Side

I am always on the lookout for simple but interesting side dishes to eat with cold roast meats. A little pile of grilled eggplants, their smoked edges moist with a vibrant green dressing, wakes up yesterday’s cold roast chicken or beef.

The slim eggplant varieties, often with a lavender blush, that are to be found in Middle Eastern and Indian markets are especially suitable for grilling, since they cook quickly and evenly. I rarely salt these little chaps. Black onion seed (nigella sativa) is the seed of the nigella flower and is common to southwest Asia. It is best known as the black seeds used to decorate Indian naan bread and resembles black sesame seeds.

This is one of those recipes I find come in handy on several levels. I use it as both starter and main dish—often with parsley-flecked couscous on the side—but it is also a fine dish to bring out as one of the constituents of a laid-back summer meal in the garden. The sort where you just put a few simple dishes on the table and let everyone help themselves.

Any of the brassica family is good to go here. Most successful are gai lan (kai lan) and choy sum.

Of all the flavors that seem to bring out the rest of the cabbage family’s earthy greenness, few work as effectively as those of Southeast Asia. Ginger, green onion, and garlic have a natural affinity with chlorophyll-rich vegetables of any sort, but the saltiness of the fish sauces with which Thai and Vietnamese cooks season their food does much for cabbage leaves. I often serve this with roast duck, which appreciates such seasoning, or as a side order for a mushroom stir-fry hot with chiles and soy.

The purity of a leaf and its edible stalk, lightly steamed and served “naked,” is always somehow life enhancing. But occasionally I want a more sensuous treatment (a welcome lift in times of recession). The spiced cream with juniper and peppercorns recipe that I occasionally use with green leaves makes them a particularly sound accompaniment for grilled or roast pork, or for poached ham or chicken, but I also find it perfectly acceptable with brown rice as a main dish in itself.

Cheese is the savior of chard, as a crisp crust, a seasoning for soup, a luscious sauce, bringing out its qualities while introducing a note of luxury. Often, the bolder the cheese the more interesting the result, so a well-matured British cheese is a wise choice for something like a shallow chard tart. As a sort of double whammy, I add cheese to the pastry as well as the filling.

Bubble and squeak is an iconic British dish made by frying leftover boiled potatoes and cabbage to make a large, flat potato cake that is crisp outside and soft within. Bubble and squeak can be as simple as the traditional leftover cabbage and potato fry-up or somewhat more sophisticated, with the introduction of cheese, smoked pork, fish, or other vegetables. The bells-and-whistles versions can often successfully disguise the fact that your supper is made from stuff you found at the back of the fridge. Keeping the potato pieces quite coarse makes the texture more interesting.

Perhaps because of the thickness of its stalks, or the unruly tangle of leaves on the plate, chard always manages to exude a rustic quality. It is not really a vegetable for “fine dining.” Blanched and seasoned with young, mild garlic and a squeeze of lemon, the stems and leaves become a useful side dish for any big-flavored main course. Allowed to cool, they also work with cold roast meats, thickly torn chunks of mozzarella, wedges of warm savory tarts, or coarse-textured “country” pâté. In other words, a distinctly useful thing to have in the fridge.

Once the snowdrops are out and the buds on the trees start breaking, I have usually had enough of mashed, roasted, and baked roots and am gasping for the fresh greens of spring. As the root season draws to a close, I find a dish of parsnips and celery root, thinly sliced and slowly baked, makes a pleasant enough change. Sweet and yielding, this is both an accompaniment and a vegetable dish in its own right. I have used the quantities below as a main dish for two before now.

There is something uplifting about refreshing food eaten on a frosty day. What follows is a light, fresh-tasting salad that makes your eyes sparkle.

As much as I appreciate the traditional rendition of the sort of celery root rémoulade you might get in a Parisian brasserie, I also like to shake it up a bit. Including the ham, or even bacon, in the salad rather than serving it alongside gives the meat a while to get to know the other ingredients, becoming more than just an accompaniment. An alternative to bacon would be shreds of smoked venison or prosciutto, or maybe smoked mackerel. Radish sprouts are stunningly colored sprouted seeds with a spicy heat. Enterprising natural food shops and supermarkets have them, or you can sprout your own in a salad sprouter. If they evade you, you could use any sprouted seed here.

Crème fraîche or strained yogurt offers many of the qualities of mayonnaise but with a cleaner, more piquant character. Beating in a small amount of olive or walnut oil will nudge it toward the perfect coating consistency of a classic mayonnaise-type rémoulade dressing. Using these tart alternatives lends a lightness, too.

Heads of celery, braised in good chicken stock, are a reminder of the elegant days of hotel dining rooms and railway dining cars. A flashback to times before chefs were ever talked about, let alone “celebrities,” and the head waiter rather than the kitchen ruled the roost. Braised celery is what I want to eat with roast turkey and the trimmings.

When making a sauce to blanket a dish of boiled celery ribs, I like to harness the mineral quality by using the celery’s cooking water in with the milk. It deepens the flavor and, together with parsley, establishes the vegetable’s earthy flavor. Celery blanched in deep water, smothered with a duvet of slightly bland and salty sauce, and given a crust of breadcrumbs and cheese is certainly worth eating. I have suggested making a crust for the celery and its sauce with Parmesan and breadcrumbs, but there is much success to be had with Berkswell, the sheep’s milk cheese from the Midlands. Despite being a rather different cheese from Parmesan, it has a similar fruitiness.

I enjoy making a bit of a fuss about cheese sauce. The difference between a carelessly put together sauce and one made with care and love is astounding. Taking the trouble to flavor the milk with bay, clove, and onion, allowing the sauce to come together slowly to give its ingredients time to get know one another, and enriching it with a little cream will result in a sauce of twice the standing of one seasoned only with speed and sloppiness. There is much humble satisfaction in a simple dish, carefully made.

Perhaps it was the carrot loaf of the 1970s, slimmers’ soups, or the post–Second World War carrot cake recipes without the promise of walnuts and cream cheese frosting, but carrots rarely offer us a taste of luxury. Fiddling around—there is no other word—with grated carrots one day, I wondered if there would be any mileage in a dish similar to creamed corn, where the sweet vegetables are stewed with cream to give a deliciously sloppy side dish. There wasn’t. Until I worked backward and added spices to the carrots before enriching them with both cream (for richness) and strained yogurt (for freshness). The result is one of those suave, mildly spiced side dishes that can be used alongside almost anything. In our house it has nestled up to brown rice, grilled lamb steaks, and, most successful of all, sautéed rabbit.