What We Cooked Today: fireworks night stew

Monday 9 November 2009

fireworks night stew

In a considerable improvement on last year's display, entitled "near-death experience", at least 1/3 of this year's fireworks got into the air and exploded there as planned. To accompany this spectacular event, we needed a cauldron full of hot, spicy, smoky stew.
We also had; hundreds of sausages, onion marmalade, salads, cakes (cherry and almond loaf from Nigella's domestic goddess) and a delicious concoction from Nigel Slater in The Observer magazine, baked potatoes with rillettes (although his assertion that potatoes would need only 1 hour baking was taken well by mum.)
As it turned out, We may as well have been feeding 500 people from a thimble but they were all very polite about it.
feeds about 8-10 people sensible portions.
- 3 thickly sliced chorizo sausages, fried in oil for about 6 minutes, then remove from the pot
- 2 chopped red onions, fried until soft in the oil and chorizo fat.
- add 4/5 small salad potatoes cut into equal sized chunks
- a handful of mini carrots
- 10 cloves of garlic slightly squashed
- 5 tomatoes chopped roughly
- add the chorizo back into the pot
- pour on about a glass of sherry
- an over-enthusiastic heaped teaspoon of smoked paprika, a large pinch of saffron strands, a teaspoon of fennel seeds, and a hesitant sprinkle of chilli powder ground together in a pestle and mortar and stirred in.
- 3 bay leaves, a strand of thyme leaves, and a handful of chopped parsley leaves and stalks.
- 2 tins of chopped tomato and 2 tins of beans (flageolet/haricot)
- 1 litre stock (we had goose but anything would do)
let it simmer away for hours - it was more convenient for us to leave it on very low for most of the day, but you can just simmer away until you like the consistancy and the level of spice.
Served in cups to an army of disappointed pyromaniacs. Thank god there was beer.

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When I grew up everybody knew how to cook but nobody ever thought about food. Now everybody thinks about food and hardly anyone knows how to cook. It’s an extraordinary shift in national culinary perception.
I learnt out of necessity when I came down from university to London, and realised that poverty meant cooking or starve to death. In those days there were very few restaurants and no celebrity chefs to give you delusions of culinary grandeur and refreshingly few cookbooks to live up to. My mother spent her whole early married life cooking from the two Good Housekeeping step by step guides. They came in yellow and white, contained black and white photographs and the pages were encrusted with spilt food. They were full of the food of my childhood, but I had no idea how you went about getting it from page to plate. Jocasta Innes prevented me from actully starving. Her Pauper’s Cookbook was my Good Housekeeping equivalent and quite soon I could produce two dishes: beef casserole nicoise and ginger biscuit pudding (there was another book, Cooking in a Bedsit by Katharine Whitehorn which contained a list of items one needed to embark on a culinary career, two of which were a sheet of newspaper and an open window, but I don’t remember any of her recipes). Jocasta’s two dishes appeared at just about every dinner party we ever had.
Back in the culinary desert of the Eighties, not only did you have few culinary aspirations, but you also had no money and quite likely a parent who had gone through the war and instilled in you the virtue of thrift; you only ever bought what you could afford and never threw away any leftover food. You cooked what your mother had cooked for you and shopped at the end of the day, when everything was cheap, at street markets, made stock out of bones given you by the butcher and consumed smoked salmon offcuts for a wildly extravagant treat. I am now completely unable to throw away any unfinished food and the fridge is full of saucers and bowls of tiny bits of the previous weeks meals (that was the other thing - sell-by dates did not exist. So long as it smelt right, it was ok to eat). ‘Doh mum, are you trying to kill us with these little plates of salmonella poisoning?’ my children, the fridge police, are fond of saying when they are open the fridge looking for something fashionable to eat.
Well, little plates of salmonella poisoning make an excellent weekend soup as i do not tell my children.
My daughter, who cooks by instinct far better than I ever will, has grown up with TV celebrity chef culture; our kitchen is awash with highly-coloured cookbooks, and she has absolutely no qualms about chucking stuff out of the fridge and experimenting with unfamiliar ingredients. Her cooking is flamboyant and experimental. Her kitchen gods are Nigel Slater and Mark Hix and the fact that she was brought up on a diet of sausages, shepherds pie, macaroni cheese, roast beef and kedgeree (what my mother cooked for me) has not influenced her style at all - when she is at home, our kitchen is an international melting pot: fish sauce, coconut, garlic. She makes wonderful tarte tatin and beef wellington and can knock up a miso soup whenever she feels like it.
Now that we (mostly) share a kitchen, I thought it’d be interesting to see how these two styles, essentially contradictory, worked together; how old style ‘adult’ British cooking, thrifty, leftover, filling and straightforward, could exist alongside, or perhaps be updated by, flamboyant, celebrity style modern ‘youth’ food - would we produce a strange fusion of the two and would this be of any use to those who are strapped for cash, but dying for a more exciting, perhaps even healthier diet. We thought we’d spend a year writing down what we each cooked every day to find out.