The Vicar’s Wife’s Cook Book. Elisa Beynon
it in there for 2½ hours or until the meat is tender. If the juices look too liquidy when you take it out of the oven, you can put the casserole on a high heat on the hob and let the stew bubble away, uncovered, for a few minutes. Test for seasoning, then serve in bowls with the rarebit toasts floating on top.
These aren’t real rarebits, but rather something far simpler. But they do the trick.
4 tablespoons grated cheese (Cheddar, Lancashire or Wensleydale)
2 teaspoons wholegrain mustard
1 egg, beaten
4 thick slices of good-quality bread (white or brown is fine)
Preheat the grill to high a few minutes before you are ready to eat. Mix the cheese, mustard and beaten egg together in a bowl. Put the slices of bread onto the rack of the grill pan and toast on both sides. Remove and spread each one with some of the cheesy egg mixture. Put the toasts back under the grill until bubbling and brown in places. Cut the toasts in half and float them on top of the stew.
When I was a child, Sunday lunch always meant rice pudding, so I connect it with sitting in a warm kitchen, feeling snug and cared for. Rice pudding is the opposite of flashy, ‘Look at me, aren’t I gorgeous?’ food: it merely exists to soothe. I added some good lemon curd to mine. My guests said it tasted very special and had I gone to lots of effort? My response, in one word, was, ‘No’.
75g short-grain pudding rice
600ml full-fat milk
150ml single cream (naughty, I know, but just use all milk if you want to lower the fat content)
2 tablespoons caster sugar
finely grated zest of 2 lemons
6 tablespoons lemon curd (homemade or good-quality bought stuff)
Put the rice, milk, cream, sugar and lemon zest into a 1.2 litre shallow ovenproof dish and put it in the oven at 150°C/Gas Mark 2 for 1¼ hours, stirring in the skin every 30 minutes. When you remove it from the oven it won’t look very thick. Stir in the lemon curd and it will miraculously thicken, with a little more sugar to taste if you wish. If there’s any left, which I very much doubt, it would also be rather nice cold.
Tradition with a twist
Given a topside of beef my intention is to go down the traditional route with Yorkshire pudding and the works. However, on one occasion I ran short on time and so we had to make do without the puds. We ended up staying at the table long after the children had left it to go elsewhere to play, while my brother-in-law shared with us his dad’s favourite way of ensuring perfect potatoes. Apparently, Daddy Mackenzie would parboil them at coffee time; drain them; distress them lightly and then pop them in boiling hot fat in a roasting tray in the oven. And then – and here’s the surprising bit – he’d take them out again, leave them on the side to cool down in the fat and then put them back in the oven for 45 minutes as lunchtime approached. The brother-in-law said this embossed the potatoes with a gooey, toffee-like colour and sweetness. Maybe we should all give the ‘Mackenzie Method’ a try and compare notes.
TWO CABBAGES WITH APPLE AND RED ONION
1.2kg topside of beef
1 teaspoon mustard powder
salt and pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
For the gravy:
the meat juices
1 tablespoon flour
120ml red wine
350ml beef stock (fresh, or made from a good-quality liquid bouillon)
salt and pepper
I didn’t muck about much with the beef. I just rubbed the mustard powder over the outside of the joint and seasoned it. Then I poured the oil into a roasting tin, heated it on the hob and seared the beef in the hot fat until it was nicely browned all over. It then went in a hot oven preheated to 250°C/Gas Mark 9 for 15 minutes. After that I turned it down to 180°C/Gas Mark 4, cooking it for 18 minutes per 500g. At the end of the cooking time I took it out of the oven and left it in a warm place, covered in foil, to give it a good rest. It was brown at the ends (so suitable for the children) and pink to red in the middle (perfect for us adults).
Whilst the meat was resting, I made the gravy. To be honest, I find it difficult to give a recipe for this as I kind of feel my way in gravy-making; I believe that making gravy is a great way to learn how to cook instinctively. If you are nervous about making it on the stove right before you are ready to serve and while guests may well be hovering, take the meat out of its baking tray 20 minutes or so before the end of its cooking time, and return it to the oven in a clean tray, as most of the meat juices and stickiness will already be in the original tin. Get on with making the gravy using the roasting tin of juices.
How you make your gravy is up to you: you could just add some wine to the meat juices to make a little jus (don’t you just hate that word?), but I opted to go down a more old-fashioned route: in other words, I used flour. If this is how you want to do it, remove the meat from the original tin (to rest or to return to the oven) and put this tin, containing all the meat juices, on the hob and stir in the plain flour (it will look a bit gluey when you do this). Add the red wine, stirring constantly, and then the beef stock. (I used a beef liquid bouillon mixed with the cooking water from the vegetables.) Add salt and pepper and let it bubble away and reduce. Keep tasting it and add more stock or wine, if you think it needs it. When it is ready, pour it in a pan, ready to serve or reheat later. If you are making it a little in advance, add any extra meat juices from the new baking tin when you reheat