Herbs & Spices

The affinity between potatoes and parsley is usually demonstrated by tossing new potatoes in butter and the chopped herb. I like to take it one step further and put the parsley in a soft, almost sloppy purée of potatoes. It excels as a side dish for white fish.

Peppers, the red, collapsed horns in particular, are heavily linked with Hungary and its rust-colored stews. The Hungarians make ground paprika from them too, which has become their most famous culinary export. Despite their South American origins, Hungary is where I have found the most dazzling displays of peppers in the markets. Two minutes, even less, from the river and the Szabadsag Bridge, Budapest’s market stalls glow deep rust and gold with tins of paprika and strings of dried mahogany chiles. I love the crumbling wooden stalls of scarlet-capped mushrooms with their stray pieces of iridescent moss, wicker baskets of black sloes, and small sacks of red berries, and the apparently precarious piles of peppers, Christmas red, clean white, and burnt orange turning scarlet. The long peppers that curl back on themselves have the intrigue of Aladdin’s lamp but are awkward in the kitchen, tending to tip their stuffing out into the baking pan. You can roast them, though, with olive oil and lots of salt, and eat them with sesame bread torn into chunks. The most useful, called Gypsy and the size of a fat rodent, are perfect for stuffing: with spinach and cream; translucent onions, capers, parsley, and garlic; cracked wheat, green olives, and toasted pine nuts; ground lamb and cumin. But mostly they are baked with a shake of the olive oil bottle and a grinding of salt until they collapse, wrinkle, and melt into silken strips. You’ll need bread then, in fat, rough chunks, and maybe a glass of bright beer. From August to the close of the year is when the market has the most from which to choose. After that the peppers come dried, in long strings of tobacco, madder, and soot. They shouldn’t be despised. By then the stalls are mostly piled with roots and cabbages, endless sausages, and wholesomely fatty pork. The paprika stalls, stacked with red and gold tins, are kitsch in a Hansel and Gretel way, their shelves covered in fastidiously ironed lace, like the old women who run them. Gulyas, or goulash, means “cowboy” and was traditionally cooked over an open fire. My paprika-scented pork stew—you could use beef-departs not too radically from the classical dish. I include dried mushrooms and cook it in a low oven, giving it a particularly deep, smoky flavor.

My version of classic Italian baked peppers, but without the anchovies and with a last-minute stirring in of basil. There are some gorgeous flavors here, especially when the tomato juices mingle with the basil oil.

It’s mid-June and I have returned home with four lamb steaks. It’s the sort of thing I buy when my mind is elsewhere. I think I was after a “nothing-special” lunch of ease and straightforwardness, yet once the steaks and their fine frame of white fat had been brushed with olive oil and the leaves and flowers of thyme, and were sizzling on the blackened garden grill, I realized I had an extraordinary treat on my hands. Instead of a mound of petits pois at the lamb’s side, I blitzed the peas to a smooth purée with mint and melted butter.

Midsummer is a time of extraordinary activity in my garden. Every day brings with it a new shoot, a newly opened rose, a froth of lettuce seedlings. At this point I make a soup of the older lettuces and peas, and yet there is no reason why I shouldn’t make it throughout the year with frozen peas and produce-market lettuce.

Among the charcoal and garlic of midsummer’s more robust cooking, a quiet salad of palest green can come as a breath of calm. Last June, as thousands joined hands around Stonehenge in celebration of the summer solstice, I put together a salad of cool notes: mint, fava beans, and young peas—a bowl of appropriate gentility and quiet harmony.

At the top of the garden, past the sunny stone terrace, the little beds of vegetables and the unruly shrubs, is a thicket, less than ten feet (three meters) deep but just enough to give the whole garden an unkempt, relaxed feel. Here lie the compost bins with their lids of rotting carpet, green plastic bags of decaying leaf mold, and four small trees of damson, hazel, mirabelle, and a King James mulberry—the latter being a “guardian” tree planted in the northernmost corner to protect the garden from the north wind. In between grow drifts of snowdrops, wild garlic sent by a friend from Cornwall, and fraises de bois, with which this garden is littered, and whose flowers twinkle like tiny stars in spring. The work in this part of the garden is mostly done in winter, if only because the leaflessness of the trees makes it possible to see what you are doing. It is always dark and cold here, and damp, too. I come in from turning the compost or cutting hazel twigs with my feet like ice, my fingers numb. Invariably it’s a Saturday, when I have been early to The Ginger Pig for my sausages. I leave them to bake with parsnips and stock. A slow bowl of food, which often sits patiently until I come in, too chilled to the bone to do anything but eat.

The kormas of India, serene, rich, silken, have much in them that works with the sweetness of the parsnip—cream, yogurt, nuts, sweet spices. The Mughal emperors who originally feasted on such mildy spiced and lavishly finished recipes may not have approved of my introduction of common roots but the idea works well enough. Despite instructions the length of a short story, I can have this recipe on the table within an hour. For those who like their Indian food on the temperate side.

Eventually, possibly toward the end of your meal, you reach the point where the salty, herbal juices from the meat mingle with the sweet creaminess of those from the parsnips, a moment of intense pleasure. While winter was in its death throes, and the first white narcissi were starting to peak through the damp earth, I produced this for Sunday lunch with a leg of lamb spiked with tough old rosemary twigs. We passed round a bowl of winter chicory and watercress for everyone to take handfuls with which to clean the mixture of juices from their plates.

The tools for my winter gardening sessions tend to lie on the kitchen floor from one week to the next: the pruning knife, my leather-handled pruning shears, the largest of the two spades, the rake. They serve as a reminder that even though the garden may look crisp and neat from the window, there is still work to be done. It is during these cold, gray-sky days that I sometimes feel as if I live on soup. Roots—fat carrots, artichokes, and woody parsnips— are part of the lineup, along with onions and the occasional potato. I take much pleasure in the way something can be both earthy and velvety at the same time. Rather like my gardening gloves.

A poaching broth for fish, a chicken, or a lumbering piece of ham is all the more interesting for the inclusion of a leek or two. They soften the stock, bringing the flavors of onion, carrot, and herbs together. The ham recipe here is my standard “food for a crowd.” Poached ham slices neatly, even when it falls off the knife in chunks, and can be kept waiting patiently in its own stock without coming to any harm. I often serve it with creamed spinach. I include it here partly to show ham’s affinity with parsnips and also because it’s a useful recipe and I wanted to get it in somewhere. This seemed as good a place as anywhere. I usually buy a ready-tied piece of boneless ham from the butcher for this. It needs no soaking, but will benefit from being brought to a boil in water, drained, and then rinsed before being cooked in the apple juice.

The thyme is essential here, adding an important herbal note to the general sugar-fest. You need something savory alongside, and nothing works quite so well as gloriously rare roast beef. Sausages come a close second.

These are the onions to have alongside a few slices of rare roast beef. The marriage of flavors is superb. If they are to be truly tender and silky soft, it is crucial to take them as far as you dare in the pre-cooking stage, before you scoop out the center and stuff them. They need to be boiled for a good half an hour, depending, of course, on their size. Any layers that are not supple and easy to squash between your finger and thumb should be discarded. There is no reason why these onions with their mushroomy, creamy filling couldn’t be served as a main dish. You would need two each, I think, and maybe some noodles, wide ones such as pappardelle, on the side, tossed in a little melted butter and black pepper.

Onions make an important contribution to the filling of pies, providing a sweet balance for the savoriness of the meat and a necessary change of texture, too. A meat pie with no onions would be hard going. I rarely make a meat pie. It is one of those recipes I reserve for a cold autumn day, when it’s too wet to go out.

In spring, the young leek is a welcome sight with its stick-thin body and compact green flags, particularly after the thick winter ones with their frozen cores. They are worth steaming and dressing with a mustardy vinaigrette or, as here, using as a base for a fava bean and bacon lunch. We sometimes have this in the garden, with inelegant hunks of bread and sweet Welsh butter.

Users of The Kitchen Diaries may feel they recognize this recipe. Previously I have always made it with cubed lamb, but I recently tried it with lamb shanks and left it overnight before reheating it. The presence of the bone and fat and the good night’s sleep have made such a difference that I thought it worth repeating here. You could make it a day or two in advance to good end.

Kale is just one possibility for bulking out this supper of pork balls and broth. I use it because I like the fullness of its leaves with the smooth pork balls. You could use any member of the greens family, and particularly Savoy cabbage. The important bit is not to overcook the greens.

Jerusalem artichokes share with the potato an ability to drink up both dressings and the fat in which they cook. Roll a still-warm steamed artichoke or potato in a sharp oil and vinegar dressing and it will soak up the liquid like a sponge. It is this quality that makes them a candidate for cooking in luxurious mediums such as bacon fat or, better still, duck fat. This contemporary twist on the sautéed potato is, as you might expect, something with which to garnish a steak. An ice-crisp salad of winter leaves (Belgian endive, radicchio, frisée, maybe) would slice the edge off its richness.