Using tongs, lift the asparagus out of the water and drain on a cloth (I find asparagus breaks up if you tip it into a colander, and that it needs the cloth to get rid of excess water, which can make it soggy). Divide the asparagus between 4–6 warm serving plates and heap the pea shoots over the tips. Give the sauce one final whisk over the heat to amalgamate it (it will split a little if left, but it will ‘come back’), then pour it generously over the asparagus. Season with a little salt and pepper and scatter the mint leaves and lemon zest over the top. Eat immediately and, if you are in festive mode, serve as a starter before Fried Megrim Sole or the lamb with spring vegetables.
I cook asparagus loose, either in boiling salted water in a shallow pan or in a steamer. Today’s varieties seem to take only about 5 minutes for a thick stem. If you have time, pare away the outer skin of the spears up to about 6cm/2½ inches from the base before cooking. This enables you to eat the whole spear, and allows the butter to sink in. Melt about 30g/1oz butter per person, pour it over the cooked asparagus and serve with loose sea salt.
Bacon and Potato Salad with Green Celery Leaf and Cider Vinegar
Unhappiness reigns if there is no bacon in the house. It is my mainstay meat, the inexpensive strip of flesh that is the difference between having nothing to cook with and the ability to produce a meal quickly for everyone. It glamorises and adds body, not least its great and addictive flavour, to things such as lettuce and spring greens, and it keeps for weeks.
But be fussy about the bacon you buy. The food industry’s record in the cheap pig meat business is abysmal on both welfare and quality grounds. Pigs reared intensively in Holland and Denmark, major providers of budget pork products to the UK, suffer some unacceptable conditions. Two-thirds of sows (mothers) are tethered and confined in stalls with hard, slatted floors for all their lives. The idea is to make pig rearing super efficient and tidy, to the miserable detriment of the pigs themselves. They are no more than breeding machines, expected to shoot out three litters a year until their bodies pack up. Stalls and tethers are not permitted in indoor pig farms in the UK but sows are kept in farrowing crates during birth and for four weeks after, before being transferred back to a pen – a system that is not ideal but is less cruel. Feed for pigs in both systems is high protein, often heavy in soya (these omnivores consume little flesh), which grows the animal to its bacon weight in swift time so that it will become a highly profitable pig. Processing this meat into bacon, and maximising profit, means injections of brine and phosphates; liquid that you will see seeping from the rasher as it cooks. A big, heavy pack of Danish bacon, the supposed great budget buy, will become shrunken watery slivers in the pan. It is hard to see what is economical about that for the consumer but we assume the industry that produced it is laughing all the way to the till. There is better value in a pack of best smoked streaky from a pig that has been kindly and naturally reared; best of all, if the streaky is cured on the butcher’s premises. Ask for it to be sliced very thinly, so that all the rind is edible and the bacon cooks to a crisp stained-glass window in just a few minutes. Back rashers have their place, too, and it is good to have both cuts at the ready. Smoked bacon tends to be less salty, as it goes through two curing processes, and its flavour pervades other ingredients in recipes in a non-aggressive way. But these flavour comments are personal. Like tea, everyone likes bacon in a different way.
Buying bacon
Buy dry-cured bacon made as near as possible to your home. Ask butchers where they source either the bacon they sell or the pork they make their own from. If you cannot buy anything local, one of the best bacons via mail order is made by Peter Gott, at Sillfield Farm near Kendal in Cumbria (www.sillfield.co.uk; tel: 015395 67609). The flavour of his dry-cured bacon and ‘pancetta’ is beautifully balanced, and is made with pork from free-range rare-breed pigs and wild boar. Furness Fish, Poultry and Game Supplies deal with the mail order: www.morecambebayshrimps.com; tel: 015395 59544.
Bacon can switch from being stock food to something exceptional when it is put in the pan with one of its most natural partners. Spend a happy hour piling through a bowl of shell-on North Atlantic prawns that have been added, at the last minute, with 2 tablespoons of butter to a frying pan of bacon. Throw over a handful of chopped dill as you serve. Big king scallops, griddled on a hot plate, can be put on the same plate as streaky bacon ‘sugar canes’: rashers of very thin bacon that are twisted before being roasted in the oven or cooked in a pan over a medium heat for 10 minutes. Serve the scallops and bacon with small beet leaves or baby chard. Tabasco on the table – as it often seems to be.
A rasher of bacon, wrapped around a lump of butter or cream cheese with chopped parsley and placed inside a part-baked potato, will, once returned to the oven wrapped in foil for a further 20 minutes’ cooking, make a supper eons more exciting than a wrinkled brown pebble with a sad lozenge of butter sliding around on the top.
I use bacon to make instant onion gravy for bangers and mash when I have no stock. Put a chopped rasher into the pan with a chopped onion, add a little butter or oil and cook over a low heat until the onion turns golden. Add a teaspoon of flour, stir well over the heat until it browns a little, then slowly add about 150ml/¼ pint water, stirring all the time. The result is a pale, buff-coloured sauce, not gravy brown, but it tastes fine.
Smoked pork belly can be cut into chunks, browned in a pan with garlic, onion and celery, then simmered in stock until tender. Serve with boiled potatoes and plenty of parsley. If you have any joints of poultry or fresh rabbit, add and simmer with the bacon.
An easy small lunch dish that can be woven into a plate of cooked yellow lentils and a slice of Appleby Cheshire cheese. Nearly perfect. It will be no good, though, made with any one of that terrible trinity of juice bombs – Gala, Braeburn or Granny Smith – and, sad to say, Bramleys will fall to bits. Cox’s Orange Pippins are best, or another apple with a good, fibrous texture and matt skin (see here).