The New English Kitchen: Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat. Rose Prince
point. Put the fingers of bread in a dish and pour over the milk. Lift them out, put them into 4 serving bowls and pour over the sauce – you can dip them in the sauce instead but you will have to work fast. Serve immediately, with whipped cream.
winter charlotte with rhubarb and raspberries
For charlottes, buttered day-old bread is placed on top of the fruit and the pudding is baked. Apples and berries make good charlottes, and it is even possible to make a savoury charlotte with chicory, apple and spices that have been slowly cooked until sweet.
Here is a baked winter version of summer pudding, filled with forced rhubarb and frozen raspberries.
Serves 6
about 8 slices of day-old white bread, crusts removed (reserve
them for breadcrumbs, if you like – see here)
softened unsalted butter
ground cinnamon
700g/11/2lb forced rhubarb, cut into 2cm/3/4 inch lengths
(see here)
400g/14oz frozen raspberries
golden caster sugar
Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6. Butter the bread slices and sprinkle with a little cinnamon. Cut each slice into quarters, then into 8 small triangles.
Put the rhubarb and raspberries into a pan, cover and cook over a low heat until the rhubarb is just soft. Add enough sugar to sweeten to your taste, then pour into a shallow ovenproof dish. Arrange the triangles of bread on top, buttered-side up, working in a fish-scale pattern. Bake the charlotte for about half an hour, until the surface of the bread is golden brown. Remove from the oven and sprinkle caster sugar on top. Serve with fresh custard (see here) or thick double cream.
brioche and fig pudding
For the last 15 years it has been easy to buy French-style breads in almost every town. Purists will quibble at their quality, but they have the slight sourness, crust and tearable dough that make French breads so wonderful. Next to arrive has been brioche – and no, it’s not as good as the artisan-style buttery bread whose fragrance pours out of pâtisseries across the Channel, but it’s not bad either. Our local late-night shop always sells brioche loaves wrapped in plastic, which keep for a suspiciously long time. They are too claggy to eat fresh but make terrific emergency puddings.
Serves 4
10 slices of brioche
5 ready-to-eat dried figs, sliced
4 egg yolks
300ml/1/2 pint whole milk
125ml/4fl oz double cream
1 tablespoon golden caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
a pinch of grated nutmeg
caster sugar for dusting
Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5. Toast the brioche slices in a dry frying pan over a medium heat; they burn very easily, so be careful. Cut the slices into triangles and arrange them in overlapping layers in an ovenproof dish, points/corners up. Slot a slice of fig between each one.
Whisk the egg yolks into the milk and add the cream, sugar and vanilla. Put in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring, but do not let it boil. As soon as it thickens slightly, pour it over the brioche and figs and scatter a pinch of nutmeg on to the surface. Bake the pudding for 20–30 minutes, until golden on top and just set. Dust with caster sugar and serve with cream.
alternative flours
Flour made from wheat is clearly the most versatile, and the keeping qualities gluten gives to bread are a real advantage, as the previous recipes show. But there are alternative flours made from vegetables and nuts that are well worth discovering. Finding a bag of gram flour in an Asian shop in Tooting Bec was the beginning of a new friendship with flour in savoury cooking for me, and my favourite recipe for orange cake would be no good without potato flour.
gram flour
Gram flour is milled from dried chick peas and is a light, gentle-flavoured flour with a smooth texture. It is used extensively in Indian cooking, in fritters or to coat vegetables for frying.
gram coating for poultry, game and fish
A practical way to season poultry and game or whole fish like sole and trout before you fry it. Quicker than breadcrumbing, it also absorbs the sometimes unpleasant fat on poultry skin that spits as it cooks.
gram flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons dried oregano
freshly ground black pepper
Scatter gram flour on to a dinner plate in a layer 5 mm/1/4 inch deep. Mix in the salt and oregano and grind over some black pepper. Roll the meat or fish in the mixture and cook.
gram and cheddar shortbreads
Makes 12–16 (enough to serve 4 people with drinks)
90g/3oz gram flour, sifted
75g/21/2oz very mature farmhouse Cheddar cheese, roughly grated
75g/21/2oz chilled unsalted butter, cut into cubes
a large pinch of cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
a pinch of freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon very cold water
Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5. Put the flour, cheese, butter, cayenne and seasoning into a food processor and whiz until the mixture has a breadcrumb consistency. Add the water and whiz again. As soon as the crumbs begin to form a dough, tip them on to a board and knead together until smooth. Work quickly; the mixture should not become greasy.
Shape the dough into a cylinder and cut it into 1cm thick slices. Put them 2cm/3/4 inch apart on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment or greaseproof paper. Place in the fridge for 20 minutes, then bake for 15 minutes, until the shortbreads are slightly puffed, their edges lightly brown.
kitchen note
To decorate and add flavour, roll the cylinder of dough in chopped pistachio nuts, or scatter toasted black cumin seeds or flaked almonds on to the sliced biscuits before baking.
potato flour
In Italy, potato flour is added to sweet cakes with ground nuts, giving them an almost impossible lightness and delicious dry crumb. It is also used to coat pork before frying. Also known as fécule, potato flour is available from Italian stores and wholefood shops. It is very white, and squeaks when rubbed between your fingers.
almond and orange cake
Based on Anna del Conte’s recipe in her book, Secrets of an Italian Kitchen (Bantam Press, 1989), this is a subtle cake to eat after a meal with a little crème fraîche.
150g/5oz blanched almonds, whole or flaked
3 eggs, separated