Jambalaya

For many years now we have bought coffee beans in bulk from H.R. Higgins (Coffee-man) Ltd, following a recommendation from the late Sheila Callender. Higgins has a wide range of excellent coffees and their service is impeccable. We buy our coffee in 250 gram vacuum-packed foil bags whose extra cost is more than offset by bulk purchase. We then keep the bags in the freezer until needed. Higgins reckons that coffe beans keep fresh in their foil bags for six months without freezing. A bulk purchase lasts us three months and tastes absolutely fresh throughout.

As an example of one of the advantages of dealing with a long-established family business (and I don’t mean the likes of Sainsbury’s), added to the bottom of the invoice for our most recent purchase was the following:

We are very sorry to find that we omitted the 10% discount on your invoice for 19th January. We have deducted it from this order and assure you of more careful attention in the future.

Wow!

Skip Lombardi has issued a plea on his Italian Food Blog for Italian recipes containing cucumber, which he has hardly ever seen in Italian cuisine. It had never occurred to me before that cucumber has made such a minimal impression on the Italian palate. Perhaps it has been eclipsed by its cousin the courgette, or zucchini. One doesn’t see many zucchini sandwiches: unlike cucumber, which is purely a salad vegetable, zucchini generally has to be cooked.

As Skip points out, cucumber is a key ingredient in the famous Tuscan salad, panzanella. And salad it is with the few other cucumber recipes I have come across. Marcella Hazan, in The Essentials of Italian Cooking has recipes for orange and cucumber salad, and roasted aubergine with peppers and cucumber. Elizabeth David, in Italian Food, has an intriguing Insalata di finocchi e cetrioli. I guess these could all be classed as types of insalata mista. Cucumber-only recipes however are rare: the only two I have come across are from Janet Ross’s early 20th century Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen, more recently re-edited by her great-great-nephew, Michael Waterfield:

Cetriola alla comasco. Cut some strips of peel from a cucumber and slice the cucumber very fine on a mandoline. Arrange on a dish and sprinkle over half an onion (grated or very finely chopped), 1 tbsp tarragon vinegar, and 2 tbsp good olive oil. Allow to ‘pickle’ for 15min before serving.

Cetriolo condito al miele. Cut some strips from a cucumber, cut the cucumber into inch pieces and then into rather thin wedges. Pour over the following dressing: 1 full tsp honey, salt, pepper, pinch chopped marjoram, 2 tbsp wine vinegar, 4tbsp olive oil.

The Consumers Association magazine Which? (online version) has recently reported on the techniques supermarkets deploy to entice us to part with our lolly. They opine that “The suspicion is that these specifications put more emphasis on how the food looks and how long it will last than on what it tastes like”, but go on to say “However, our snapshot taste test of strawberries showed that Tesco’s strawberries were as tasty as those from a farmer’s market. We bought non-organic British strawberries from market leader Tesco, Islington Farmer’s Market, and a market stall in Camden Town. We then ran a blind test, in total rating 234 strawberries for looks and taste. The result? There was no clear winner, with all three of the strawberries being preferred by almost equal numbers.

Have you noticed many farms in Islington, or Strawberry fields in Camden, lately?

A couple of years ago I wrote about Sainsbury’s unreliability. I don’t think much has improved since then, and there hasn’t been a week when everything on my list was on their shelves. Becoming increasingly frustrated with the experience, I decided to sign up for their home shopping service Sainbsbury’s To You.

I love shopping on the Internet. I can search to my heart’s content, mull things over as much as I need to, and buy what I want when I feel like it. So including the weekly grocery shop ought to be a breeze. In some ways it is, but the experience has been far from straightforward so far, and my concerns about the retailer’s reliability have not been dissipated in any way.

Skip Lombardi suggests that soffrito can be made in advance and stored in the fridge for up to a month. Sure, but why?

For certain, it will save time when you come to make the soffrito-based recipe, but you still have to make it sometime. OK, so you can make a big batch all in one go. But the effort (as opposed to the time) in making soffrito is in chopping the ingredients, and the more there are, the longer it takes. Skip neatly gets round this this with a food processor: pulse, pulse. pulse, and there you go. Easy. But I have generally found that food processors pulverize onions rather than chop them, releasing bitter juices that do not easily cook out.

Anyway, for me, part of the magic of making a dish that calls for soffrito is preparing the ingredients, letting them fry gently whilst infusing the kitchen with a lovely aroma as one prepares the rest of the meal…

There are those amongst you who seem to think that a weblog called Jambalaya should have a recipe for the dish of that name. In fact I described one a while ago on another weblog. My original article has a fairly detailed recipe together with an account of how we arrived at it. I will reproduce it below for those of you too lazy to visit the original offering!

First, a word about the word—or rather about the origins of the word jambalaya. The dish itself is clearly related in spirit, method and (mostly) content to the Spanish paella, a rustic, outdoor one-pot dish or rice, meat, fish and vegetables (or whatever). A link with early Spanish colonization of Louisiana is thus plausible, though some sources go to some lengths to ascribe a French connection through the putative Provencal word jambalaia. (If anyone can provide evidence to corroborate this, please let me know). I, however, am rather struck by the phonetic similarities to the word jumble, which seems aptly to describe the nature of this dish.

Since writing that article I have been experimenting a great deal with Spanish rice dishes based on the classic paella. My original inspiration for these came from Sam & Sam Clark’s wonderful Moro cookbook. The Clarks’ spanish rice dishes start with a sofrito of chorizo, onion, celey and green peppers, which seems to me very sound basis for this as well as jambalaya, although many ‘classic’ recipies fopr these dishes don’t go this way.

Leaving aside the ‘main’ ingredients of the two dishes, which can variously include chicken, sauasage, seafood, ham, snails, vegetables etc., the main differences between paella and jambalaya are (1) the cooking pot: a paella is a wide, shallow, flat-bottomed pan whilst jambalaya is traditionally cooked in a deep cast-iron pot; (2) the rice: the Spanish use a round rice such as Valencia or Calasparra, which absorb more liquid without disintegrating. Jambalaya is usually made with American log grain rice; (3) the flavourings: saffron, rosemary and paprika are fundamental to the Spanish dishes, the Creole derivative is enlivened with cayenne, chilli, allspice, cloves and thyme—plus tomatoees in the New Orleans version.

Now for the recipe. The method is probably fairly generic, but is most immediately based in that given by Ella and Dick Brennan in their Commander’s Palace New Orleans Cookbook.

Last weekend I cooked Thai food for friends. We had tom yam, green chicken curry, pad thai, beef salad, ca chien muoi xa (fish with lemongrass, from Alan Davidson’s Seafood of South East Asia [1]), and fragrant rice. The clear favourite was beef salad, for which I used a recipe from Jennifer Brennan’s excellent The Original Thai cookbook [2].

I adapted Jennifer’s recipe roughly as follows:

First, grill or barbeque a piece of beef. Fillet is best but sirloin (or New York strip) is fine: season it well with black pepper. I prefer to grill it on a very hot barbeque for a few minutes only each side (depending on size), pouring over some melted butter, creating a ‘flare up’ to give the beef a slightly blackened crust. However you do it, it should be very rare inside. Then allow to cool, wrap in tinfoil and refrigerate. This can be done well in advance.

Then prepare a platter with some salad leaves. Tear up some basil, mint and coriander leaves and sprinkle over the lettuce. Finely grate over this a stalk of lemongrass, and scatter over some thinly sliced red birdseye chilli. Now slice the beef thinly and lay over the salad bed: it will be easier to slice cold. I prefer to allow it then to come up to ambient temperature before dressing and serving, but others might prefer the whole thing chilled.

Make a dressing by pounding some green chilli and garlic in a mortar. Add fish sauce and lime juice in equal quantities and a teaspoon or so of sugar. Stir to mix well. Finely slice some red onion over the beef and then the dressing. Garnish with some fried onion and dried red chilli flakes, or whatever you fancy.

Obviously the quantities are determined by how many you plan to feed, and how hot you like it. Just use your imagination, experiment, or scale the proportions in Jennifer’s book. If you don’t have the book: buy it. Its not just a recipe book, but a comprehensive introduction to the origins and development of Thai cuisine.

Today, the Julie/Julia Project has come to an end. A year ago, Julie Powell, a New York secretary set out to cook all 536 recipes in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child's 1960's classic, over the course of 365 days. She has achieved this and what's more, has chronicled the whole affair with much panache (and in a sort of Bridget Jones's Diary style) in her personal weblog.

The book's foreword introduces it as ...a book for the servantless cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, timetables, children's meals, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat." Julie, who subtitles her weblog "Nobody here but us servantless American cooks... ", has evidently recreated these masterpieces in conditions somehat removed from those enjoyed by Julia Child and her colleagues back in the 1960s.

I recommend highly that you read what you can of Julie's account of the past year, before it disappears. Her weblog is hosted at blogs.salon.com which does not appear to be the most reliable, and many pages from the early days of the project seem to be no longer available. Let's hope that is just a temporary aberration, and that Julie will return to entertain and educate us once again after a well-earned rest.

Our friend Megan returned from a Breton wedding recently eulogising not only about the wedding but also about some fabulous Breton patisserie. A particular favourite was kouign amann, which is Breton (Cournouille, actually) for gâteau beurré.

I have not tried this myself, but Simone Morand has a recipe in her Gastronomie bretonne d'hier et d'aujord'hui, (Flammarion, 1965):

450g flour
300g butter
300g sugar
pinch of salt
20g 'levure de boulanger' (fresh yeast is implied)
1 egg yolk to colour (optional)

Mix the flour salt and yeast. Add the sugar, then the butter. 

Give 4 turns as for puff pastry. Rest for 15mn. Brush with egg yolk.
Dust with icing sugar or mark with a fork (dusting with sugar is more usual).

Bake in a gentle oven.

This is an odd recipe unless the levure de boulanger (yeast) is wet enough to form a dough with the flours and sugar. There are other recipes on the web here and here. Overall, the basis is a fermented bread dough over which one spreads out butter and sugar, and folds and turns as for puff pastry.

I read somewhere this week that Sainsbury's had been bumped from its number two position amongst Britain's supermarkets. I am not surprised.

I started regular shopping in our local Sainsbury's nearly twenty years ago - when it was the undisputed number one - and have done our main family shopping there nearly every week since: that must be getting on for a thousand visits! Over the years I have seen it improve and then gradually decline - I think as much through indifference than anything else.

Like most families we tend to buy much the same things over time, broadening our tastes a bit with each new trend, but generally behaving predictably from one month to the next (I have every till slip stashed away somewhere: these will be a goldmine for some future aspiring sociologist or market historian!). What attracted me to Sainsbury's back in the 1980s - and kept me going there even after Tesco's had overtaken it and opened a much bigger store a a mile closer to us, was it's wide range of continental foodstuffs, the general high quality of its fresh produce, but above all, its reliability. It was rare in those days for anything to be out of stock.

Now it is different: I can no longer rely on Sainsbury's. There has not been a shopping trip in the last year or two from which I have not returned short of between one and five items on my list, and sometimes more. Sure, sometimes these are specialty items (but why should they be different), and sometimes I am chasing items which may have been withdrawn altogether. Mostly, though, it is a failure of stock control and logistics. One only has to look around the store at the chaotic way in which the aisles are cluttered with pallets of stock waiting to replenish the shelves to recognise that this retail operation is nowhere near as slick as it used to be.

Another disappointment is that the company seems to do little to find out what its customers think. In all this time I have never seen a market survey in progress in the store, let alone been asked to participate. Nor have I ever been sent a questionnaire. There used to be a suggestions book 'instore', prominently displayed and frequently used, but that disppeared years ago. The Customer Service desk, when manned, usually has a queue of customers trying to exchange something or other, and is not very user friendly.

To be fair, much has changed for the better over the years. Long queues at the checkout - whilst beginning to creep back - are not the scourge they used to be (and still are on the Continent). The store layout is no longer regularly changed: things are generally where they usually are (assuming they are there at all). Overall, the range of foodstuffs is still impressive, though there is plenty room for improvement: just compare the frozen fish cabinets with those in France, Spain or Italy.

I am saddened that Sainsbury's is not doing so well. It may be that it has coasted for too long on its ability to retain the loyalty of its customers.

The yardstick most often trotted out to assess cooking abilities is 'how to boil an egg'. Actually, boiling an egg is not that straightforward, and the news media usually manage to come up with the wrong answer anyway. A much better test would be soffrito.

Soffrito comes from the Italian 'to fry gently' but the technique has wide applications in cookery and forms the basis of many well known dishes - yes, even spag bol. Indeed, its origins can be traced back to a mediaeval Catalan manuscript, the Libre de Sent Sovi and the method has its counterpart in the Catalan sofregit and Castillian sofrito. Whatever the origin, some aromatic vegetables are gently fried in oil until soft. Sounds easy enough, but some common sense and attention to detail makes all the difference. Here are a few tips: