Pizza, wood fire

This is the wonderful introduction to Floyd on Italy, which I am thoroughly enjoying:

What is Italian food? Spaghetti Bolognese, lasagne with coleslaw and deep-pan pizzas filled with assorted culinary garbage? No. A thousand times no. On the subject of pizzas, by the by, in Britain at least they have gone the way of the once noble quiche, which before it got ‘wine-barred’ and abused was an exquisite dish, until, as the late Elizabeth David lamented, it became a culinary dustbin. Whereas thinly rolled dough spread with chopped tomato and topped with anchovies and cheese and zapped into a wood-fired oven is heaven – you just don’t need prawns and artichoke hearts, mushroom and chicken tikka pieces in a pastry shell and even if you do you can’t call it a pizza.

And do you know, I travelled the length and breadth of Italy without seeing a spaghetti Bolognese on any restsaurant menu and definitely not in Bologna? And minestrone soup is not tomato soup with peas and spaghetti hoops.

Let me try and tell you what Italian food really is.

You walk into a restaurant. You sit at a table and ask for a menu. There is no menu, but wine and water are presented at once.

The waiter explains the food available in rapid speak. In Italian. You don’t understand. ‘Please may I see a menu,’ so that with my Penguin dictionary I can work it out. It’s hard enough to say ‘please may I see a menu?’ You tried but he’s gone. To a table of happily munching folk who want more. More of what? Leave your table. Walk to theirs, and look.

Oh, wow.

A basket of fresh broad beans in their shells ripped open and dipped into salt and crunched. Fine thin slivers of (Parma) ham cut from the bone, toasted slices of ciabatta (slipper loaf) drenched in olive oil and rubbed with garlic, a mountain of vibrant red radishes, big green nutty olives as sweet as young hazelnuts. And big glasses of red wine. Then a groaning board of squid and clams and prawns and mussels and octopus, lightly cooked and served cold soused in olive oil and lime or lemon juice (not a drop of baslamic vinegar in sight – it is mainly used in London ‘Italian’ restaurants, no names, no pack drill – the foodies* will know what I mean).

Then a steaming bowl of yellow egg-yolked soft tagliatelle with melted butter, crisp slivers of aged Parmigiano and grated lemon zest. You suck it into your mouth. You smile. You drink. You talk. You laugh. You eat.

They clear the plates, but not the glasses, and bring more wine. They bring lightly grilled lamb chops with oregano and a wedge of lemon.

You almost eat the bones too.

Then a plate of grilled peppers and aubergines. Followed by a soft, succulent wedge of Gorgonzola.

And then you can choose an iceberg of ice creams. With a glass of strega and a tiny cup of strong black coffee.

This is Italian food.

I hope this book will help you to enjoy what I loved.

Keith Floyd

Tuckenhay, Devon

27 April 1994.

*In his third and final autobiography, Floyd says he cannot stand the term ‘foodie’. Perhaps a view he developed later on.

Ebay is not what it used to be, dominated as it is by the Buy It Nows of the Paypal dictatorship and their ludicrous seller fees, but occasionally it does still do the business. This afternoon I won an auction for  a copy of Floyd on Spain, which accompanies Keith’s 1990s BBC TV series, for just £2.69 (+postage of £2.16).

And last night I went on to the wonderful Abebooks and snapped up a second-hand copy of Floyd on Italy for just 66p, which is ludicrous when you consider what a splendid television series it was, full of Floyd passion, wit and, of course, superb, authentic recipes. Knowing Floyd’s writing, the book will most probably be even better.

I bought the VHS of Floyd on Italy some years ago (the DVD was released last year, but I’m yet to buy it). One of my favourite moments is in a town square in Parma, where Floyd tries to make and cook fresh ravioli. As if this task isn’t tricky enough, a massive thunderstorm kicks off and it starts pissing down. Flanked by two umbrella-wielding assistants, and wearing a classic English mackintosh, our man tries his best to prepare the little pasta parcels, utterly sodden, while claps of thunder and flashes of lightning reign all around. It’s marvellous telly, precisely the sort of thing that would be edited out of slick, contemporary cookery TV.

A quick hunt on Google Images and I found this screenshot, from that same square in Parma. Note the mackintosh and sodden hair. And the obligatory glass of vino:

This swine of a virus, which I have had once before, hit me last Wednesday and has played proper havoc with my voracious appetite.

I appear, however, to have been fortunate; most of the afflicted complain of violent, projectile vomiting, which – knock on wood – I have avoided.

I began to feel chills and a strange stomach on Wednesday, almost like hunger aches. These morphed into nausea by Wednesday evening and a complete loss of appetite – symptoms which may or may not have been exacerbated by England vs Egypt, which was on ITV that night.

Insomnia, headaches and a particularly nasty 4-hour spell in the bathroom followed on Thursday night, along with stomach cramps (timed beautifully to coincide with my trip to Craven Cottage for the football on Saturday), night-sweats and bloatedness. What’s more, my thin physique has lost 3kg, leaving me desperately close to vanishing in a puff of dust.

This will not do. I am keen to get stuck into some Floydian recipes, and still hope to do so on Friday evening. But for the past five days, it’s been rice, toast, banana and a bit of thoroughly-cooked chicken. All in tiny portions.

Speaking of which, I do recommend the BRAT diet to all sufferers of this virus or food poisoning. That is:

Banana

Rice

Apple Sauce (or cooked apples of any sort)

Toast

They’re neutral, easily digestible and, in most cases, shouldn’t aggravate your symptoms. For a special treat, you can probably get away with supping cola, too.

Apparently, the virus is ravaging the UK and beyond, including the unfortunate cruise ships on which hundreds have come down with it.

Be off with you, noro, and all your nasty dots. I want to get cooking.

The recipe, from Floyd on France:

1 large capon, cut into 8 pieces

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons flour

1 glass white wine

850ml chicken stock*

3-4 onions, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 bayleaf

Salt and pepper

How to make it:

Gently cook the chicken in the butter until firm, but not brown.

Dust with the flour and allow to become golden. Throw in the wine, stock, onions, garlic, bayleaf and salt and pepper. Cover and swimmer for 1 hour. (From Lorraine.)

Floyd on Lorraine: “Lorraine, in the Vosges mountains in north-eastern France, is a region of dairy farms and orchards, with a cuisine to match. Its most famous dish is the much-abused Quiche. If properly made, it’s out of this world.

***

*I must confess to not making my own chicken stock for this, which is pretty sloppy of me. Knorr has its place, though, and it was in this dish, but I fully appreciate that it doesn’t hold a candle to the real stuff (or the wind).

This was an excellent main course following the Italian Salad starter. It was accompanied by Ryan’s marvellous, buttery mash, which was perfect for soaking up the wine sauce. He never reads this blog so he won’t know that his mash is being given a proper double thumbs-up.

Once again, the seminal Floyd on France comes up trumps with another simple dish that doesn’t take long to cook but oozes flavour and left me very happy. A sunshine plate of happiness indeed. The onions were regal, the chicken tender and infused with the white wine and butter.

Both my dining companions were most favourable in their reviews, which was nice, and I rate this as reliable, solid, classic dinner party fare. If in doubt, whip up Floyd’s Fricassée au Poulet and serve it with rice, mashed or perhaps new potatoes. It doesn’t have the array of flavours of the Basque Chicken, or of a really good Chicken Couscous, but it’s thoroughly tasty nonetheless, and a new success in the Eddie On Floyd experiment. Woot!

(By the way, I’ve neglected to publish a photo of this wonderful dish because the ones I took were, in the final analysis, crap. Food photography, I am fast realising, is a skill, and one I am not terribly good at. So rather than publish a photo that will make you feel slightly queasy, I thought this recipe was best described with words alone. Worth noting that there are no photos or pictures whatsoever in Floyd on France.)

Floyd's Italian Salad

PLATE OF SUNSHINE RATING: Scorching hot (but not humid)

The recipe, from Feast of Floyd (which I picked up in hardback for £3 in a charity shop, the best bargain I have ever found):

“A robust salad that goes down well with lots of red wine – a good starter for filling hungry people!”

100g short-cut macaroni or small pasta shells

100g green peas, cooked

50g lean ham, chopped or sliced

50g salami, chopped or sliced

50g mortadella, chopped or sliced

50g black olives, stoned

1 teaspoon French mustard

150ml mayonnaise*

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Cook the pasta in boiling salted water until it is al dente, drain and refresh very well under cold running water. Allow to drain thoroughly, then mix with the remaining ingredients. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

(Serves 3 – 4.)

*I used Hellman’s, not home-made.

I served this up as a starter at a small December dinner with old friend Ben and Ryan, and I’m delighted to report it was absolutely wonderful. Extraordinarily simple, filled with marvellous, cold Italian meats, lovely green peas and topped off with the French mustard, which adds a sharp dash of extra flavour.

I cannot recommend this recipe enough. Go try it now! It will not disappoint. In fact, I intend to serve it up again for a forthcoming dinner, only this time I’ll make double, because all of us enjoyed two servings.

Floyd is absolutely right – it’s robust and goes down a storm with red wine. Ham, salami, mortadella, olives – flavour, flavour, flavour! Fantastic.

Couscous au Poulet (Chicken Couscous)

PLATE OF SUNSHINE RATING: Cloudy with occasional sunny spells.

This chicken dish, Floyd’s favourite, was an unfortunate effort. It wasn’t awful, but I’m sure it would have been far tastier had I used more reliable vegetables and non-supermarket chicken.

It’s a truism that fresh, seasonal fruit and veg, and free range (preferably organic) meat taste better and make a less damaging impact on the planet. I’m lucky to have a really good butchers near home, but I’m rarely able to visit, as the opening hours clash with my working hours, and they aren’t open on Sundays. There are some decent greengrocers in the area, which I do use, but, again, opening hours don’t match my shopping hours, so often I’ll buy my ingredients from the Waitrose next to where I work.

When it comes to supermarkets, Waitrose fruit and veg are usually of a high quality. Yes, they’re a supermarket, and they’ve contributed in their own way to the enormous damage supermarkets have inflicted on small businesses and quality produce, but as supermarkets go they appear to be less shit than the others. And it’s not necessarily true that they are far more expensive than their larger rivals. I truly believe much of the produce in the larger supermarkets is a complete false economy, and although Waitrose may charge you more for certain goods – but by no means all – your tummy and general state-of-mind will be grateful for the slightly higher cost in the long run. You wouldn’t buy a Mini Cooper expecting the performance of a Lotus, and you wouldn’t go to a Michelin-starred restaurant and expect to pay McDonalds prices!

We’ve all become very reliant on cheap food, and lost all sight of the seasons. We can find strawberries and blueberries, once a summer treat, in the supermarkets all year round, thanks to the aeroplanes which fly them over from the other side of the world. It soon becomes apparent, though, that if you buy a whole turkey for £2 – as some supermarkets were charging over Christmas – the chances are you’ll be eating an item on the food chain just a notch or two above ‘horse-shit’.

For this recipe, I made the crucial mistake of buying my fruit, veg and chicken breasts from Morrisons. Now, don’t get me wrong, Morrisons have their strengths. Notably, if you’re looking for Radox bubble baths, 24-pack bags of Monster Munch, Colgate toothpaste, Mr. Kipling’s Lemon Slices, James Bond DVDs and Heinz baked beans, Morrisons are super-cheap and reliable. Fresh fruit and veg? Not so much. Even when British produce is in season I have struggled to find much of it on the shelves of Morrisons. I had a similar experience around Halloween last year, when my search for bobbing apples in Tesco led me to find row upon row of French apples, with not a single British one in sight.

So yes, the Couscous au Poulet taught me a proper lesson. Let’s look at the recipe, from Floyd on France:

1 boiling fowl, jointed (I was cooking for two, so just used some chicken thighs and breasts)

Oil for frying

4 cloves garlic, chopped

Salt and pepper

2 tins chick peas, strained, or 300g dried chick peas, soaked and pre-cooked

1 large onion, chopped

1 X 415g tin tomatoes

3 courgettes, sliced

1 red pepper, chopped

1 aubergine, chopped

1 tablespoon very hot paprika or cayenne, or (best of all) harissa

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 teaspoon thyme

2 bayleaves

500g couscous, cooked according to instructions on packet

How to make it:

Brown the chicken pieces in oil.

Season well with garlic, salt and pepper. Cover with all the other ingredients except for the couscous, add 300ml water and cook in a covered flameproof casserole on top of the stove on a low heat for about 1 hour.

When the chicken is tender, strain off the sauce.

Mix all the bits, including the chicken, with the couscous and re-heat by steaming over boiling water in a colander – the couscous must not touch the water or it will become mushy.

Serve at once with the re-heated sauce poured over it. Have a side dish of harissa to hand so that you can make each helping more spicy if desired. You could also add some spicy hot sausages, like Merguez, in the last moments of cooking. Throw in a few pieces of beef and lamb with the chicken and you have a Couscous Royale.

(Serves 4 to 5).

Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? As Floyd describes in his introduction to the recipe, it is “a happy mix of Arab and French cooking; spicy and yet delicate. And hugely filling.”

I should confess that I could not find harissa, and I did not add the spicy, hot sausages. I was cooking for myself and Ryan who is not a fan of the spice, so a tablespoon of paprika was as hot as I got.

It was indeed filling, and the chickpeas, tin tomatoes, paprika, turmeric, thyme and bayleaves combined to create a really lovely, diverse flavour. But the vegetables were clearly not good enough and the chicken was nowhere near as lovely as my local butchers’ fare. My produce let me down. Or, as a teacher might suggest, I let myself down.

Like all chefs, Floyd stresses the importance of the seasons and of freshness in fruit and vegetables. It is not always easy to cook seasonally, especially in an experiment such as this one, but I certainly learned my lesson that I cannot buy cheap vegetalia and expect to cook up a plate of sunshine happiness.

So, although this was by no means dire, and it was certainly filling, the vegetables and chicken lacked proper, rich, Floydian flavour. This Couscous au Poulet  was in stark contrast to my first Eddie On Floyd recipe, the Basque Chicken, which was full of fresh flavour. There are far worse chicken dishes out there, but I had hoped for so much more.

I will attempt this recipe again and do Floyd’s favourite justice. I promise.

Floyd entertains

Not my Gateau de Savoie

(This is what it’s supposed to look like. This is not, however, what mine looked like.)

PLATE OF SUNSHINE RATING: Heavy rain, blustery conditions.

This cake was not crap. It was far worse than that.

It could have been even worse, of course. It could have been wholly inedible and tasteless. As it was, it was partially inedible and tasteless.

You can’t fault a guy for trying. Twice, in fact. I was so determined to make this succeed that I baked it twice in a week, and the second attempt was considerably more successful than the first, but it remained bland, low on taste and uninspiring. Don’t let this amateur put you off, though. Give it a whirl and tell me if you succeed in baking a cake of sunshine happiness.

Let’s start with the recipe, from Floyd on France :

3 eggs, separated

150g flour, sifted

200g caster sugar

15g yeast

Finely grated rind of 1 lemon

How to make it:

Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 5, 190C.

Beat the egg yolks in a mixing bowl and whisk in, little by little, 75g of the flour, the sugar, yeast and lemon rind. Put to one side. Meanwhile, beat the egg whites until stiff and carefully mix in the rest of the flour.

Now mix the two preparations together. Put into a buttered cake tin and bake in the oven for about 1 hour. (From Savoy.)

Simple, huh? What a straightforward cake. I love cakes. Chocolate, Victoria sponge, lemon drizzle, orange drizzle, carrot, cherry, hell, I’ll even down a fruit cake on occasion. I really wanted this Savoy Cake, my first Floydian cake and my first French cake, to be, at the very least, better than a supermarket sponge cake. But it really wasn’t.

WHISK AWAY

Whisk It

Let’s start with the beating of the egg whites ‘until stiff’. I had never whisked egg whites before and this is not easy. It requires some violent hand movements (I did not use an electric whisk). Delia Smith has a thing or two to say about whisking whites:

“In whisking them, what you’re actually doing is incorporating air, and as you do so, the original volume of the egg white can actually be increased by up to eight times.”

Right. She also says that the bowl must be absolutely grease-free, so properly cleaned (with very hot water) and wiped with a cloth. Delia also suggests a very large bowl, so that as much air as possible can circulate.

Sadly, I did not read Delia’s advice until about five minutes ago, so could not apply her wise words to my Gateau de Savoie. The first whisk attempt took me an age-and-a-half, and I was close to weeping. But I persevered. And, with patience and wrist-ache, I whisked the whites. Job done. But learn from my mistakes, fellow gastronauts, and use an electric whisk in a large, obsessively-clean bowl.

For attempt number 1, I used a loaf tin.

Inappropriate Loaf Tin

I used the appropriate, round cake tin for attempt number 2. Not that the shape of the tin made a huge difference to the taste, but at least it was properly presented, as the Savoy folk would have wanted.

Attempt 1 was dry, hard and tasteless. It was, to be frank, not pleasant to eat. I risked one small slice, regretted it and donated the rest to the local birds.

Dry, Hard, Tasteless

Attempt 2 was more on the moist side, soft, very thin and slightly less tasteless. I mean, it was decent enough to share a slice with Susie when she popped over for a spot of afternoon tea (and, in fact, she helped herself to seconds) but it certainly wasn’t good enough. I followed the recipe to the book but couldn’t get it to rise above the average.

Gateau de Savoie

This was undoubtedly the first real flop of the Eddie On Floyd experiment. I have not been downhearted, though. It is my intention to attempt the Gateau au Chocolat (Rich Chocolate Cake) – perhaps in time for Easter.

I have also made Floyd’s Christmas pudding, which was great fun, although it won’t be tasted for another month or so, of course.

In the meantime, please enjoy the sound of silence…

Keith Floyd, who died earlier this year following one final rich and boozy banquet, is probably the most colourful and passionate TV chef ever to have graced our screens. Rarely seen without his trademark dickie-bow and a glass of red plonk in hand, Floyd cut an enthusiastic and eccentric figure who wasn’t afraid to risk flambeing himself as well as his food in the name of good television. Fortunately, Floyd had just put the finishing touches to his autobiography Stirred but Not Shaken at the time of his death, and it has been adapted here for radio. Read in suitably upper-crust fashion by actor Michael Cochrane, this should prove to be an inspirational, entertaining and moving listen for anyone who tuned in to witness this flamboyant figure in action.

Go here and listen to it on the BBC Iplayer.

Floyd's Autobiography