As Strong As Soup

There are thousands of soda bread recipes on the net and this one isn't so very different, but I wanted to record my basic, perfect-for-soup (and other things) soda bread recipe. Forgive me if you've heard it all before.  Apart from the buttermilk, this recipe uses ingredients that I normally have to hand in my kitchen cupboards and fridge and so this is a bread that can be put together quickly with minimal effort. To that end, I use the packaged crispy onions that you can buy at pretty much any supermarket but don't let me stop you frying your own crispy onions, if you're so inclined.  Like other soda breads, this does not store well and should either be eaten quickly or frozen. Happily, it does freeze very well. The amount of buttermilk specified here might seem strange but buttermilk is most commonly sold in ½ pint measures in the UK. Let's just say that the reason for this is historic. 160g self-raising flour 160g wholegrain flour  1 tsp bicarbonate of soda  40g...

If I ever get round to inventing a time machine then I'll probably revisit any year from the 1980s rather than live through 2020 again. So for this Christmas season I'm looking back to the decade "when the frocks went posh" (as the estimable Cleaners from Venus say). I'm offering versions of both a sauce and a side dish from the 80s that would be useful at any time of the year but will be just perfect alongside Christmas leftovers. So make a note of them in your Filofax, blow the dust off the Lloyd Cole album and I'll see you down at the wine bar later. First, the sauce.... Grelette Sauce This cold sauce is very easy to put together. It can be served in generous amounts to complement a main course or in smaller dollops as a condiment in a similar way to tartare sauce. I remember it being served mainly with fish and fish terrines but it also works well with turkey, chicken or vegetable dishes. Grelette sauce was created (I think) by Roger Vergé but there were ...

It's been easier to buy less common ingredients than basic cupboard essentials during the recent strange days. Flour has been the most difficult item to find in my tiny corner of the world. Fortunately, I could find gram flour and I used it to make onion bhajis and socca and, because I like a simple life, I always make very straightforward versions of those treats in the oven.  It might be useful at this point if I try to be quite clear for once in my life: when I say gram flour, I'm talking about chickpea flour. In the UK most chickpea flour seems to be sold as gram flour, unless it's ‘farina di ceci’ imported from Italy. There is technically a difference between gram and farina di ceci but for these simple recipes that shouldn't really matter. It's also possible that you might find chickpea flour called ‘besan’. Once again there is technically a difference between besan and gram flour but the same product is often labelled with both names in this country so let...

Mention Roscoff Onions to people of advanced age in the UK, such as myself, and there's a good chance that they will start to tell you nostalgic tales of the Onion Johnnies selling their onions door to door throughout England and Wales while dressed in hooped shirts and riding bicycles. This isn't a complete fantasy, there were Onion Johnnies and they did ride bikes and very possibly wore Breton hooped shirts now and then. (In fact, I'm told that there's an Onion Johnny Museum in Roscoff). But the truth is that the heyday of the Onion Johnny was before World War Two and by the 1960s and 70s there were very few about. When I was a young thing in the early 1960s, there was a Breton onion seller who visited our area of London but I'm pretty sure he had an old battered van and not a bike. (I'm not too certain if he wore a striped shirt, but I doubt it). My family didn't buy any onions from him because they considered onions to be too exotic and posh for the like...

The cuisine of Picardy is not the best-known or trendiest style of French cooking but I don’t care. I like it anyway. The dishes tend to be straightforward, made with familiar ingredients and are full of strong, comforting flavours. Admittedly, some of them can also be pretty rich and a stranger to the notion of portion control. Caghuse is one of the more restrained Picardy recipes. It’s often served cold in Picardy but, while there’s nothing wrong with that,  I think it’s nicest served hot on a cold day. There are different ways of spelling the name of this dish and there are many different ways to make it too. Essentially it’s a one pot dish of slow-cooked pork with onions and vinegar but there are plenty of possible variations along the way. I use chicken stock and cider but beef stock and beer can be used instead. You could also add some herbs to the dish, if you fancy – sage and thyme work well. Strictly speaking, the pork should be cut from the leg and should be on the bone...

What’s the difference between confit d’oignon and onion marmalade? The answer is: one of them is French. For this month’s Random Recipe challenge Dom of Belleau Kitchen has asked us to select a recipe at random from ‘ a book or books you received for Christmas last year’ . Now this is a bit of a problem for me because I pretty much gave up the Christmas presents thing quite a few years ago. Looking through my cookery book shelves, though, I came across a book that I seem to remember buying at a charity Christmas fair a couple of years ago. I hope that will do. ‘The Paris Café Cookbook’ by Daniel Young, published back in the 1990s, is actually an American book. As far as I know, it was never published in the UK and it was probably donated by one of the many US expats who live around here.  The book is a guide to the French capital’s cafés and a selection of the recipes you might find there. The randomly selected  page took me to the Café de l’Industrie and a recipe for ...

For the March Random Recipe challenge Dom of of Belleau Kitchen has given us the number 17. I went to the least used shelf of the bookcase (the top one) where the 17 th book was ‘The Hudson River Valley Cookbook’ by Waldy Malouf. This book was published in the nineties, which is when I got hold of a copy, but I haven’t opened it in quite a while. Maybe I’ve been led astray by books containing more glossy pictures by chefs with glossy TV shows but more fool me, because there are some excellent recipes in this collection. The book opened at the page for Onion Walnut Muffins, which is probably because there was a piece of paper stuck in it at that point. I think I'd put it there years ago when I thought about making them but never got round to it. Maybe that’s not truly random, but having read the recipe, I really wanted to give them a go. The muffins are intensely savoury and make a great alternative to bread alongside any number of dishes. I’m sure they could also be adapted...