The New English Kitchen: Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat

leaves from 4 sprigs of dill

sea salt and white pepper

Heat the stock to boiling point and add the spring onions and peas. Bring back to the boil and simmer for 1 minute. Allow to cool for a few minutes, then liquidise with the cream or milk. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Fry the bacon over a low heat until crisp, then add the potatoes and stir to warm them through. Serve the soup in deep bowls with a large spoonful of bacon and potatoes in each. Scatter the dill on top.

frozen spinach

Defrosted slowly, frozen spinach can be as good as fresh. All the water must be squeezed out, and the spinach cooked either with plenty of butter, or heated with good olive oil to make this quick vegetable dish.

spinach with pine nuts

Serves 2

2 tablespoons pine nuts

480g/1lb frozen whole-leaf spinach, defrosted and the water

squeezed out

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Dry-toast the pine nuts in a frying pan until lightly browned, then set them aside in a bowl. Warm the spinach through in a pan and add the oil. Transfer to a dish, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and scatter the pine nuts on top. Finish with the lemon juice.

canned food

Canning is ideal for certain foods, a good and pure way to store them without preservatives. It can even improve them in some cases – skipjack tuna being an example.

skipjack tuna

I could never understand why anyone would want to eat a lot of seared fresh tuna. Half the time it is dry and tasteless and, when buying it, it can be hard to tell how long it has been out of the water. What’s more, at the current rate of consumption, blue and yellow fin tuna will soon go the way of the dodo. Blue fin – the type favoured by the Japanese for top-quality sushi – is at an all-time low, while yellow fin is in serious decline. The only tuna not listed as endangered is skipjack. The standard of canned skipjack tuna varies from dubious and disgusting small flakes that look like factory-floor sweepings in unidentifiable oil, to tender fillets that, when packed in the tin, look like the cross section of an old tree trunk. This tuna is far superior and has a light texture, because it does not absorb too much oil. The unique double-cooking technique – before canning and then again when the sealed cans are heated to preserve the contents – seems to improve and tenderise the flesh. It can then simply be softly flaked into a salad or sandwich, or made into a delicately flavoured fish cake.

choosing tuna

Trawling for any fish using nets puts other wild species at risk of getting caught up in the gear, but the risk is greater to these lovely mammals when netting tuna. Check labelling on cans to be sure it contains ‘dolphin friendly’ tuna, looking for mention of monitoring by the EII (Earth Island Institute). The ‘dolphin safe’ motto you may find on cans from North and South American tuna fisheries is not, according to marine conservationists, so closely monitored. In coming years, the EII hope to develop a logo to make it easier for shoppers.

Catching tuna by pole and line is the only truly sustainable means. Not all ‘line-caught’ tuna is sustainable. Ask for hand-lined, troll-caught tuna; or tuna caught on long lines that are ‘seabird friendly’. It is currently very difficult to tell what fishing method was used for catching skipjack tuna. This is because it is a commodity – like coffee or tea – traded on a world exchange. It’s a system of trading that undermines efforts to conserve the tuna numbers. If well-managed fisheries are not rewarded, why bother? In the coming years the Marine Stewardship Council hope to certify the pole and line tuna fisheries as sustainable – watch out for their logo on tins and jars.

You can also find handline-caught albacore – a pale, delicate-fleshed relative often dubbed ‘white tuna’, and found mostly around the coast of Spain, Portugal and France (see the Shopping Guide).

Always buy tuna packed in either olive or sunflower oil, draining it away before you use the fish.

tuna cakes

Lovely, delicate cakes to eat for supper – tuna-loving children will adore them. Serve with a green sauce (see here (#u08e70ce4-258f-438b-8e51-d5cb35075e10)).

Serves 4

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons plain flour

300ml/

/

pint milk

180g/6oz canned tuna, drained

2 shallots, finely chopped

juice of

/

lemon

2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese

dried breadcrumbs (see here (#u2c33e651-eef1-4889-8b52-d965765cb8aa))

sunflower oil for shallow-frying

salt and white pepper

Melt the butter in a small pan and add the flour. Cook gently for a minute, then remove from the heat. Gradually stir in the milk, then cook, stirring, until the sauce thickens and finally boils. Remove from the heat, add the tuna, stirring to break up the flakes, then add the shallots, lemon juice and Parmesan. Season with a little white pepper and the barest pinch of salt. Refrigerate the mixture until very cold, then roll it into a cylinder shape, about 4cm/1

/

inches in diameter. Cut it into pastilles 2.5cm/1 inch thick and roll each one in dried breadcrumbs. Shallow-fry the tuna cakes in sunflower oil for 3–4 minutes on each side, then drain on kitchen paper.

tuna salad with skinless tomatoes

I mix preserved tuna with lots of herbs, lemon juice, and virgin olive oil if necessary, then add black pepper and a few capers and eat it with tomatoes. The secret, by the way, of great tomato salads is skinning them. Note to the ‘time sceptics’: it takes 3 minutes to skin 4 tomatoes. This is how to do it: nick the skin of ripe tomatoes with a knife, submerge the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute, then drain and push the skins off. They have a wonderful way of homogenising the dish, absorbing the olive oil and the flavour of the herbs and allowing the tuna to stick to them.

kitchen note

Add drained, canned cannellini or haricot beans to make a more substantial plateful.

other uses for tuna

Flake tuna over a pea and broad bean salad dressed with olive oil.