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

1 cucumber, peeled, halved, deseeded and cut into slices

1cm/

/

inch thick

1 teaspoon black onion seeds (nigella)

4 sprigs of coriander, chopped

Melt the fat in a pan, add the onion and cook until soft. Stir in the chilli and curry paste and cook for 1 minute, then add the coconut milk and water. Finally add the cucumber slices, bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes. Finish with the black onion seeds and coriander.

pickled cucumber

/

cucumber, peeled, prepared as on here 93 (#ulink_9c4b93ff-6610-545f-83fa-c1cb214c615f)

1 teaspoon golden caster sugar

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar a pinch of salt

2.5cm/1 inch piece of fresh ginger, grated

3 small green chillies, chopped

Combine the cucumber with all the remaining ingredients. It’s good served with curries or boiled ham.

avocado

When an avocado is perfectly ripe, its oil-rich flesh is almost a sauce, a kind of green mayonnaise that goes so well with crustaceans – yes, it’s a refugee from the avocado-and-prawn generation talking – but also matches red chilli, lime and fresh coriander. Avocados are imported into the UK from South Africa, the Caribbean and Mexico. The dark, knobbly-skinned variety, the Hass avocado, has more flavour but some prefer the gentle taste of the smooth, soft-skinned type. Both are available all year round and are as welcome to me as bananas and oranges – fruit that I cannot do without.

avocado mash with coriander and curry oil

Treat this as a starter. It looks dazzling with the yellow oil, particularly if decorated with a few sprouting beans or pea shoots. Smooth-skinned avocados are ripe if the skin gives a little when pressed at the round end; knobbly avocados are ripe when the skin turns from green to a dark greeny-black.

Serves 4

2 teaspoons Madras curry powder

6 tablespoons avocado oil (see the Shopping Guide)

2 ripe avocados

2 tablespoons yoghurt

juice of 1 lime

4 sprigs of coriander, including their roots, well washed

2 shallots, finely chopped

salt

Stir the curry powder into the oil and leave to infuse for 30 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve and reserve.

Peel and stone the avocados, then mash the flesh until almost smooth. Beat in the yoghurt and lime juice. Tear the leaves from the coriander stalks and roots and set to one side. Chop the stalks and roots finely and stir them into the avocado mixture. Season with salt.

To serve, spoon the avocado mash into a neat mound on each starter plate, then scatter over the shallots and coriander leaves. Zigzag the curry oil over the top and eat with toasted flat bread.

kitchen note

If the curry powder does not contain turmeric, add 1 teaspoon to colour the oil a zingy yellow.

watercress

Watercress now grows all year round, and stores well in the fridge. It relies on a supply of clean water to grow and only several days of hard frost will dry up the supply. Most British watercress comes from an admirable co-operative of farms in the south of England, particularly Hampshire and Dorset. Choose this type in preference to French imported – there is no excuse for shops to sell this. Watercress is very underrated, and so English.

The nutritional qualities of watercress were once valued so highly that it was known as poor man’s meat. I use watercress frequently in this book as a replacement for the ubiquitously trendy rocket. Its peppery leaf goes with dozens of dishes, and finds a place in sauces and salads, too. Grumble if you are sold sealed bags of watercress that smell of rank water when opened; it means it has been hanging around a bit.

Watercress has the winning attribute of being slow to change colour from bright green to dull olive when cooked, unlike spinach or herb leaves. For that reason, as well as its powerful, clean flavours, I use it in dumplings and soups and in the simple sauce below.

watercress oil

1 bunch of watercress

6 tablespoons olive oil

a pinch of sea salt

Cut off and discard the lower 5cm/2 inches of the watercress stalks. Either whiz the watercress with the oil and salt in a food processor or pound using a pestle and mortar until you have a smooth sauce.

Use in the same way as Herb Oils (see here (#u08e70ce4-258f-438b-8e51-d5cb35075e10)). Good with roast beef, or zigzagged over toast spread with fresh cheeses or smoked fish.

watercress sandwiches

Children once took watercress sandwiches to school, in place of real meat. They are, in fact, very good and, cut small, are nice to eat with drinks before dinner.

Spread slices of good brown or white bread with farmhouse butter, then sandwich with watercress, the lower stalks cut away.

year-round fruit

Oranges and bananas, mangoes and papayas – I cannot do without them, and rely on a supply to cheer up fruit bowls when the English apples and pears have all been eaten, the berry season is over and soft orchard fruits are a memory in a pickle jar to eat with cold Monday leftover meat. I have travelled to Tobago twice and eaten so-called exotic fruits in their home – ripened in the sun and not in the hold of a ship – and was cheered to find that although they tasted better, it was only marginally so.

These fruits are made for travel. They ripen without sunlight in the dark, in our cold shops and quickly on our radiators. The gentle fingers that pack them in boxes in the Caribbean and Africa do so knowing how easily bananas bruise. I once asked a banana trader in London’s Nine Elms wholesale market why Caribbean bananas are small and curled and South American bananas long and straight. It was a conversation that has always stayed with me. ‘Ah, that is because there is less investment in the banana plantations of the Caribbean,’ he said, ‘and the bananas are picked before they grow to their full size.’ It was 1999 and we were talking about the World Trade Organisation’s decision to apply levies on certain European ‘luxury’ goods to the US, in retaliation for European loyalty to the Caribbean banana market over the largely American-owned plantations in South America/Costa Rica. ‘The Caribbean bananas,’ the trader continued, ‘are picked early because the farmers cannot afford to leave them on the trees even for another week. To me,’ he added, ‘they always look like small, hungry hands.’

This is an analogy of a worldwide problem for food producers. Lack of investment is the enemy of small food production. Along with coffee, tea, chocolate and dried fruits, Fairtrade bananas are now in most supermarkets. They are still small and curled but I am watching with hope.