Side

The first time I made this, I discovered a wealth of delights: the way the tomato holds the little cheese like an eggcup holds an egg; the point at which the juice of the tomato and the melted cheese meet; and the subtle difference in smell and flavor depending on which cheese you use. Two of these tomatoes are lunch for me if there is something else on the table—a couscous salad, perhaps, or some bread and salami. Others may want more.

The cream sauce of a vegetable gratin is something I like to eat with brown basmati rice, but barley, couscous, or quinoa would be just as suitable.

The classic Indian spinach dish saag aloo, where spinach and potatoes are added to spiced and softened onions, is often cooked a while longer than I would like it to be. Authentically, the spinach goes in before the potatoes, so that it makes an impromptu sauce. Delicious. But I sometimes make it less than classically, keeping the spinach almost whole and adding it last, so that it comes to the table singing brightly, more as an ingredient than a “sauce.”

The white sauce way. Yes, it’s a drag to make white sauce, but what you end up with here is creamed spinach of extraordinary solace and luxury.

Making creamed spinach without the traditional backbone of white sauce produces a quicker, greener, and slightly fresher-tasting result. It makes up in speed and greenness what it loses in nannying quality.

A good soup for a spring day, bright green and not too filling.

I ate this rather soothing way with lettuce twice last week, once for lunch, accompanied by a piece of salmon, the second time for supper, with nothing but a hunk of soft farmhouse bread, the sort with a dusting of white flour on top. Light, juicy, and clean tasting.

There are certain unfashionable meals I want to slap a preservation order on lest they disappear altogether. Faggots and gravy, traditional Midlands meatballs fashioned from pork innards and belly and wrapped in caul fat, is one such recipe (lardy cake—the name speaks for itself—is another). Pease pudding would be many people’s chosen accompaniment; others probably a pile of minted fresh peas. To my mind, the faggot needs a cooling sidekick to soften the blow of the liver and onions. A mash of rutabaga is good, but also this rather more subtle approach.

Rutabaga’s ability to sponge up liquid is shown to good effect when it is baked with butter and vegetable stock. When it is teamed up with potato and seasoned with garlic and a spot of mustard, it is as near to a main course as I feel you can safely get with this particular root.

The fry-up has always appealed to me, in particular the bits that stay put at the bottom of the pan, the crusty scrapings that brown rather too much. I call them “the pan-stickings.” One of potato and duck fat is a deep-winter supper of immense pleasure; another of herb-speckled sausage meat and zucchini. This is robust cooking, crisp edged and flecked black and gold. It is not for those days when you want something genteel or elegant. This is the sort of supper to pile on a plate and eat with a cold beer. The latest of my fry-ups is extraordinary in that two generally sweet ingredients come together to produce a deeply savory result. The key here is not to move the ingredients around the pan too much, letting them take on a sticky crust while allowing them to soften to a point where you can squash them with little or no pressure. The caraway seeds, which people tend to either love or hate, are entirely optional.

I’m not suggesting we should inflict anything on our family or friends that they won’t eat, but there are worse ways of getting rid of an unwanted rutabaga than in this three-root mash. Works well with pretty much anything, even fish.

Even the smallest pinch of sugar will take any possible bitterness out of a rutabaga. The method that follows, of cooking the chopped vegetable with a small amount of butter and stock so that it takes on a deep, earthy richness, is one I use for carrots and turnips too. A very fine side order for roast chicken or something altogether more gamey.

January 2007. It is not especially cold, but has been raining nonstop for two days. Even the short dash from bus to front door leaves me soaked through and in need of some sort of carbohydrate and fat. Butter and beef dripping seem suddenly more appropriate than olive oil. Even more so the little bowl of duck fat I saved from last Sunday’s roast. Perhaps it was the week before. No matter, it keeps for months. It is said that people used to rub this snow-white fat on their chest to ward off a cold. I prefer to take my duck dripping internally, and set about a simple layered potato dish with thyme and garlic. The addition of the pumpkin was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It works well, adding a sweet nuttiness to the recipe. I like it on its own too, with a sharp and vinegary green salad at its side. It is also a good side dish for meat of some sort and wonderful with cuts from yesterday’s roast, just the thing for a cold roast chicken or duck leg.

Marrying textures and tastes to one another is one of the most satisfying pleasures of cooking: the soft with the crisp, the steamily hot with the icily cold, the spicy with the mint cool. I somehow had a feeling that crisp crumbs might work well with the soft, collapsing flesh of a squash. They do, but are more interesting when the crumbs are not packed on top like a crumble but lightly scattered over and between the pieces of squash.

Potatoes cut thinly are not only good deep-fried but can be blissful when cooked with stock or butter until they are sodden and meltingly soft. I wanted a sliced potato dish that had the simplicity of pommes à la boulangère but something of the richness of its creamier cousin, pommes à la dauphinoise. This is what I have come up with: thinly sliced potatoes layered with garlic, butter, and grated Parmesan. Savory, melting, and, yes, rich, they are a near-perfect accompaniment for cold roast lamb or beef.

This is my version of the Spanish omelette, being lighter, crisper, and more studded with herbs than the norm. The point here is that you can mix the herbs to suit your taste. Tarragon and mint are a must for me, but any of the more unusual herbs is worth using too: chopped sorrel leaves, salad burnet, lovage, or any of the lesser-known basils. Because the herbs are only lightly cooked in this recipe, their flavor will stay true.