The Greasy Spoon

Sage

One of the fun things about writing The Greasy Spoon is thinking up new ways of describing the various tastes.  On wikipedia ("it's in wikipedia so it must be true) Sage (Salvia officinalsis) is described as having a peppery taste.  I'm not sure that's right?  I've been a bit off-colour for the last week (with what women call "Man Flu") and The Girl (God Bless 'Er) cooked me up a divine chicken stew laced with copious amounts of sage.  The sage and chicken combination worked well. with the velvety, aromatic, oniony and slightly sweet flavours of the sage helping to create a rich, smooth sauce.

Traditionally, sage was used in the cooking of Merrie Olde England. It works well with pork, beautifully in stuffings, is the perfect match for onion and an essential ingredient in bread sauce. I love it.

Here's my recipe for bread sauce. In England, we serve bread sauce with game, such as partridge or pheasant. It really is the genuine taste of this country, with the rather Medieval flavours of sage, nutmeg, mace and cloves. It's also a good 'un with poultry. Some strange people out there like their sauce thick. Personally, I prefer my bread sauce to be a bit sloppy.

Add the following ingredients to a saucepan: 300ml milk, 50g butter, a chopped small onion, a crushed garlic clove, a bayleaf, two cloves, a blade of mace and some chopped fresh sage. Heat. Once the mixture is warm, stir in 75g of fresh white breadcrumbs and cook until thick and smooth, stirring the whole time.

When you're happy with the consistency, remove the bay leaf, mace and cloves, and pour in 150ml of single cream. Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper and grind in a decent amount of nutmeg.

Reheat the sauce, but to stop it going thick- mix in a knob of unsalted butter and some more milk, to taste.

Still on the subject of sage, a simple Italian sauce I'm rather fond of is Sage and Butter Sauce. This is just butter, heated until it turns a golden noisette colour (ie not burnt), lots of fresh chopped sage, salt and pepper and a decent squeeze of lemon juice. Very simple. I like it.

Colonel Skinner's Mango Chutney

At Dotheboys Hall, I remember being fascinated by an old copy of Hobson Jobson which I found hidden away in the school library.  First published in 1903, Hobson was an etymological glossary of Anglo-Indian words and language. A study of words such as Pajama, Veranda, Bungalow, Tiffin, Kedgeree and of course, our very own Curry.

Anglo-Indian food is another fascinating study, in its own right.  One of the best books on the subject is David Burton's The Raj at Table, published by Faber & Faber.

Here's a recipe for Colonel Skinner's Mango Chutney.  Today, there are various brands out there using this name. Actually, Colonel Skinner's Mango Chutney is something that you will find in the old Anglo-Indian cookery books and the original recipe involved leaving the chutney outside in the backyard to mature under the hot sun for a few days.  I tried to find out who the original Colonel Skinner was (sounds Irish?), but without success.

Chop up the following ingredients in your Magimix or otherwise trendy food processor: twelve ounces of dried mangoes, half a pound of  brown sugar, ginger, rasins, chillis and garlic to taste. Once they're chopped up, spoon the mixture into a large preserving pan.  Add two and half pints of vinegar and season with salt.  Bring to the boil and simmer for an hour. Transfer into sterlilised jars and store in a dark cupboard.

Dr Kitchener's Curry Powder

I was leafing through a paperback copy of the original 1861 edition of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (Oxford World's Classics) and came across her recipe for Indian Curry-Powder, founded on Dr Kitchener's Recipe.  William Kitchiner (1775?-1827) was the author of the Apicus Redivivus, The Cook's Oracle, first published in 1817.

I'm quite fond of these historic Anglo-Indian curry powders; the sort of thing we chuck into stews and then have the nerve to call "curry".  Here's my version of Dr Kitchener's curry powder, as described by Mrs Beeton.  I've slightly adapted it for the modern kitchen and added cardamom and black pepper.

Add the following ingredients to a mixing bowl: two teaspoons of powdered turmeric, two teaspoons of powdered cinammon,  two teaspoons of powdered ginger, two teaspoons of powdered fenugreek, a dash of cayenne pepper and a good grinding of black pepper.  Mix them up so they form a powder.

In a pestle and mortar, grind up the following ingredients until they form a fine powder: two teaspoons of coriander seeds, two teaspoons of mustard seeds, and a few cardamom pods. (You will have to discard the cardamom's outer shells).  I love grinding up spices: all those lovely, aromatic smells. When you reckon the ingredients are ready, mix them in with the other spices.  

Keep the finished curry powder in an air-tight container. It should keep reasonably well. Obviously, if you want to make more of the stuff, you will need to increase the quantities. Half the fun of this sort of thing is to play around with the proportions, to suit your own tastes. Secret recipes and all that.

Juniper

Following on from yesterday's post, I thought, this Friday afternoon, that I would write more about the juniper berry. Juniper is actually an evergreen tree- a conifer in the genus Juniperus in the cypress family Cupressaceae.  The berries are small, wrinkled, dark brown things with a tiny stone in the centre. If crushed, they give off a lovely woody, peppery, pine-like flavour, with a bittersweet taste, and it's this very flavour which is used in the making of London Gin.  Juniper also goes extremely well with game (such as pheasant and venison) and ham.

Here's a simple recipe for Ham with Juniper Berries, otherwise known as Ham in a Piquant Sauce:

Pour six tablespoons of wine vinegar into a small saucepan.  Crush up eight juniper berries and add them to the vinegar.  Chop up four shallots very finely and add to the vinegar and juniper berries.  Turn up the flame and boil away until the vinegar has reduced and there is very little left in the saucepan.

In a larger pan, chuck in a knob of unsalted butter, and stir in some flour; to make a roux.  Once the flour and butter are sufficiently cooked, stir in 300ml of chicken stock and 300ml of white wine to make a smooth, creamy sauce.  Now add the juniper flavoured vinegar mixture, stir and bring to the boil. Crank down the heat and let the sauce simmer for about twenty minutes.

Sieve the sauce to get rid of the bits and pieces, turn down the heat, and carefully stir in 150ml of double cream.  Check the seasoning.

In a flat oven proof dish, arrange some slices of ham.  Cover the ham with the piquant sauce and cover with a lid.  Heat it up in a lowish to moderate oven for about half an hour.

Pheasant Casserole

Pheasant Casserole! I can't think of anything more suitable for a cold November.  I once had it at a Sunday lunch party, served with a jug of foamy Black Velvet- and this worked surprisingly well. If you don't know anyone who shoots, pheasant are amazingly cheap to buy, either from your local butcher or decent supermarket such as Waitrose. I've plucked a few pheasants in my time, and I have to say that I'm not sure that it's worth the hassle, when you can a) get the butcher to pluck them for you (and do a much better job) or b) buy them from the shops, ready plucked, for a few quid.

Here's my family recipe for pheasant casserole (from The ABC of Tried and Tested Recipes), which I've adapted slightly from the original version. Take a large cock pheasant and fry it in butter and oil, until lightly browned. Add a dash of cognac, and flambé it quickly until the flames die down.  Remove the pheasant and put it into a casserole.

In the same pan, fry some chopped bacon, diced celery and carrots cut into batons.  Add two tablespoons of flour, and cook.  After a few minutes pour in half a bottle of red wine (I suggest using a Burgundy or a Rhone) and top up with some chicken stock.

Bring to the boil, and simmer gently so that the alcohol burns off.  Pour it over the pheasant in the casserole and add 50g button mushrooms and 175g button or baby onions.

Cook in a moderate oven for just over an hour.  Pheasant has a tendency to get dry and stringy very quickly, so I've cut down the cooking time.  I'm sure you'll get the drift: you want lots of sauce, and you need to make sure that you don't over cook the pheasant.

When you reckon the pheasant is ready, take the casserole out of the oven and let it cool down.  Lift out the pheasant and carve it up: cut the legs and wings off and carve the breasts.  Place the carved meat in a flat casserole dish with the sliced breasts in the centre, surrounded by the legs and the wings.  Place the vegetables, mushrooms and onions over the pheasant.

Strain off the sauce through a sieve into a small sauce pan-  this will get rid of all the nasty bits and pieces. Add two teaspoons of redcurrant jelly to the sauce and  chuck in some crushed juniper berries. I'm currently crazy about juniper (which, of course, is used to flavour gin).  It has a rich, pine-nut, woodlandly sort of  taste and works beautifully with game.  Check the seasoning. When the sauce is at the right consistency, pour it back over the pheasant.

Serve the casserole with parsnip chips.

Spanish Omelette

Before the days of package holidays and cheap international travel, many people in Britain had never been to places like Italy or Spain.  In Britain, "Risotto" was cooked in a casserole dish in the oven; and to be fair, I suspect this was as much because the proper arborio or carnaroli rice needed to make a proper Italian risotto wasn't available back then. "Spanish Omelette" was cooked with peas, ham and red and green peppers. 

This British version is, no doubt, delicious, but it's not a proper Spanish omelette.  By this I mean an omelette- as cooked by the Spanish, in Spain. Tortilla de Patatas. The genuine article is made from eggs, potatoes and onions. 

Cook 300g of waxy potatoes in salted water.  In a decent non-stick frying pan cook some chopped onion in olive oil.  Drain the potatoes, remove the skins, and then slice them up.  Add the potatoes to the hot pan.  

Whisk up four eggs, and season them with salt and pepper. Pour the egg into the pan, shaking the pan around so that the onion and potatoes begin to set with the egg.  When the egg is almost set (this should only take just under a minute) place the pan under a hot grill.  You want the top of the omelette to take on some colour (i.e. to turn golden brown), but at the same time, you don't want it to burn.

Turn the Spanish Omelette out onto a plate.  The Spanish often serve it cut in to wedges.

Bonfire Night Bullshot

Until recently Hallowe'en wasn't particularly celebrated in the British Isles.  The odd mask might have appeared in the local newsagents, and children at school might have peformed some sort of spooky play at school, but that was about it.  Instead, the emphasis, at this time of year, was on Guy Fawkes Night, and that meant private bonfire parties, fireworks, bangers and "Penny for the Guy" on the Fifth of November.

For the celebrations tonight, why don't you fill up your hip flask with a hot bullshot cocktail? Normally this is drunk cold, on ice; but I see no reason why it shouldn't be served hot (in a similar fashion to mulled wine or cider) and I have a sneaky suspicion that you might find it even better this way.

Empty a tin of beef consommé soup into a large pan. Pour in a large slug of vodka and add a dash of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, a squeeze of lemon juice, a pinch of celery salt, and finish it off by seasoning it with salt and pepper.

Warm up the bullshot on a medium heat, making sure that you don't boil it.  If you've got guests, I would suggest serving it in small coffee cans or cups.  If you're going to the Park, I would urge you to fill up your hip-flask and pass it around.

Poulet Forestière

Here's a recipe for an autumnal chicken and mushroom dish that Bon Viveur rather grandly called Poulet Forestière, published by The Daily Telegraph in 1964.  I make it often.  If the cooking techniques seem slightly weird - that's Fanny Cradock and 1960s cookery for you.  I would probably flambé the chicken and mushrooms in the cognac to burn off the alcohol (rather then add it neat towards the end as in the original recipe) and also sauté the mushrooms separately (rather then cooking them with the chicken, and risking their disintegration).  

Of course, the trouble with this sort of recipe is that it could turn out a trifle bland if you use bog-standard ingredients. To counter-act this, I would suggest that you use meaty, brown field mushrooms (rather than those flavourless button mushroom things), an organic, free-range chicken; be generous on the cognac and make sure that the dish is properly seasoned with a quality sea-salt and lots of chunky black pepper.

Cut up a decent free range chicken, and dredge the pieces in flour, seasoned with sea salt and pepper.  Sauté the pieces in unsalted butter (making sure you don't crowd the pan- otherwise the chicken will boil, rather than fry), sauté some nice field mushrooms, and then simmer both the chicken pieces and the mushrooms in a casserole dish with chicken stock and white wine in a medium oven for about three quarters of an hour.

Arrange the chicken and mushroom in a serving dish, and strain off the cooking liquor into a small pan. Thicken it up with a beurre manié (that just means a flour and butter roux), a tablespoon of cognac, and a teacup of cream.  Reduce slightly until thick, check the seasoning and then pour the sauce back over the chicken and mushrooms.

Chorizo and Butternut Squash with Roasted Tomatoes

As it's Hallowe'en, I've decided to come up with an idea suitable for this most American of festivals. Here in London, it's also suddenly cold and frosty.  I think this recipe would work well. I've gone for butternut squash rather than pumpkin.  It's also simple- and that's no bad thing.

Slice up a red onion and fry it gently in oil and butter.  When the onion's soft, turn down the heat to a low setting and add some chorizo sausage, chopped up into cubes.   The chorizo should take about ten to fifteen minutes to cook.

In the meantime, remove the skin from a butternut squash, and cut it in half.  Chop the squash into small chunks and cook it gently in a separate pan with butter, first seasoning it with a few pinches of nutmeg and some decent black pepper.

Go back to the chorizo and add some crushed garlic.  This will take a few minutes to cook.  Make sure it doesn't burn.

Finally, remove the cooked chorizo, red onions and garlic and place them into a clean pan.  Add the cooked butternut squash, and some baby tomatoes, which you've previously roasted whole in the oven. Warm the pan through, check the seasoning and finish the dish off with some chopped coriander and a squeeze of lemon.

The secret with this recipe is that the three main ingredients are cooked separately in their own juices, and then just gently folded together at the end.  Butternut squash has a delicious, slightly musty, autumnal taste and you don't want that to be overpowered by the spicy paprika flavours going on in the chorizo.

Cardamom

Yesterday, I wrote about a white chocolate mousse flavoured with a hint of cardamom. Did you know that cardamom was a member of the ginger family?  There are two types of cadamom: green cardamom (Elettaria) and black cardamom (Amomum). The type you buy over here in little jars is more likely to be the green variety.  It's quite likely to have come from Sri Lanka too.

Cardamom has a deeply aromatic smell, which reminds me of menthol, or perhaps even mint.  The pods contain seeds, which quickly loose their flavour once the pod's broken apart.  It's also used to cure toothache, digestive disorders and skin conditions. According to Kew Gardens, it's the third most expensive spice in the world.

I like the fact you can use cardamom in both savoury and sweet dishes.  If you're cooking basmati rice, try throwing in a few cardamom pods and a squeeze of lemon juice to give it an extra lift.

White Chocolate Mousse with Cardamom

This is a simple pudding that I enjoyed recently at a dinner party in Northumberland. I'm pretty sure that I've worked out how it was made. The sickly sweetness of the white chocolate is counterbalanced by the sophisticated savoury taste of the cardamom pods.

First, warm up three tablespoons of milk in a small pan. Add some crushed cardamom pods and a bayleaf. The spices will infuse the milk with a subtle flavour. Next, very carefully melt some white chocolate over a bain-marie. If you over-heat the chocolate it will congeal into a strange, almost oily lump. Pour the infused milk through a sieve into the chocolate. Stir very carefully.

Whip up some double cream until thick and carefully fold this into the chocolate mixture.  Finally, fold in some egg whites, which you have previously whipped into stiff peaks. (Incidentally, the secret to getting your egg whites to thicken up is to make sure that your mixing bowl is completely clean and dry and that all traces of oil and fat (i.e egg yolk) are removed).

Serve the mousse in ramekin dishes, and dust with cocoa powder.

Piccalilli

Piccalilli is one of those slightly weird British "delicacies"- if that's the right description. Frankly, the stuff's almost radioactive; it's bright yellow in colour, and potently acidic; utterly out of fashion too, evoking the world of Austerity Britain: all the glamour of Dad's allotment, prize marrow competitions and Brown Windsor soup.

I spent a few minutes researching its history on the internet. Apparently, the first known Piccalilli recipe was by a Mrs Raffald in 1772, when it was also known as English Chow Chow. That sounded about right. It had to be connected in some way with eighteenth century India, and I'm assuming that the rather odd sounding name is just a play on the word, pickle. Anyway, here's The Greasy Spoon's recipe for making your very own piccalilli:

First prepare the vegetables. Break up a small cauliflower into small florets, peel a cucumber, de-seed it, and chop it into small cubes. Finely chop up two onions. Place the vegetables in a bowl, sprinkle them with salt, and leave to stand overnight. The salt will draw out lots of water and help to keep the vegetables crisp. Pour off the water, rinse the vegetables with cold water, and pat them dry.

When you're ready to make the piccalilli, get hold of a large preserving pan and pour in about 500ml of cider vinegar. Add 250g of sugar and the following spices: a dollop of Colman's English mustard, turmeric, ground ginger, ground cumin, mustard seeds, chili flakes, nutmeg, and a pinch of cayenne pepper.  Warm it through until the sugar dissolves, add the vegetables and then bring the mixture to the boil.  Season with chunky black pepper, reduce the heat and simmer away for about ten minutes.  It's unlikely that you'll need to add any more salt, as you've already used it at the beginning of the recipe. The turmeric and mustard will turn the mixture a bright yellow colour.

Finally, thicken up the piccalilli with some cornflour: in a separate bowl add some of the cooking liquid to a tablespoon or so of cornflower and whisk it up until it forms a paste. Reduce the heat and slowly mix this paste into the piccalilli. Simmer for a further five minutes (until the cornflour is cooked properly) and then decant into sterilised jars. It will need to mature in a dark cupboard for about a month before use. Excellent with cold beef and oily fish such as mackerel and herring.

The Fabulous Snaffles Mousse

I've recently been reading up on an old 70's cult favourite, the Snaffles Mousse. For those in the know, Snaffles was a fashionable basement restaurant in Dublin and the Snaffles Mousse was the signature dish of its proprietor, Nicholas Tinné. The hilarious thing about Snaffles Mousse is that it's just a mixture of Philadelphia cheese and Campbell's consommé soup- but it tastes like a sophisticated and creamy smoked fish mousse. Well, Up to a point, Lord Copper.

There's also quite a bit about it on the internet, including a new interpretation by none other than Simon Hopkinson. Simon Hopkinson (co-author of The Prawn Cocktail Years) is currently my number one culinary hero and what he says and does, in my eyes can do no wrong.

Here's my take on the fabulous Snaffles Mousse. It's based on Nicholas Tinné's original recipe (as published in The Good Food Guide Dinner Party Book (published 1971), but includes Simon Hopkinson's refinements and if I may make so bold Master Copperfield, one or two of my own tweaks as well:

Take a leaf of gelatine and soak it in cold water until it's soft. Open up a tin of beef consommé soup (I fear Campbell's is no longer with us in Perfidious Albion, so use Baxter's) and heat up about two tablespoons of the stuff in a small pan.

Once the consommé is hot (but not boiling), lift the gelatine out of the water, give it a squeeze to get rid of the excess water and chuck it into the hot consommé. Swirl it together to melt the gelatine and set aside to cool down.

Pour the remaining consommé into a liquidizer and add 300g (that's a pack!) of Extra Light Philadelphia cheese, two teaspoons of curry paste, a crushed garlic clove, the juice of a lemon and the remaining hot consommé/gelatine mix. I used two teaspoons of Patak's Madras paste. It was far too strong. Simon Hopkinson used Patak's Tikka paste which should be milder, but I would suggest that you go easy on the curry paste- you are not making a curry mousse, rather a mousse with a hint of curry, if you get my drift.

Check the seasoning and then whizz it all together until smooth. The longer you blitz it, the smoother it will be. Strain it through a sieve. This will help to get rid of the uncooked bits from the curry paste. Pour it into a bowl and then whisk it like mad, and by hand, until frothy. This will help to lighten it up.

Pour it into ramekin dishes and bung it in the 'fridge. Once it has set, take it out, and cover the top with a layer of prawns. Finish the dish off with a layer of mock caviar. I've ditched the standard over-salty stuff and now use Onuga herring roe. This has a subtle, delicious and smoky taste and I would throughly recommend it.

As a further refinement, I'm interested in using Campbell's chicken consommé (rather than beef)- I have a hunch that this would make an even lighter, creamier mousse; but I seem to remember hearing that Campbells' is no longer available over here. If any reader can enlighten me on this one, I would be most grateful.

Belgian Blues...

The first thing you notice about Belgium is the driving. It's utterly insane. I'm not being unfair, because I liked Belgium, especially the food- which was superb. But by God, once you cross the border you take your life into your hands.

The autoroutes are peppered with deep, crater-like pot-holes and weed-like triffids. Not much fun when you hit them at 120k an hour- which is the sort of speed most Belgian drivers seem to think is on the slow side. Secondly, the roads are full of rickety white vans, driven by intense, long-haired, Goth-like individuals- meandering at speed from one lane to the other. You'll see lots of these in your rear-view mirror- especially as they're about to ram you from the derrière. Enough...I liked the place.

The good news is that the food is universally excellent in Belgium. I've even heard it said that the food in Belgium is better than in France. Certainly, at the various low-key places we stopped off at, the food was fab.

We found a simple cafe in the square at Ypres- opposite the old Cloth Hall. This famous Medieval building was almost completely destroyed in the First World War, and then rebuilt in the 1920's' though, apparently, was only completed in the 1960's.

We ordered the national dish: moules, pommes frittes, and mayonnaise. I was interested to see that the Belgians added chopped leeks, chopped celery, and carrots (cut into tiny julienne) to their liquor. Although ours was based on a dry white wine, I gather they also use Belgian beer as a substitute.

Belgian beer is one of the reasons to visit Belgium. It's lovely stuff; and oh so superior to that fizzy water they call "beer' in the U S of A. Trappist beers are of interest. For a beer to qualify for this category, the entire production process must be carried out by, or supervised by, Trappist monks on the site of a monastery. Only seven monasteries currently meet this qualification, six of which are in Belgium and one in the Netherlands. The current Trappist producers are Achel, Chimay, Koningshoeven (the Netherlands), Orval, Rochefort, Westmalle, and Westvleteren.

There's a particularly good wikipedia article on the subject, which I would recommend that you have a look at, if you've got the time and inclination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_beer

I'm finishing up with a bonus photograph of the Battlefield of Waterloo. I took this shot from what would have been Napoleon's lines- looking directly towards La Haye Sainte Farm House (that's the small white blob in the middle). The mound on the left is the Waterloo Memorial. The place, although fascinating, was a terrifying tourist trap. The local restaurant sold Burger a la Ney, Omelet Wellington, and Steak Hougoumount. You have been warned...

Germany Calling!

Baden-Baden turned out to be a German version of Bath, or Cheltenham- an elegant, monied kinda town, where the Herrenvolk go on holiday to have sterilised mineral waters (and other similar delights) shot up their backsides. I liked the place. In such a refined environment, we were expecting lighter foods: carrot juices, infusions, Ryvita bread- that sort of thing. The reality was entirely different.

First stop was at a Lowenbrau biergarten. Here, burly waiters in Lederhosen brought vast plates of sauerkraut, sausages, pasta (schupfnudein), pork knuckle, bread dumplings (knodel) and the like. Judging by the Gothic proportions of most of our fellow diners' stomachs (their toes must be a distant memory), helpings of this enormity are probably de rigeur in the Fatherland.

I ordered a beer. This arrived in a flagon about three feet high (I kid thee not) and I could barely lift the blasted thing off the table. For breakfast we had hearty heaps of bratwurst, smoked salmon, goat's cheese, black pudding, smoked meats and black bread.

It's not that the food is particularly bad in Germany; it's not. It's just that after a few days of knodel, Black Forest Gateau, stomach slapping and beer burping, you start to dream longingly of the lighter and more refined food cooked by the French.

Heidelberg had a grungier atmosphere to Baden-Baden and is bathed in a rather beautiful, glowing, reddish light. A distinguished university town, it was one one of the few German cities to have survived intact after the Second World War. It's also home to the slightly sinister duelling fraternities, for which I have a burgeoning fascination. The students still wear the uniform of cap, breeches, and coloured sash.

The town is overlooked by the ruins of Heidelberg Castle. In the cellars is the enormous 18th century tun- or vast barrel (Das Grosse Fass) constructed by the Prince Elector Karl Theodor to hold fifty-eight thousand gallons of wine. The tun was looked after by one lucky Tyrolean midget called Perkeo.

There are some elegant food shops in Heidelberg selling biscuits, gingerbread, cake, sweets and other goodies. Bread is good in Deutschland. Particularly delicious were the Apfelchips- presumably apples sliced very thinly, dried and then deep-fried, with a sprinkling of sugar.

On The Greasy Spoon tomorrow: the paradox of Belgium. Is Belgian food better than French food? We take our lives in our hands by driving to Waterloo...

Alsace Lorraine, Part Two

Next stop was the spooky Chateau de Jaulny in Lorraine. This unfashionable part of North Eastern France is remote, and off the tourist track- which being an admitted "contrarian" was one of the reasons for going there in the first place. The countryside is beautiful, if slightly desolate, and relatively unpopulated; with the lovely, fast, empty French roads surrounded by deep, dark forests, and undulating hills. Perfect werewolf country.

Jaulny stands silhouetted on a ridge and has a whiff of Transylvania about it. The chateau may have once been the residence of Joan of Arc.

Madame was charming, and explained that the stuffed wolf's head mounted on the stone wall in the Hall (which would have done Hammer proud) had been shot by one her ancestors at beginning of the last century. Wolves, apparently have now been re-introduced into France, and are now making their way back to Lorraine. After two unsettling nights (is Jaulny haunted?), we crossed the Vosges mountains into Alsace.

Alsace is a fascinating part of France. Until the end of the First World War it was part of Germany, though today it is a curious hybrid- the look is decidedly German, though the feel of the place is French. As soon as you leave Lorraine, things start getting Germanic: chalets appear; churches start aquiring onion domes, you start to get towns ending in "burg", and "heim"; supermarkets sell canned goat cheese terrine, the hills are alive with the sound of. And this applies to the food, too. If you're going to enjoy Alsatian food, the charming town of Colmar is probably a good place to do it.

Colmar is a Medieval huddle of half-timbered and shuttered houses, cobbled streets, winstraubs and tasty, buxom waitresses in the traditional dirnl. Lots of gingerbread, too.

One of the most delicious Alsatian specialities is the tarte aux flambee. This is similar to pizza, but has a thinner, more delicate crust. The traditional tarte has onion and smoked pork; though in a smallish restaurant opposite the kofihaus, The Girl had a superb asperges blanc tarte, washed down with a carafe of the excellent Alsatian wine.

Another Alsatian dish is sauerkraut, or charcoute. Pickled cabbage is stewed gently for three hours, often with a splash of Reisling at the end of the cooking period, and then served with sausages, bacon, and smoked pork.

Before we left Colmar for The Fatherland itself, I had another chance to sample the delights of the tete de veau. Well, I had to, didn't I? This one was well-prepared, with the chunks of pink coloured simmered meat (and the accompanying gobbets of brains and fat) arranged in an earthenware pot. With the viniagrette came a mayonnaise and caper sauce.

Alsace Lorraine, Part One

Camp Followers of The Greasy Spoon will have noticed that Yours Truly has been away for the last few weeks. I'm not especially apologetic, as The Girl and I have just spent the first half of August on a driving holiday around North Eastern France (destination Alsace Lorraine), Belgium, Luxembourg and the western reaches of Baden-Wurttemberg, which of course, as you all know, is in sunny Deutschland.

One of the raison d'etres of the holiday was the food. I was curious about the cuisine of Alsace- which has a fantastic reputation, and is partly Germanic, partly French (Alsace and large parts of Lorraine were annexed by the newly created German Empire after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870). It didn't fail to disappoint. But more of that later.

First stop was at a chateau close to the Somme battlefield, near Arras. Lovely house, but an immensely sad place, being as it was only a few kilometres from the former Front Line. After all these years, the ghosts of those desperate battles of the summer of 1916 still linger on. The breakfast table was graced by a glass bottle of pure, filtered apple juice, made by the local villagers. Apples, and that means cider too, are a feature of this area, which slightly surprised me, thinking as I did that this sort of stuff was more commonly found in Normandy.

We had a fantastic dinner at a low-key restaurant, La Cote d'Agneau, in the small town of Doullens. Service was pretty dopey, but By Gum, the food was good: lovely, intense flavours- a fabulous foie gras terrine, and rich, roasted tomatoes left to stew on the vine.

I noticed that the French tend to flavour their food far more than we do in England; they're generous with their salt and pepper; and I suppose that this is one of the reasons why they tend not to have salt and pepper pots on the table. This is a tip we can easily copy in our own kitchens.

Despite current opinion, I still reckon that French food is generally far superior to British food. Here in London, we've got lots of excellent (and expensive) restuarants patronised by the reasonably affluent, and well-off; but if you drive out to the English countryside, it can be a very different story. In France, the general attitude is different. You can eat in some dusty restaurant in a deserted ghost-town of a village, and the food, although not necessarily superb, will still, generally, be pretty darn good. Shops sell local produce of a superior quality (often organic), and the standard offered by supermarket shines in comparison to the unimaginative, chemical blandness of British supermarkets.

After a night of sin at the ultra haut bourgeois Chateau d'Etoges (serried ranks of shiny cars, pushy wine-waiters, a superb dinner, and a much needed bottle of the excellent local Borel-Lucas champagne) we sped on to Epernay, where we shacked up at the Pierson Whittaker Champagne House.

The Champagne industry is centred on the two towns of Rheims and Epernay. We toured the celllars of the House of Tattinger, founded relatively recently in 1932. They were extraordinary. The offices of Tattinger are on the outskirts of Rheims and above ground are both modernist, and extremely slick. But directly underneath this temple of corporate efficiency is a labyrinth of ancient monastic cellars, stocked with thousands of bottles of maturing champagne. Incidentally, in case you're wondering, Champagne is generally cheaper in the local supermarkets of the Rheims area- and there are definitely some bargains to be had out there. However, in the rest of France, the price of champagne is almost up to UK levels- and that means it's currently pretty expensive.

Tomorrow, in the next exciting installment of The Greasy Spoon: werewolf country, the delights of Colmar, and the gothic horror of German "cuisine"...

Salad Niçoise

It's July, it's holiday time, and I'm thinking "South of France". What better than a Salad Niçoise? By the way, Niçoise, if you've ever wondered, means 'from Nice".

Like other famous dishes, there's lots of different ways out there to make this salad; and as usual, the way that you make it, is better than the way your neighbour makes it.

I reckon that the classic Salad Nicoise has the following ingredients: lettuce, tinned tuna fish, cooked green beans, black olives, tomatoes, baby new potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, and just possibly capers. The whole shooting match is then tossed in a garlicky French dressing. I make sure that the beans are crunchy, and slightly undercooked, and the so-called "hard" boiled eggs have a soft yellow yolk.

I'm currently rather keen on a rather nifty new way of serving this dish. Instead of mixing it all together in a salad bowl, try arranging the ingredients separately on a long white serving plate (the sort of plate you would serve a salmon on). You can then either dress the thing with the viniagrette, or as I do, place a dollop of mayonnaise at the end of the dish. An aioli (ie garlic mayonnaise) would work beautifully here.

This method looks stunning visually, and picky guests (lots of them around these days, I'm afraid) have the choice of avoiding the anchovies or the capers, or anything else they don't like the look of. Good idea, what?

Perfect Fried Eggs

I realise that I haven't written anything on The Greasy Spoon for some time. Apologies- my trusty mac needed urgent repair and, darn it, that took over a week. Anyway, I'm back now with a post about the perfect fried egg.

I saw Gary Rhodes talking about this on televison a few days ago. Gary Rhodes is one of the few television chefs I admire: his technique is, of course, top notch, and I like the way (apart from a dubious appearance on that dancing programme) he hasn't sold out to the celeb culture, in the manner of Blanc, Ramsay et al.

In a hot non-stick pan, melt a knob of unsalted butter. Crack the eggs onto a plate, and then slide them carefully into the hot butter. If you egg is fresh, the egg white will stay firm. If your egg is stale, the white will become watery, and spread out all over the place. Ideally, your eggs will be fresh.

Season them with salt and pepper and cook them gently on a low heat, letting the egg white bubble up around the yolk. Baste the eggs with the hot butter. That's it. I like my egg yolk to be runny- though of course, as ever, it's all a matter of personal taste, isn't it?

Taste the Mystery of the Orient...

A few weeks ago- purely in the interests of nostalgic experimentation, you understand- I made myself a Vesta curry. Those of you of a certain age should know all about this: the Vesta range offered a tantalising choice, which included "indian" curry, chow mein, and I think, "Spanish" paella. Inside the brightly coloured boxes, which conjured up images of sophisticated exotica, were sachets of dried noodles, dehydrayted bits of this and that, and- oh joy to behold- soy sauce, or some sort of mango chutney, thrown in as an extra goodie.

Now, the amazing thing, is that Vesta are still in business and their product, more or less, still looks like it did thirty years ago. And it tastes the same, too. I followed the instructions down to the letter; adding the powder to a saucepan, topping it up with cold water, and then simmering it gently for- I think- fifteen minutes, twenty six and a half seconds. The result was, as Her Majesty might have said, "surprising": a watery, saline mess, studded with dried-up, bullet-like peas suffering from an identity crisis; the sheer horror of it all (almost as bad as being a participant in an Hieronymus Bosch tableau vivant) still lingering in my befuddled and confused brain to this day.

Have tastes changed that much over the years? I suppose that back in the 1970's, clever admen could evoke the sophistication of places like Spain and India, which, in those far off halycon days, were beyond the reach of ordinary people, more used to taking a boat out on the Broads for their summer holidays.

They used the same technique to sell the Mastermind board game (Game of the Year 1972), which had pictured on its box a suave, mysterious, and bearded Man of Taste; his dead-sexy Hong Konganese side-kick (young enough to have been his grand-daughter) standing alluringly behind the smoked glass coffee table. Most disappointingly to my ten year old mind (reared on a television diet of The New Avengers and The Persuaders), the game turned out to be just a small, grey plastic board, with a collection of brightly coloured plastic pegs which soon got gobbled up by my mother's frantic hoovering.

I'm glad to say the advertising agencies are still at it today: just remember, that charming little jar of Mrs Bridge's Home-Cooked Farmhouse Surprise, was probably manufactured- and manufactured is the right word here- in some Kafkaesque unit in the Slough Trading Estate. On a similar tack, I've often wondered if 'Free Range Eggs' really do mean free range. That could be a good idea for a future post. So, until then my amigos, adios...