The Vicar’s Wife’s Cook Book

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.

ROAST BEEF (#ulink_d4a56cf5-41bf-594f-8f98-d82f4b3ab90f)

THE ROAST POTATOES (#ulink_106774bd-d501-557c-a6a4-e8364c624ec8)

CARROT AND CUMIN PURÉE (#ulink_aaa659de-ea25-59e6-8a00-571d0c01857b)

TWO CABBAGES WITH APPLE AND RED ONION (#ulink_0458ebb5-7338-500a-93ca-08bd705f9e34)

TOFFEE AND APPLE CRUMBLE (#ulink_f6ff41e1-c4a2-532a-8603-4c033ef750cc)

Roast beef (#ulink_0b999648-d055-537e-8e4e-a2f73ee68c4e)

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 the gravy.

I am a bit obsessive about gravy and constantly fret there won’t be enough, so when people go for seconds I am there, bossily waving the gravy boat in their faces, lest they forget to anoint their fresh portion with my lovingly made sauce.

The Roast Potatoes (#ulink_96d762f6-c6bd-5a36-b143-9a3472cb7167)

Again, I don’t think one really needs a recipe for this as everyone seems to have their own tips and tricks for how to make the perfect roastie. (See the ‘Mackenzie Method (#ulink_7ab0e732-bd49-58e6-9798-b9cd6d8163bc)’) Here are my personal hints.

1.5kg floury maincrop potatoes, such as King Edwards or Maris Piper

2 tablespoons goose fat or lard

salt

Peel the potatoes and cut them into medium-sized pieces. (I tend to go for a sort of triangle shape as I cut them up.) Put them in a pan of salted boiling water and pop on a lid. Parboil them for 10 minutes or so, then pour them into a colander. Put the lid from the pan on top of the colander and hold it down as you give the potatoes a really good shake. (I do this shaking business in the colander rather than the pan as a heavy pan full of potatoes is a bit too cumbersome for me to handle.)

Preheat the oven to 210°C/Gas Mark 7. Put the fat into a roasting tin and put in the oven to heat up. Once it has melted, remove the tin from the oven and put it on the hob over a medium heat. Now introduce the potatoes to the fat and turn the potatoes in it until they are all evenly coated. Do be careful as you do this because the fat may well spit at you. Put the potatoes in the oven. (Ideally you should cook them in a separate oven from the beef, but if you haven’t got one, compromise by cooking the beef at 200°C/Gas Mark 6 and whack up the heat once the beef comes out.)

Most cookery books say that roast potatoes take around 50 minutes, but I have found that they usually take longer than that – about 1–1½ hours. You want them fluffy inside and looking like they do in the Mackenzie household. Remove from the oven, sprinkle with a good amount of salt and serve.

Carrot and Cumin Purée (#ulink_e74f003e-4f92-583c-af26-49c91088eed9)

Making this reminds me of the endless purée-making I did for my children when I was weaning them. However, this concoction, with its creamy cumin headiness, is a far more adult affair. It would also be delicious served to liven up a chicken breast cooked with lemon and garlic or a plainly cooked lamb chop.

750g carrots, peeled and chopped into 5cm lengths

100ml cream (single or double)

2 teaspoons ground cumin (or maybe more, depending on your taste)

salt and pepper

Put the carrots in boiling salted water and boil for 7–8 minutes until soft. Drain off the water (reserving it for the gravy or making soup), pour in the cream and stir in the cumin and some seasoning. Blend the whole lot together using a hand-held blender or a food processor and reheat, if necessary, before serving.

An Alternative Purée

Parsnip and swede also make a fine purée, and making it is a sneaky way of getting people who claim to hate swede to eat it.

Peel 5 parsnips, chop them into chunks and do the same with half of a small swede or a quarter of a large one. Boil in salted water until soft – about 20–25 minutes – and drain, saving the cooking water. Pour 100ml of milk and 100ml of cream into the pan you used to cook the vegetables, and heat it up. Add the parsnips and swede, mash together and whisk with an electric whisk. Add salt and pepper, a knob of butter and maybe some freshly grated nutmeg.

Two Cabbages with Apple and Red Onion (#ulink_9d1938a0-a62a-5845-a39a-c6cccf085137)

One of the reasons I love my weekly organic vegetable box is that it forces me, and those who eat with me, to partake of food I could easily avoid or overlook. Take the cabbage family: so often the cabbage conjures up memories of bad smells and soggy school dinners, and so we can be inclined to give anything related to it a wide berth. However, cooked with a light touch, cabbage and suchlike can be wonderful. One day, with a red cabbage and a small green one asking to be eaten, I knocked up the following as a side dish to the beef.