Kitchen Dispatch 5

When I moved into my last flat, my boyfriend at the time bought me a copy of Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book as a house-warming gift. We’d been flicking through it in a bookshop a few weeks previously, but this edition was an old one, probably printed in the 80s, with an old French painting on the cover (see here and here) and little illustrations of the vegetables discussed at the beginning of every chapter. As it turns out, the illustrations are very useful, since there are a great many vegetables in the book that I’ve never come across before. I was surprised by this - I’d always thought that we have a much more broad, diverse selection of foodstuffs available to us today than people did in the 1970s. But there are several that I would not be able to identify in a police line-up (which admittedly I can't imagine I'm likely to be asked to do, but as I've expressed, my knowledge of these vegetables does not extend to their potential criminal tendencies), and I've had no luck finding them in the multinational food-shops of London (what good are big city lights if you can't buy cardoons?). I suppose food trends come and go, and perhaps these are just vegetables that have fallen out of favour. But grocers stock turnips, of all vegetables! So why not seakale? Salad burnet? Celtuce?! 

Nonetheless, I love Grigson’s recipes for the vegetables I do recognise, or can find. These are not 'modern' recipes: many would be very out of place in cookbooks now, because they demand unfashionable amounts of butter, flour, breadcrumbs and cream, but (despite my mother being a nutritionist - or perhaps because of) I love the wholesome, traditional, unfussiness of them, the way they make things taste good so simply. 

This is not to suggest that Grigson was pedestrian in her cooking, however. One of the best things I’ve made from the book is ‘Aubergine Kuku’, which is apparently of Persian origin, devised by the "chef to the Peacock Throne of Persia. He makes it often for the Empress Farah. It has a certain flavour of the Thousand and One Nights". It is essentially a dish of fried, mushed aubergines and onions, mixed with flour and eggs and baked to make a sort of pancake-omelette, which she very specifically recommends cutting into diamond shapes to serve. It’s a satisfying, delicious, easy dish that’s much too beige (literally speaking) for modern tastes, but which people disdain to their detriment.

Unfortunately in my flat here I have no oven, so aubergine kuku is somewhat out of the realm of possibility. I could probably adapt it, but there are too many others of Jane’s recipes to try to bother. This week I made Celeriac Chips: probably the simplest of her celeriac recipes, and one which definitely does this gnarly vegetable justice.

Although I have had celeriac before - I think roasted with other root veg - I’m not sure I’d ever previously cooked it. I can say, it is one of the most pleasurable vegetables to cook with, because it is such a strange, frankly ugly, specimen to begin with that it’s an immensely pleasant surprise when it turns out to be delicious.

For the less celeriac-educated: it's a root vegetable, usually about the size of a toddler’s head, with sculptural, gnarly growths that cover its surface, giving it the wizened appearance of an old tree, or the surface of a far-off planet. When you peel it, it looks like it has multiple cores, or as if it has grown several tiny parsnips inside it, which are all trapped together in one great hulking mass. It has a similar colour and texture - a little less floury perhaps - to parsnips, and tastes much like them too, just not quite so sweet. 

Grigson’s recipe suggests peeling the celeriac, and then cooking it whole, a day before you wish to eat the chips. I wasn’t sure whether she intended for us to roast or boil it whole, but I don’t have an oven, so I had to go with the boiling. Unfortunately, I also don’t have a saucepan that’s big enough to fit it in whole, so I had to quarter it, and wiggle these four pieces around until I could get most of them covered with water. 

I wish I was as organised as Grigson believes her readers to be, but sadly I did not read the recipe the day before I wanted to make chips, and I did not have the patience to wait, so I boiled the thing in the morning, let it cool on my windowsill, and then made the chips in the evening. I’m not sure what the reasoning is for doing it the day before - I’m sure it’s something scientific - but I hoped that a few hours would do the same job. 

In the evening, then, while drinking a glass of red wine and feeling sad that I was missing a friend’s birthday, I cut the celeriac quarters into rough thick-cut-chip sizes (although admittedly these were slightly inconsistent - the celeriac is an awkward shape for turning into even chips). I put a large chunk of butter into a frying pan (although she doesn’t specify, I thought Grigson would have wanted a large chunk) and then cooked them “gently” as she stipulates - which I took to mean on a fairly low heat, not in a rush - turning them occasionally so that they browned a little on each side. 

The recipe tells us that if we are not eating them with meat (which I was not), then the best thing to do when they’re finished frying is to put them in a gratin dish and grate some Gruyère over them, then put them under the grill for ten minutes to crisp up. This sounds AMAZING, but unfortunately grilling is one thing that really is impossible to do without an oven (I thought about trying to use a hairdryer to mimic the effect, but decided against this), so in the end I served them with a sprinkling of parsley. I made a wonderfully sweet tomato sauce to go alongside them (shallots, garlic, tomatoes, thyme, oregano, basil), with goat's cheese and steamed some chard too. 

I seasoned the chips with salt and pepper - of course - but the salt was a special type that I bought at Saladin (the spice mecca), a variety called “chill-smoked salt pyramids”, which, as the name would suggest, is a slightly spicy, smoky (duh!) salt, orangey-pink in colour from the chilli dust it’s mixed with. (It really does come in tiny pyramids, too, and tiny pyramids in themselves are surprising - the shape we most associate with hubristic hugeness, made humiliatingly miniature, crushable, edible.) This was, I think, a perfect foil for the dependably buttery, starchy, wholesome chips, and the same effect could be easily achieved with a smattering of smoked paprika (or similar) and some ordinary sea or table salt. Black pepper on everything for me, but each to their own. The boyfriend who gave me this book would have been horrified by the amount of pepper I put on those chips last night - but then, he wasn't there. So I guess I can put as much pepper on my chips as I like. 

P.S. Perhaps scandalously, I had these for breakfast this morning as well - and I can report that they were equally as good at 10am as they had been at 8pm, especially dipped in some very fiery harissa (also from Saladin), which wakes you up quicker than three double-espressos…