Quite a lot of people think that they don’t like liver. And if their only experience of it is the stewed beef liver that was served at school, then I can fully understand them having a prejudice against it. But please give liver another chance. Think more those gorgeous liver pates and less the shoe leather of the aforementioned school dinners.
Veal liver is the most tender and has a gentle flavour and smooth texture. In France it is frighteningly expensive (24€ a kilo last time I was there) it is so highly prized. Buy it cut into thin slices so that it cooks quickly. It is ideal for the Liver in Breadcrumbs below.
Pork liver not only has a very good texture and the sweetest flavour of all the livers, it is also very economically priced. Despite the Liver with Tomato Pilav being a dish from Turkey, which is Muslim, we always used pigs liver to make it. The Liver in Breadcrumbs recipe also suits pigs liver very well.
There are some golden rules to cooking liver successfully.
Firstly never cover it, the steam makes the liver go tough and rubbery. Secondly never cook the liver in a sauce or any other liquid as this has the same effect as the steam. You can fry the liver, but then remove it from the pan to a warm plate while you use the juices in the pan to make a sauce. The liver can then be returned to the pan to be heated through in the sauce, but no more than that. If you have heated it through and find that you are not ready to serve for whatever reason, then turn off the heat and rewarm when you are ready and don’t cover it. One of the reasons that school dinner liver was so leathery was that it was kept warm for extended periods in gravy with a lid on.
The third golden rule is not to overcook the liver. It wants to still be pink in the centre when cut into. If you are unpractised at knowing when it is enough cooked, just take a piece out of the pan when you think that you may be about there and cut into it, it should be pink in the middle, but not red and bloody.
Often when the liver has been taken out of the pan while you make a sauce or in this case finish the Pilav, juices will flow from the liver, this doesn’t mean that it is not cooked enough.
Throughout our teenage years either my sister Trisha or I cooked this dish for the whole family almost every Saturday lunchtime. It was taught to us by our father who is from Sarajevo the capital of Bosnia. This area was for over five hundred years part of the Ottoman empire, and it was not until we were holidaying in Turkey on a Gulet together with some friends and had this dish served to us that we realised that it is a Turkish dish. Our cook on the boat – Hali – made it for all of us one lunch time, and our friends loving it wondered how it was made, to which Trisha and I announced in unison that we could make it with our eyes closed!
Firstly put the rice on to boil. Use your usual method but you want the rice slightly under cooked.
Heat the oil in a large frying pan and add the onions and peppers if you are using them. Fry over a moderate heat until the onions are lightly browned.
Season the liver pieces with salt and a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper. Add to the pan with the onions and cook stirring from time to time until the liver is just cooked. This will take about ten minutes. Do not cover. If the pan is covered the liver will steam and go tough.
To see if the liver is cooked enough, take out a piece and cut into it. It should be pink inside. If it is red inside it is not cooked enough and if it is brown you have gone too far.
Remove the liver from the pan leaving behind the onions, pepper if used and the juices. Add the tomatoes to the remains of the pan and stir to mix. Cook over a higher heat until the tomatoes have deepened in colour and cooked.
Drain the rice and add to the tomatoes. Stir well to mix together and cook for a couple of minutes for the flavour of the tomatoes to penetrate the rice.
Add the liver and mix again. Cook a minute or two for the liver to rewarm. Stir in the parsley. Serve with a green salad.
This is a very simple dish and was very popular when I put in on the menu in restaurants where I worked.
Put the breadcrumbs in a shallow dish and season with the garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper. Be generous with the garlic and herbs as coatings are a little like marinades in that the flavours tend to disappear in the cooking.
Heat the fat or oil in a pan large enough to take all the liver slices.
Dip the slices in the beaten egg to coat them and then into the breadcrumbs likewise to coat them, making sure that you have and even coating of breadcrumbs all over the slice.
Fry on a medium heat until crisp and golden on each side.
Serve with a wedge of lemon to squeeze over.
Some of the most memorable dishes that I have tasted in Spain have been found in unprepossessing little restaurants in small villages while touring around the country. In Alicante province, crisply roasted tender artichokes seasoned with garlic. In Murcia province, freshly boiled ham cut into thick slices and dressed with freshly ground black pepper, lemon juice and generous amounts of fruity olive oil, crusty chewy country bread on the side. Near Guadix, a heap of braised tiny wild mushrooms that were such a taste explosion that I can’t recall the rest of the meal. En route to Cordoba, a delicate cold soup of garlic and creamed almonds.
And north of Seville, this starter of Huevos a La Flamenca. A base of freshly made garlicy tomato sauce, with strips of ham, chorizo, peppers and asparagus into which an egg is broken, then the dish is baked to cook the egg, or the pan can be covered on the stove and the eggs steamed to set them. It is served in individual earthen ware dishes. For those of us not out toiling in the fields all day, this is maybe too substantial a dish for a starter, and I like to serve it as a light lunch or supper dish with a green salad and warm bread for dipping in.
This is a perfect time of the year to be cooking this dish as the asparagus is just starting to come up, but there is not enough of it to make a dish on its own. On this occasion I have added some oyster mushrooms to the dish, just because they were in the fridge.
This looks best cooked and served in individual oven proof dishes, but if you don’t have them, you can cook it in one large dish and then serve it out.
Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a frying pan and add the garlic. Fry a few minutes until translucent.
Add the chorizo and continue frying until it is lightly browned.
Add the tomatoes and continue cooking on a low heat for ten minutes. If you are using passata then cook for five minutes only.
Blanch the asparagus by putting it in a bowl and pouring boiling water over it. Leave it for one minute and then drain.
Divide the tomato sauce and chorizo pieces between the four oven proof dishes.
Cut each slice of ham into three and lay in the dishes leaving the centre uncovered.
Lay two asparagus spears in each dish.
Break an egg or two into the centre of each dish, and put the dishes to cook in a hot oven, 180 C, for ten minutes or so until the whites of the eggs are just opaque and set. Bear in mind that the eggs will continue to cook in the dish.
Put a paper serviette onto each of your plates and top with the hot dishes of eggs.
Serve with a green salad and hot bread.
Marcus Gavius Apicius, renown Roman gourmand, to whom the first European cookbook still in existence was dedicated. My friends are well aware of my passion for all things culinary and when they come across interesting or obscure books on the subject are likely to treat me to a copy. This one was a gift from my lovely friend Suzane.
It is considered to be the work of several chefs of the time and so the recipes vary in the detail and style quite a lot, with many of the recipes appearing to be notes to oneself or to other chefs who already know the basics of the recipe. I have a couple of recipe books which are collections of recipes by women in a particular region of Spain, and the style is similar in that they assume for example that everyone knows how to make a basic potato tortilla and so only give you their variation on the recipe.
So although the Apicius cannot be used as a straightforward recipe book, it gives a fascinating insight into the cuisine of rich ancient Rome, and there is enough information in some of the recipes to be inspirational. The use of herbs and flavourings is particularly interesting to me. They used a range of fermented sauces, almost concentrated stocks, one of the favourites being that made from Lovage, a descendant of which is still much used in Germany, Maggi Wurze. The fish version sounds very similar to Nam Pla the Thai fermented fish sauce. For sweetness they went for concentrated sweet wines, such as date wine as well as honey. Sweet and sour, salt and sweet, bitter sweet, the new and trendy Umami, they are all there and often skilfully heightened by the use of fresh herbs.
This onion dish I have made before and served it as a vegetable dish, but with the addition of a little extra water during cooking, it makes a really good sauce come vegetable.
Peel a medium sized onion and cut into slices.
Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a sauce pan, and add the onions. Cook over a low heat with a lid on to keep in the heat and the moisture. Stirring and turning the onions over from time to time.
When the onions have cooked down and are an even golden colour and translucent, add the seasonings.
A quarter of a teaspoon of Maggi Wurze – which is a lovage essence.
A teaspoon of good honey.
a good pinch of fresh thyme.
The same of fresh oregano, chopped finely.
Continue cooking until very soft and almost a puree.
Serve as a sauce or vegetable accompaniment to meats and fish.
Garlic mash is a regular favourite and there are several ways of making it.
If you want the mash to still be creamy white but with a hidden punch then slow roast the garlic cloves. Leave them in their skins for cooking, but cut a slash across the centre to allow the insides to expand. If I am cooking a Sunday roast, I often throw in a few extra cloves of garlic to have garlic mash the next day. Just add the garlic pulp to your potatoes when mashing.
Another method is to finely cut the garlic and fry it in butter or olive oil until golden brown, and then add that to the mash and mix in. This is the style of mash here. I have used spring garlic as it is in season. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it resembles spring onion but has a pink tinge towards the roots, and has a lovely mild and sweet garlic flavour. I also deglazed the pan in which I cooked the cutlet and added this to the mash for extra flavour.
We have had some lovely rain and now suddenly spring has arrived. The patio is atwitter with swallows recently returned from wintering in Africa and now busily repairing their mud nests. The air is starting to be filled with the scent of citrus blossom – very early this year – and the raucous cries of the Great Spotted Cuckoos looking for mates. All the deciduous trees are already pruned and now that the winter harvest of limes have been gathered, we are starting with the pruning of those. The trees have vicious thorns, so thick gloves and long handled secateurs are necessary. Once the pruning is done, then a feed of horse manure and iron chelate will be given to each tree, the groups of baby limes will be thinned out and then they can be left to enjoy growing in the spring sunshine. Lime trees being tropical don’t like even the small amount of cooler weather that we have here and always look a bit scrappy and sad at this time of the year, but the boost of fertilizer followed by some warmth will transform them into the lush green trees that they should be.
In the vegetable garden the cycle continues of sowing, maturing and harvesting. There are continually salad crops, right now being harvested are a variety of chicories and endives, Florence fennel and three types of lettuce. I have seedlings of more lettuce, chicory and oriental greens just about ready to go in the ground. The mange toute peas have been fantastic this winter and are just coming to an end. I had sown some French beans to follow on, but it looks as though the birds might have stolen their heads as soon as they were out of the ground, so I am going to have to resow those.
With the early warmth I am thinking that I may be able to start sowing some of the summer vegetables – aubergines, beetroot, peppers, courgettes. For some of these I can buy seedlings very cheaply from the local market.
Just starting to be ready are the asparagus and purple sprouting broccoli. The very first head of broccoli this season, I had with orange butter as a starter, absolutely delicious. Butter sauces are a little out of favour at the moment with the concerns with cholesterol and saturated fats, but I would rather have the occasional bit of real butter than weird tasting margarines made with emulsifiers and who knows what base oil. You can of course use green broccoli for this or the green Romanesco cauliflower, white cauliflower I think is too bland for this sauce. Asparagus, either green or white are both complemented well the flavour of the orange butter.
Cook the broccoli for a few minutes in salted boiling water until cooked but still with some bite. You can use your serving plate as a lid and warm it at the same time.
Meanwhile put the butter, orange juice and grated zest into a small pan and heat over a low heat. Swirl the pan around continuously to mix the ingredients and get a smooth emulsion. The sauce wants to warm but never bubble, so do not go away and leave it heating. It is ready when the butter has melted and made a smooth warm sauce with the orange juice and zest.
Drain the broccoli and lay on a warm plate. Pour over the sauce.
Best eaten with your fingers scooping up the lovely orange flavoured butter as you go.
The tender and mild centres of the red and green chicories I have been using in salads, and the slightly tougher and more bitter outer leaves I have saved to cook. This next recipe is inspired by the cooking of Sicily with its arab influences of using pine nuts and raisins in savoury dishes. I thought the sweetness of the dried fruit would off set the slight bitterness of the chicory and it does very well and the red chicory contrasts beautifully with the pale pasta and pine nuts. This sort of sauce can also be served as a vegetable on its own.
Put the water for the pasta on to heat up, adding a dessertspoon of olive oil and a pinch of salt.
In a shallow pan heat some of the olive oil and add the garlic.
When it is starting to change colour to a golden colour, add the pine nuts and continue frying until they are golden all over.
Add the green chicory which is tougher than the red and stir fry for about 5 minutes.
Add the red chicory and continue frying for a further 3 minutes.
Add the chopped anchovy and the raisins. If the raisins are large then cut them in halves or quarters.
Continue stirring and cooking for a couple of minutes.
Once the pasta water is boiling add the pasta and let it come back to the boil. Cook the pasta for about 3 minutes.
Drain the pasta reserving a little of the water and add the pasta to the chicory mix. Stir well to mix together.
If it is very dry add a little of the reserved pasta cooking liquid.
Check the seasoning and add salt and freshly ground black pepper as required.
Serve with grated parmesan cheese to sprinkle over.