There’s a game I often play with my team
during quiet moments, as the clock moves inexorably toward the start of
service, called What Right Now. It works whether I’m by the stoves, on the
floor, or helping polish stems behind the bar. All it involves is asking the
target what thing in the world they would most like right now to be consuming.
Like the best games it is simple, satisfying, and often surprisingly
challenging. I initially used to use it as a tool to encourage creative
thinking towards service – in anticipating that the warm afternoon turning to a
breezy evening called for Campari & Soda, we would better serve our guests
unconscious desires, preparing to offer them the drink that they did not yet
know they wanted – however in time it’s become an illustrative thought
experiment in the perils of over-complication.
When I first opened Brunswick House it was
a seven seat espresso bar, in a hastily tiled corner of the storage annex of a
salvage yard. My brother and I had a thousand pounds each saved in tips from
working as a barman and cook/waiter respectively, which we used to buy a second
hand coffee machine from a scrappy, and a couple of domestic fridges from
Argos. I served espresso, espresso with milk, and four differently constructed
sandwiches. Over-elaboration was the least of my worries. As it’s grown over
the last five years, so have I. We have now expanded to the point where we
regularly feed 200 guests a night a menu of the most emphatic celebration of
British seasonal cooking, complimented by a 150 bin wine list.
This is not done for ostentation, it’s not
done in self-agrandisement; it is simply a reflection of my overwhelming
enthusiasm for food and wine, and my desire to share as much of it as I can
with as many wonderful guests as possible; however as a foil against
self-indulgence, I continue to practice What Right Now in officious self-censorship.
It is the overbearing nature of this enthusiasm which causes me to forever
question whether what I’m cooking is really what I would like to be eating, and
whether we’re not as professional cooks sometimes guilty of brow-beating our
guests, presenting over-constructed plates both architecturally or technically
baroque. The question therefore becomes not “what right now?” but “is this
something that, right now, feeling as I do, I would cook at home for myself and
those I hold most dear?”
As I’ve got older I’ve noticed my palate
shifting significantly to embrace much cleaner cookery. I want to taste
produce, the grass it fed on, the soil it grew in, the sea in which it swam.
Suddenly all the dishes I was used to cooking at home, those comforting
gratins, stews and pies, seem claggy, cloudy, indistinct. My domestic
repertoire has also shifted to reflect my infant daughter’s interest in food;
children have about 3 times more taste buds than us, and her discernment in
avoiding anything over-embellished is one of her many qualities through which I
learn ineffably more from her than she from me. It is also the case that my
taste in wine has shifted in the same direction, to that which is made with as
little intervention as is wise to best reflect the terroir from which it’s so
arduously extracted.
Over the next four weeks I will seek to
present the recipes that, while reflecting the cuisine of my restaurant, also
represent exactly the cooking I do at home. I will also be attempting to
discuss, as an aside, the kind of wine I would open to share with these dishes,
as, while I don’t subscribe to the tyranny of ‘correct’ wine-pairing, I think
that a beguiling wine can add immeasurably to the charm of a simple lunch.
Green Salad
I struggled with the idea of including a
recipe for a green salad. For so many blindingly obvious reasons it seemed
unwarranted, and indeed unwanted, after all, everyone can make a green salad,
can’t they? Either I’m being massively condescending, assuming the readership
have yet to master this high peak of culinary achievement, or crashingly dull,
revealing a criminal lack of both imagination and ambition. However it is
precisely because of it’s apparent unsuitability that I was immediately
attracted to it – we take it so very much for granted, and fail to give it due
care and attention. It feels too ubiquitous to bare scrutiny, and for that
reason so very much deserves it.
Brillat-Savarin, whose work, like that of
his finest translator MFK Fisher, I value more and more the older I get,
certainly does bare scrutiny. Indeed, as my existence seems to get more and
more complicated, it is almost a wilful inversion of his famous aphorism that
I attempt to bring order to it through my diet – eat simply, and life will
become so. “Salad refreshes without weakening, and comforts without
irritating”…”I can recommend this dish to all”. It’s proper place in a meal to
my mind comes after meat and before cheese, and is a course in it’s own right,
however since I only eat with such munificence on rare occasion, I mostly make
a green salad as the central component of a light lunch or supper, served
alongside a good piece of cheese, biscuits, some good smoked fish or cured
meat, and glass of something decent. The salad is the only dish as part of such
a meal that I’ll prepare, and therefore I’m used to giving it excessive
attention.
Green salads come ready washed and mixed in
suspiciously inflated bags, packed into supermarket chiller cabinets
everywhere, requiring only a cursory splot of dressing from one of those
perma-emulsified bottles on the adjacent shelf. So many recipes seem to offer
infinite means to cheer this bedraggle of leaves – canny dressings, roasted
squashes, toasted seeds - health, they promise us, and not heavy or dull. While
I have no objection to end result, I spend the winter waiting in quiet yearning
for the return of green leaves in all their complex variation, and believe in
celebrating them as such. Quite aside from the myriad health scares and
environmental woes associated with chlorine-soaked bags of hydroponically grown
foliage (I actually doubt that the chemical treatments they receive make them
suitable even as compost), the satisfaction from breaking down a head of
lettuce, picking leaves from stems, washing, drying, only compounds their
deliciousness.
On my mother’s small farm in West Sussex
everything is fair game for the salad bowl, and in our two plots - one, the
kitchen garden maintained by my mother for our personal consumption, and the
other, the market garden my father and I use to grow for sale at his wonderful
deli Italo on Bonnington Square, and eventually when it’s more productive, for
my kitchen at Brunswick House - the profusion of different leaves, roots,
flowers and shoots offer so much variety of flavor, texture and appearance,
they need no addition beyond a light dressing to constitute an entirely
beguiling course.
In the restaurant we buy our leaves from
Chegworth Valley, generally best known for their marvellous varietal Apple
juices, but best loved by me and my team for their salad growing. Ben Deme, who
runs the family farm, isn’t able to explain why their leaves are so good,
beyond the expressive fine sandy loam in which they’re grown, the rich organic
compost and seaweed with which it’s fertilised before planting, and the very
attentive and energetic work in the fields from him and his team. For domestic
use, when unable to get a delivery from the farm via Italo, I love going and
buying a bag of leaves and flowers from Jane at Fern Verrow’s stall in Spa
Terminus on a Saturday.
I tend to gravitate towards peppery and
bitter leaves, such as old fashioned English Rocket, with its enormous, robust
spears, Land and Water Cresses, and Oriental Mustard leaves like Komatsuna and
Mizuna. I like to balance these with Little Gem for volume, and finely minced
English garden herbs (chervil and parsley are a preference). I like a light
dressing at this time of year, barely an emulsion. I don’t bind with much
mustard, as the leaves are pungent enough without, and as a result the salad
must be dressed immediately prior to consumption, to stop the oil’s sad
wilting. No one likes a droopy salad.
1 banana shallot, carefully and finely
minced
a generous pinch of fine sea salt
a small pinch of caster sugar
A good light vinegar – apple cider is
broadly available, though my preference is for one made from Riesling
Oil
Dijon Mustard
Mix salt and sugar through the shallots,
cover with vinegar and leave to sit and macerate for an hour.
Break any lettuce heads down, and, along
with other leaves, plunge into a deep bowl of cold water, agitating thoroughly
to shake free any sand, grit, or indeed caterpillars. Remove and spin dry.
Wash, dry, & pick your herbs, and mince
thoroughly, tossing them up after each pass of the knife to stop them bruising
to paste. Add to leaves.
Strain out the shallots and reserve. Add a
teaspoon of mustard and a quantity of oil triple the amount of vinegar, and
beat together thoroughly with a whisk. I prefer a neutral oil like cold-press rapeseed.
The mustard acts as a natural emulsifier, binding the oil and vinegar, limiting
the oil’s enervating potency – no one likes a droopy salad. Reincorporate the
shallots, then mix through the leaves by hand. I like to finish with a course
sea salt, for flavor and texture. Without salt it ain’t salad.
Radishes and Butter
Butter is one of my daughter’s favourite
things, and I do get a little concerned by her ability to consume whole pats of
it neat. She licks it spread from bread, sucks it molten off florets of
broccoli, and takes whole bites from fresh sticks as it were ice cream. She
gets this entirely from me, though deprived the metabolism of a 22 month old
infant, I try to consume proportionally less of it.
1ltr Jersey Cream
2 tablespoons Live Yogurt
Sea Salt
1 bunch Easter Egg radishes, tops looking
crisp so you know they’re spanking fresh
The above vinaigrette, made with pasted
garlic in place of minced shallot
We make our own butter at Brunswick House
in the same way my maternal grandmother did on the family farm. We take the
best cream we can lay our hands on, culture it with live yogurt, leave it for
16 hours at room temperature to get going, then churn. After salting, the
solids are left out for three days to mature. The salting is crucial as it
stops it going rancid while maturing, while the maturing is crucial as it makes
it taste interesting, bringing out grassy, cheesy, complex flavours, where
initially it just tastes creamy. It gets a final squeeze to expel the last of
the whey, which we then use in other dishes.
While I like this butter on a crust of warm
sourdough bread, my favourite vehicle is a simple radish, freshly picked with
lively tops not yet softened, plunged into iced water to clean. Their limpid
peppery crunch is the perfect foil to good butter’s smooth, funky majesty. I
like to serve with a saucer of the above vinaigrette, through which to swipe
the leaves as a palate cleanser.
