Category: Family

Another day, another David…

01 - The finished tart

Do you remember I told you Lady de B and I joked about setting up a catering business out of the back of a vintage Bentley? Well, we don’t have the wheels yet but we do have our first gig. My friend Paula asked me to cater her wedding in September – marquee in her country garden, bunches of blowsy, old-fashioned roses and herbs on the tables, mismatched plates and a hog roast for 120 happy revellers. Richard Curtis, call your production designer…..

Paula wants canapés, big salads to go with the roast, puddings and gorgeous English cheeses, and later, little bits of biscuity heaven to go with tea and coffee. I’m excited. Excited and scared. I’ve never done anything this huge before. So I called Vanessa, AKA Lady de B, who as well as being a wonderful cook, is queen of the clipboard and list. Between us, we’re going to do it. Last night we had our first planning meeting at De Beauvoir Mansions and I made a French Onion Tart to take along for our supper. It’s based on Elizabeth David’s Tarte à l’Oignon or Zewelwaï, the lovely tart from Alsace, from her book French Provincial Cooking.

I thought of calling this post ‘I have cried salty tears…’. I know this is a lot of onions, but it’s worth it – they all cook down into the most deliciously sweet, lusciously melting, creamy mass. You’re eating essence of onion, and that’s never a bad thing.

Tarte à l’Oignon, or Zewelwaï

My lovely dad, who is stoical and uncomplaining in the face of all kinds of adversity, hates to chop an onion almost more than any other domestic task. I think of all of the things I’ve ever done, he’s most impressed by my capacity to slice and dice my way through a mountain of onions without the aid of goggles, gin or Valium.

250g plain flour
125g unsalted butter, very cold, cut into small cubes
1 tbsps olive oil (not extra virgin)
A good pinch of sea salt
2 eggs
2-3 tbsps iced water
1.2 kg onions, finely sliced
6 egg yolks, very well beaten
284ml pot of double cream
A few gratings of nutmeg
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

01 - A bowl of onions

02 - Chopped onions

Cooked Onions 1
Put the flour, butter and salt into a food processor and pulse briefly a few times – you still want little, pea-sized pieces of butter in the mix. Drop in the eggs and pulse a few more times. Turn it out into a bowl and add the water a little at a time, stirring gently with your hands or a knife to bring it together into a ball – you may not need all of the water. Place the dough on a floured surface and with the heel of your hands, lightly stretch it out into a ragged rectangle. Fold it over in three sections, rather like you would a business letter, and repeat the process a couple of times. Do it all very gently. Wrap in clingfilm and chill for at least a couple of hours so that it loses all of its stretch.

Butter a flan tin (mine was 19x29cm) and dust lightly with flour. Roll out the pastry so that it is quite thin. Line the tin with the pastry, pressing it gently into position and trying not to stretch it. Don’t trim it yet – put it into the fridge for half an hour or so to chill down, then trim it just before you fill it.

While all the pastry palaver is going on, make the filling. Melt the butter in a large frying pan with the oil over a medium-low heat. Tip in the onions with Cooked Onions 2a good pinch of salt and stir until they’re all coated. Turn the temperature down to low and cook the onions until they are soft, translucent and starting to turn golden. Stir them from time to time to make sure they’re not sticking. This took about an hour, on the lowest possible heat. Season well with salt, nutmeg and plenty of pepper and allow to cool down a bit. In a jug or bowl, whisk together the cream and well-beaten eggs then pour over the onions and stir until everything is combined.

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas mark 6.

Pour the filling into the pastry case (yes, that’s right, no blind baking – hurrah!) and put the tin on a baking sheet. Bake for about 30-35 minutes until golden. Eat hot. You can certainly eat it cold – I had leftovers for breakfast this morning and it was delicious – but the pastry will lose some of its melting flakiness.

06 - Ready to eat

TIP

If you want to serve this when you have friends round for lunch or dinner and you’d like to avoid last-minute panics, line the flan tin and make the filling a few hours ahead. Pop everything in the fridge until about 45 minutes before you want to serve it, then assemble and bake at the last minute.

I capture the kitchen

I can cook because my mother can’t. Really can’t. To her, the kitchen is hostile territory where pans commit scorching hara-kiri, ovens spontaneously combust and meat comes in two different cuts: stringy or tough. So as kids, if my brother and I wanted to eat something vaguely more thrilling than toast, we made it ourselves.

Don’t pity me – it was wonderful. Mum was always engrossed in a book, either reading one or writing one, so she never cared what we did in the kitchen so long as we were QUIET, there was no BLOOD and any flames were intentional. In a childhood of happily anarchic gastronomy, there was no toy cooker for me – the whole kitchen was my playground. I had no idea it was weird for a 10 year old to spend Sunday afternoon boning a duck or icing petits fours. I spent hours pouring over the pages of the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook, marvelling at the 70s gorgeousness of the ruby-red maraschino cherries and emerald-green angelica which seemed to adorn every perfectly-iced cake. Marguerite Patten was my heroine.

If I loved cookbooks, I loved my dictionary more. In a world of potato waffles, crispy pancakes and fish fingers, quenelles, purées and gratins were strange poetry indeed. When other girls were arguing about Starsky or Hutch, Donny or Jimmy, I was wondering where in the wilds of County Durham I might be able to find truffles or foie gras.

My parents threw lots of parties, the kind where women sat around in floaty dresses and love beads and bearded men played guitars. And there I was, like a mini Margo Leadbetter, passing around the (tinned) tuna pâté and extolling the virtues of my apple charlotte or gingernut log. Any conversations about gender stereotyping probably took place when I was out of earshot in the kitchen, checking the progress of my devils on horseback.

When others rhapsodise about their Mum’s special shepherd’s pie or apple crumble I have nothing to offer but toast toppers or baked beans (with cheese on a fancy day). But I’m not sorry. In the true spirit of 70s self-reliance, I made my own memories. And then I ate them.