Side

Carrots have been one of my quiet successes. The carrot thinning salad has become a regular weekly addition throughout the summer. Root vegetables no bigger than your little finger have a charm to them that insists you leave them whole. Cooking them, in shallow water so that they steam rather than boil, takes barely a minute or two. I dress them as soon as they are out of the pan, sometimes with a light, lemony dressing, other times with cilantro. To turn this into a main-course salad, add spoonfuls of ricotta or cottage cheese to which you have added pepper and some of the dressing.

The dressing is enough for four and will keep in the fridge for several days.

All of the brassica family have an affinity with cream and cheese, yet it is those grown for their heads rather than their leaves that seem to get the comfort of dairy produce. Cauliflower and broccoli have long been served under a blanket of cheese and cream, but less so cabbage and the leafier greens. The reason, I have always assumed, is that the cabbage would be overcooked by the time the sauce has formed a crust in the hot oven. In practice, the “white” cabbages that sit on supermarket shelves like rock-hard footballs can be put to good use in a gratin. Their leaves and stalks are juicy when blanched in boiling water and the thicker leaves hold up very well under a sharp cheese sauce, flecked with nutmeg and hot white pepper. I mostly use a cabbage gratin as a friend for a piece of boiled ham or bacon, especially one that has been simmered in apple juice with juniper berries and onion, but sometimes we eat it as it comes, as a TV dinner, like cauliflower cheese. My suggestion of Cornish Yarg is only because I have used it here to good effect. Any briskly flavored cheese is suitable.

There will be quite a bit of this left over for the next day. Lovely reheated with cold ham.

February 2008. The garden is all frost and cabbages. Here and there the occasional fat seed head, some purple sprouts on bending stalks, and piles of sticks that I have pulled off the trees that overhang the vegetable patch. The earth is crisp underfoot. Soup days. The winter cabbages, especially Savoy and Protovoy, are blistered with webs and hollows that seem made to hold a sauce of some sort. At its simplest, this could be melted butter or hot bacon fat, but a cream sauce seems an especially attractive idea on a cold day, adding suavity to a coarse flavor and at a stroke tempering the leaves’ stridency. The juniper in the spiced cream that follows makes this a perfect accompaniment to ham or roast pork, though I have been known to eat it with brown rice as a main dish in itself.

The brassicas are much revered in Chinese cooking, and dealt with elsewhere in this book, but the white cabbage, with its waxy leaves and crisp stalks, makes an excellent candidate for seasoning with the saltier accompaniments. On cold, rather gray days, the sort of day when nothing much happens, I often crave robust, dominating flavors—perhaps in a quest to inject some vigor into the occasion. Strident greens tossed in lip-tingling oyster sauce can be such a dish. In the last four or five years, this has become one of those recipes I use as a “knee-jerk” accompaniment—an alternative to opening a bag of frozen peas. It is excellent with grilled pork chops, though I have also eaten it atop a bowl of steamed rice before now.

One of the gifts of the nouvelle cuisine movement was the puréed vegetable. At its worst, a sad puddle of unidentifiable beige gunk; at its most successful, a moreish pool of intensely flavored, silk-textured essence. Sprouts, which marry so happily with cream, tend to look like baby food when given this treatment, so I keep them coarsely chopped instead of whizzed to a pulp. I am exceptionally fond of this little side dish.

Sprout tops share a luxury of growth and strong flavor with many of the Asian greens. One cold day in November I married them to an impromptu sauce of essentially Chinese ingredients. It worked. The tricky bit was working out what, in future, they needed to share a plate with. A slice of ham steak; a piece of lamb’s liver; a fillet of mackerel, its skin crisped on the grill; a pile of sticky rice with some finely sliced air-dried sausages; a grilled mushroom the size of a saucer. All will work. Eminently.

Raw cabbage, especially the tight, white variety, would be good here if the idea of raw sprouts doesn’t grab you.

I often serve this as a main course, but it is in its element as a side dish. Its bright green and smoky-bacon notes would be interesting with grilled mackerel, or perhaps with thinly sliced cold meat such as roast pork or beef. This is essentially a cheap dish, robust and earthy, to which you could add caraway seeds if juniper isn’t your thing, or shreds of fat-speckled salami in place of the bacon, or a few croutons to make it more substantial.

Any blue cheese will melt into the sauce for these sprouts, but I have been using a lot of Stichelton recently, a relatively new, gratifyingly buttery cheese made from unpasteurized milk. A main course with rice or plainly cooked pasta, and a particularly satisfying side dish for boiled ham.

The market: stumpy carrots, the prickle of frost, dark greens, the scent of wet soil. Here and there among the trestle tables are shallow baskets: Russian kale, tips of cavolo nero with their infant leaves, broccoli heads the size of a mushroom, and sprigs of purple and white sprouting so small you can hold ten in the palm of your hand. Each sprig of vegetable is so precious, so diminutive, as timid as a chanterelle. I pick them up with finger and thumb, which seems the way they must have been picked from their stems. These are shoots plucked from the stem after the growing heart of the plant has been removed. No smothering of cheese sauce, just a three-minute trip in the steamer and a classic hollandaise to dip them in, let down with a dash of cream and a grating of zest from a blood orange.

A good contrast here between the sweetly warm beets, nutty hemp, and tangy goat cheese. Any crisp, slightly bitter salad leaf will work. The English-grown ivory and crimson chicory, crunchy, juicy, and appealing to the eye, works well but the classic white would be just as welcome.

I have used Taleggio, Camembert, and English Tunworth from Hampshire as an impromptu “sauce” for warm asparagus with great success. A very soft blue would work as well.

I retain a soft spot for canned asparagus. Not as something to eat with my fingers (it is considerably softer than fresh asparagus, and rather too giving), but as something with which to flavor a quiche. The canned stuff seems to permeate the custard more effectively than the fresh. This may belong to the law that makes canned apricots better in a frangipane tart than fresh ones, or simply be misplaced nostalgia. I once made a living from making asparagus quiche, it’s something very dear to my heart. Still, fresh is good too.

Cured pork products get on well with our beloved spears, bacon and pancetta especially. Although it is not especially easy to eat, requiring fingers and forks, a rubble of cooked, chopped pancetta, and especially its melted fat, makes a gorgeous seasoning for a fat bunch of spears.

There is no joy in undercooked asparagus. Neither, curiously, is there much flavor. It must be soft and juicy, otherwise it loses much of its magic. Baking the spears in an aluminum foil parcel in the oven will suit those who don’t like messing around with boiling water and steam, and keeps the asparagus surprisingly succulent.

Asparagus is something you feel the need to gorge on, rather than finding the odd bit lurking almost apologetically in a salad or main course. The exceptions are a risotto—for which you will find a recipe in Appetite—and a simple rice pilaf. The gentle flavor of asparagus doesn’t take well to spices, but a little cinnamon or cardamom used in a buttery pilaf offers a mild, though warmly seasoned base for when we have only a small number of spears at our disposal.

There are dozens of shapes for Danish pastry, far more than I have room to demonstrate, but the shapes below are fundamental and fairly easy to master. (For more shapes, I suggest going to the Web.) The first shape, called Schnecken (German for “snail”), is probably the most common shape; with Schnecken, you have the option of applying cinnamon sugar to the dough before cutting and shaping. The second shape is a simple pinwheel that’s very pretty and popular for serving to guests and on special occasions. I’ve provided a few recipes for fillings, but you can also use commercial pie fillings (just don’t use regular fruit preserves, jams, or jellies because they don’t contain starch and aren’t oven stable, so they’ll melt out of the Danish). I’ve also provided recipes for two glazes for finishing the Danish and recommend you use both: a hot syrup glaze for shine and retaining freshness, and a simple fondant glaze to accentuate the flavor and provide visual appeal.