients together. Lemon juice is added to speed up the formation of the protein strands, while the bain-marie ensures the sauce isn't overheated, cooking it slowly to achieve a thicker and more velvety texture.

I whisked a 500ml pot of plain yoghurt with three egg yolks and the juice from half a lemon, then cooked it in the bain-marie for about twenty minutes. This is a great recipe for the lazy cook as it doesn't need the constant and crucial agitation of a real hollandaise. I took the rubbish out, made some tea and emptied the dishwasher while it was cooking, whisking perhaps every three minutes just to evenly distribute the heat.

The sauce has thickened when it evenly coats the back of a metal spoon, and at this point I added another egg yolk and a big knob of butter, whisking them into the warm sauce to make it richer and more glossy. A teaspoon of dijon mustard and plenty of salt and pepper finished the sauce, which went into the fridge overnight. This is perhaps the most significant difference between a custard hollandaise and the real thing: letting real hollandaise cool down is a disaster, allowing it to split and spoil, which generally means cooking the whole thing laboriously from scratch on the day. Putting my version in the fridge only improved the flavour, taking the bite out of the mustard and softening the taste of salt to let the lemon juice stand out. Better yet, in the morning I only needed to heat it through in a pan and pour.



Hungover, a cup of coffee in one hand, I toasted the muffins, fried the black pudding, poached the eggs and assembled the lot on plates before spooning over the warm sauce. I dropped some cherry tomatoes in the frying pan while things were cooking, letting them blister on the bases and cooking through their juices, which made a refreshing and tasty accompaniment.

This dish is totally recommended. The mustard beautifully matched the earthiness of the black pudding, and while the sauce lacked the silky mouth-feel of a full-fat hollandaise, in the trade-off we got a superbly light sauce with a fabulous lemony bite, and perhaps three years saved on our lifespan.

(I should add that hollandaise sauce can also mask a thousand sins. My eggs poached poorly and came out flat and straggly, but still ended up looking most jolly wrapped up in their little yellow blankets, and of course tasted fabulous to boot).

Vanilla from the rainforests of Glasgow

Did you know that the vanilla pod grows on an orchid? I had no clue until we stumbled into the orchid house at the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and saw them for ourselves. Quite plain things they were, straggly grey pods hidden behind the flamingo-like glories of its sister breeds. Still, they’re the only orchids which have a popular flavour of ice cream named after them so I guess they’ve still doing okay for themselves.

A small yellowing sign explained that vanilla flavouring is mostly produced synthetically from wood pulp these days, which is the last horrifying discovery that will put me off cheap vanilla ice cream forever. What could be more heavenly than a thick mix of cream, sugar and the nectar from an orchid pod? And what could be further removed from that than a tub of commercially produced ice cream - a thick combination of vegetable oils, fatty acid emulsifiers and sugar, whipped up with air, stabilised with seaweed extract and then flavoured with extract of wood pulp?

Seeing vanilla growing fresh in the Botanic Gardens resonated nicely with our lunch at The Ubiquitous Chip, a Glaswegian institution on Ashton Lane where we were seated in a glass-roofed courtyard festooned with tropical plants and vines, and where we were served a splendid starter of scallops with black pudding sauce, all drizzled with a light vanilla oil. I think of vanilla as a sweet and flowery scent, but here it added a rounded earthiness which complemented the delicate scallops perfectly. And what wonderful scallops too: their fat roe sweet, soft and caramelised, the bodies so lightly cooked as to be nicely moist inside, the fishy cousins of a chocolate truffle. I would only have changed the black pudding sauce. Less a sauce and more a streak of cat vomit, it tasted lovely but did nothing for the eye. A nice crispy bit of black pudding might have varied the textures a bit too.



The Ubiquitous Chip has been around since the 1970s and proudly claims to have changed Glaswegian eating habits forever, championing good and local ingredients at a time when processed foods and white carbs were the fashion. Crucially, it also once claimed to be the only restaurant in Scotland not to serve chips, although this is one political stance they have abandoned - as the platters of fish and chips so popular on table 103 demonstrated.

The Chip has also served as a backdrop to my boyfriend’s life: his parents dined here when they were courting, he brought them back to celebrate his graduation, and here we were again for a Bank Holiday lunch to celebrate his new job.

A celebration must mean only one foodstuff: steak. The up-market Argentinian chains may have captured the London market with their romantic tales of gauchos herding steers across the pampas, but in Scotland they still know that the best steaks come from the Angus breeds plodding around the soggy Highlands. My rare Aberdeen angus fillet was seared and peppery on the outside and soft and almost mousse-like inside. Paul took his medium, which came thiner, tougher and flavoured throughout with black pepper. We each preferred our own, which is precisely as it should be.

Pudding was a disappointment. Brown bread ice-cream has been a classic since lucky school boys took one last tea at Gunters before going up to boarding school, but The Chip’s house version, Caledonian oatmeal ice-cream, hit very far wide of the mark. The little crumby nuggets should have been burned and sweet – a sort of poor man’s praline, a decadent surprise cutting through the blandness of the cream – but the oatmeal here was merely bland and chewy, surprising in the same way one might feel upon finding a fly in the jam.

The lemon and rosemary pudding – a tight little ball of sticky sponge rich with egg yolks and sugar – might have saved the day, had it not been for the complete and utter lack of any rosemary in the dish. The best part of pudding thus proved to be a single ginger crisp served on the side, which was so fabulously rich and toasty I would order the entire dessert again just to taste it.



I usually come away from a restaurant determined to try making at least one of the dishes on the menu, but I think in this case I’ll go off piste and try inventing my own oaty ice cream, inspired by The Chip but based on something closer to Gunters. My aim was to create a real, thick and delicious oaty ice cream. Elevated from the bland with some extract of orchid, and as bereft of wood pulp, chewy oatmeal and seaweed extract as anything I’ve ever made.

Mix around two cups of Scottish rolled oats with one cup of brown sugar and a cup of ground almonds, lay them out on a lined baking tray and place under a hot grill until golden. I found they needed a lot of mixing to get them evenly brown.

Once the oats have started to cool, whisk up three eggs whites until stiff and then turn into a glossy meringue by gradually adding half cup of ordinary sugar (I use unrefined and unbleached castor, but you can consult your own conscience). Set aside and whip up a cup and three quarters of double cream, whisk in the egg yolks and a few drops of vanilla extract (not essense or flavouring or anything else bashed out of wood pulp – see above), then fold the cream into the meringue along with the oats.

Place in an ice cream maker and churn ... or if you don’t have an ice cream maker, stick in a tub and freeze until solid. The egg whites do most of the hard work for you but it won’t be quite so nice.

The verdict? Really quite splendid, and so much nuttier and more flavoursome than that of The Ubiquitous Chip.

Taking the pistachio

We're going up to Glasgow for the long weekend – a five hour train trek instead of the usual fifty minute hop by plane, a choice informed by fear the Icelandic volcano might belch again – and I figured a batch of biscuits might help the journey pass more quickly.

One problem with experimenting with cakes and puddings is that I usually end up with far more sweet stuff than the two of us can ever get round to eating (or worse, which we do eat, prompting emergency trips to the gym). For this reason I decided to make some Shortbread Pistachio biscuits from the Ottolenghi cook book, which like supermarket cookie dough is rolled into a long sausage so you can slice off the cookies you need and freeze the rest of the roll for future baking.

Ottolenghi on Upper Street is one of my absolute favourite restaurants in London. Sitting at the long communal table running down the middle of the room, the waiter brings plate after plate of deceptively simple dishes - saffron flavoured this, full and meaty that - to share and enthuse over with friends. Yet however wonderful the main courses may be, one eye is always on the front window where a mountain of cakes and puddings patiently waits. The Ottolenghi cook book is precisely the same - I nod and approve of the savoury offerings, but when it comes to cooking I turn straight to the last chapter to find the perfect cake recipe.

The basic dough is made by mixing 200g butter, 25g ground rice, 240g plain flour, 35g icing sugar and then a pinch of salt and the ground seeds of eight cardamom pods. This took longer than I imagined, the butter resolutely refusing to mix into the dry ingredients, and at times I thought it would never get there. However, eventually it all suddenly sprang together in the mixer, forming a tight smooth cookie dough.

The dough is then rolled into a long sausage about an inch or so wide, wrapped in clingfilm and refridgerated for a half hour to firm up, before being painted with a beaten egg, rolled in finely chopped pistachio nuts and then refridgerated for another half hour.



When you’re ready to eat, chop off however many biscuits you need, sprinkle with vanilla sugar and bake for twenty minutes at 150 degrees.

They came out brittle and crumby, the nuts nicely toasted and flavoursome. Still, there seemed to be something slightly missing. Shortbread is made by significantly increasing the volume of fats to wheat, so the butter coats the particles of flour and stops them from forming the glutenous proteins which would otherwise hold the biscuit together (you’ll note there is far more fat – or shortening – in these biscuits than in the Doris sponge I cooked last week). And here was the problem: the shortbread was so short that the biscuit fell apart into tight angular crumbs in my mouth. Not exactly the sort of comforting biscuit I'd been hoping for.

I think I’ll leave the rest of the biscuit dough in the freezer until June and serve them with a nice soothing gooseberry fool – something light and whipped to take the edge off the crumbs, and tart and fruity to bite through the fattiness – and consider making a proper biscuit laced with pistachios another day. Something crisp on the outside, chewy in the middle and studded with fabulous green nuts. Something the way a biscuit should be.

A humble Doris sponge cake

If I had a time machine I would go back to 1819 and urge the King to name his newborn child Doris. The impact two centuries later would be pervasive: a commuter could arrive at London Doris Station, walk up Doris Street to Westminster Palace and perhaps pause to admire the skill of the Dorians who carved the building from stone over a century ago. Stopping to buy a coffee, he might even treat himself to a piece of Doris sponge cake.

Just as Queen Victoria ruled over an age of innovation and change, Victoria sponge is the cake which started it all and so is the only logical place to start my Great Cake Project. From the humble Victoria sponge all other cakes can be derived: add lemon zest and steep in syrup and you have lemon drizzle cake; replace some flour with ground almonds and ginger and you have a rich and sticky ginger cake; add cocoa, cream and cherries and you’re better than halfway to a Black Forest Gateau.

Of course, this is why Victoria sponge also has such a poor reputation. The Victoria sponge is precisely as mundane as its namesake was not. It’s really nothing more than a blank canvas, yearning to be made far more interesting. No one will ever peer into a loaded cake counter and decide to skip the dazzling chocolate confections in favour of a plain lump of yellow sponge cake. Yet, in an age where most food strives to be simple and honest, can there be anything more desirable than a minimalistic mix of butter, flour, eggs and sugar? It was my duty to find out.



I haven’t made a Victoria sponge since I was a child – indeed possibly not even then, as adding a dash of cocoa or a handful of glace cherries has always been too tempting – but the recipe is hard to forget: take equal weights of sugar, butter, flour and eggs, combine them into a light batter and bake.

About four eggs should do it for a decent sized cake, and once you've weighed them in their shells you can measure out everything else to match. The ingredients should all be at room temperature to ensure a soft and happy mix, and of course I used self-raising flour because I was born in the 1970s and am addicted to convenience.

The process of making the sponge batter is a three-step science lesson in how to treat any cake (I’m talking hand-beating here – using a KitchenAid makes most of this obsolete):

• Beat the sugar and butter together to create a highly aerated mix of fat and sugar. It’s the bubbles you create at this stage which will expand in the oven to make the cake light and spongy, so don’t stint on this step. It’s also a good idea to taste the mix at this point – this perfect and gloopy combination of fat and sugars is precisely what the primeval mind craves, triggering two major pleasure sensors in your brain at the same time. Just make sure there’s enough left in the bowl to finish the cake.

• Beat the eggs in one-by-one to blend in the yolks, a powerful emulsifier that's going to keep your entire cake together. Fat and water are not natrual friends and the cake would otherwise separate. Beat the yolk through and you're creating a new emulsification in which the fat (which holds the air bubbles which lighten your cake) is evenly distributed through the rest of the structure. The egg white serves a seperate function, capturing more air bubbles in the batter and then, in the oven, forming long tight protein bonds which will help hold the whole cake together. The more eggs you add, the softer and richer the cake will be - the egg yolks also coat the flour particles and stop glutenous proteins forming that would dry out the cake.

• Sieve the flour and fold gently into the mix with a metal spoon. Sieving helps to seperate out the individual flour particles and also mixes air into the flour. It's important to be gentle folding this into the batter as it's easy at this stage to bash out the little air pockets we've spent so long creating back out of the mix. Gentle as we are, it's also essential that the flour is distributed fully throughout the batter as it is the flour's glutens and starch which will react with the moisture in the cake and heat of the oven to form a strong framework within which the moist and airy parts of the cake will sit.
  

Yikes. Enough science, how was the cake? Well, baked in two tins at 180 degrees for twenty minutes then sandwiched around raspberry jam and whipped cream, it was utterly delightful. It's hard to beat a freshly baked cake, and the soft, crumby, almost mundanely plain cake was a fabulous vehicle for the rich cream and (as the picture may suggest...) vast flood of raspberry jam. We ate two slices on the day and I took the rest into work. It was hoovered up before we even got to elevenses.

I don't know if I'll ever make a cake as simple and plain as this again, but at least I've confirmed that perhaps Good Queen Doris was right to lend it her name.