Cooking

Anne – a good cook - had been looking at apple tarts in famous French chef and restaurateur Joel Robuchon’s book. I picked it up and have been flicking through. It’s full of mouth-watering recipes. I had used and adapted several of them. A favourite was roast lamb with a red pepper, garlic, olive oil and breadcrumb crust. I’ve had guests drooling over that one.

One of my regrets is that I’d hoped to develop my culinary skills in my retirement years. For over a year now I’ve not trusted my strength enough to put a casserole in to the oven, let alone get it out. Last time I made pancakes I ran out of steam stirring the mixture and had to ask Anne to cook them.

I came late to this interest. When I finished varsity I’d flatted with two other ex-students. We took it in weekly turns to do the cooking. One of them Bob and I loved our roast meat. So I learnt to roast. But when I got married my first wife and I both accepted customary role models. She did the cooking. I washed the dishes. Except in the weekend, when I often made breakfast - scrambled eggs, cheese toasties, pancakes, sausages.

When I started living with Anne she had a wider range of food and I became interested in dabbling in the kitchen. She introduced me to garlic and olives. That dabbling turned to usage. I began to pickle onions. I chanced a casserole. One wet Saturday I said to her eldest boy what pudding would he like. ‘Lemon meringue pie.’ That was a challenge. I cheated in that I did not make the pastry. I learnt a valuable lesson, make sure the ingredients and implements are available before you begin.

On the Monday back at work a colleague asked what had I done over the weekend. ‘Made a lemon meringue pie’ I said. ‘Can’t Anne cook’ he replied assuming that would be the only reason I would descend to such a menial occupation. After all real men only cook on the barbecue.

When I’ve been at home as a consultant we took a week and week about. For a while Anne was going off to work so I did most of the cooking. Then when I was director of the Teachers Council I was too exhausted at the end of the day to do much so she took over the activity. I’m a meat man. I love my roasts so until recently I’ve cooked most of them since we’ve been together. Pork cooked in milk proved a discovery. Winter casseroles became a specialty, cooked in wine or beer. Steak and kidney made with a dark beer is superb.

Cooking for and eating with friends is a great act of fellowship. I recall one particular meal. We couldn’t go to friend Rae’s 65th birthday party. Our present a few day's later was to cook a meal from the Loire valley recipe book she’d given us after visiting that area. We did buy the entrée, a home-made pate. For the main course I cooked pheasant. Anne did the dessert, an apple tart from the same recipe book.

I hadn’t eaten pheasant since I was a boy when Uncle Charlie gave Mum an occasional one during the shooting season. She plucked and dressed the bird – such impressive plumage. However, I bought a frozen one from the butcher.

I began by stir-frying in a small amount of butter medium-sized chunks of smoked bacon with sliced red cabbage leaves (Savoy would do equally well). At Anne’s suggestion I add a few crushed juniper berries. I worried about the mixture sticking so I added a slosh of white wine but I don’t think I needed to, the cabbage sweated and the bacon’s fat provided a little liquid. When that dish was cooked I set it aside.

I then laid strips of streaky bacon over the bird and cooked it in a large baking dish in a high temperature oven. The book said 220 but I did it at 200; even then the bacon crisped considerably. After half an hour I placed the cabbage and bacon mix around the pheasant returning it to the oven for a further half hour. I was surprised how little fat emerged from the bird even though it was farm reared.

Only after it had been placed back in the oven did I think of looking at Elizabeth David. Her recipe for pheasant is very similar though she said that juniper berries are a must. She also uses white wine. Another idea she put forward was that beef stock and kirsch could replace the white wine. Her suggestion of adding pork sausages to the mixture opened up further possibilities, pheasants being expensive as well as hard to get. Mashed garlic spuds with chopped parsley completed the course.

(A few weeks later Anne did cook pork sausages with cabbage and bacon – it proved a very tasty dish).