While the cabbage cooks, bring the milk to the boil with the bay leaves and onion, then remove from the heat and leave to infuse. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour and cook over a moderate heat for a couple of minutes. Add the milk, strained through a sieve, stir until smooth, then leave to simmer over a very low heat for fifteen minutes, barely bubbling, while the cabbage roasts. Tear the bread into small pieces and grill or fry until crisp, brushing or trickling them with a little oil as they cook.
Finely grate the remaining Parmesan into the sauce and season to taste with a little salt (you won’t need much), some black pepper and, if you like, a little smoked paprika. Lift the cooked cabbage on to plates, spoon over some of the cheese sauce, and finish with the fried bread and some green sprouted seeds.
15 NOVEMBER
Frost fairs and braised brisket
I ache for snow. The last generous fall in this garden was in January 2013, when the yew hedges tilted drunkenly with its weight. I ache for silence, for the sound of my own muffled footsteps as I walk up the garden path. But most of all I ache for icicles. When I was seven or eight, icicles hung from every gutter on the house. Long glass stalactites hung down from the greenhouse roof like trickles of icing on a gingerbread house. They shone in the late afternoon sun. I snapped off the longest as a rapier for a mock fight with an imaginary friend, and galloped across the snow-covered lawn in a one-man jousting match. Before I went in for tea the other icicles met their fate, as a unicorn’s horn, a fencer’s épée and lastly a shimmering javelin.
I remember a winter in Paris when the fountains froze. One close to my tiny attic room near the Sorbonne had set into a vast, sparkling ice sculpture that stopped me in my tracks on the treacherous walk to cooking school. How I would have loved to be in London for the frost fairs on the River Thames.
Frost fairs were held on the river on several occasions – the Thames froze over twenty-six times between 1408 and 1814. In 1536 King Henry VIII travelled along the river from London to Greenwich by sleigh. Queen Elizabeth I practised shooting on the ice in the winter of 1564, and carnivals were held on the frozen river. The first recorded frost fair was in 1608 but it was the last one, held in 1814, that saw an elephant led across the frozen river near Blackfriars Bridge, and stalls, shops and funfairs set up on the ice. There was bull-baiting and horse-racing, carousels and puppet shows, skating and football matches. The fair held in the winter of 1683–4 saw the Thames frozen over for two months, complete with a shopping street built on the eleven inches of ice.
The cold winters were far from one big carnival. The ice on the river thawed unexpectedly on several occasions and many drowned. In January 1789 the melting ice dragged a riverside public house into the water, crushing five people. The winters were unimaginably cold, animals and birds died, plants and trees froze solid, people choked on the smoke trapped by the cold air and the homeless froze to death.
There is little likelihood of the Thames ever freezing again. The river was shallower then and flowed more slowly, the winters were considerably colder and any idea of global warming inconceivable. Yet the notion of a vast frozen river on which one could skate, roast a whole pig and travel downstream on a sleigh is still something I dream of seeing. Just as I dream of climbing through the back of my wardrobe into a snow-covered wood.
No sign of snow yet, but I need something warming today. A dark braise of a favourite cut of beef.
Braised brisket with porcini and onion gravy
You’ll need a spoon. The broth surrounding the beef has been in the oven for four hours, along with a handful of caramelised shallots, black peppercorns, thyme sprigs and bay leaves. I could have used beef stock, but preferred to make a broth out of dried mushrooms. A dark-coloured, bosky liquor in which to coax a cheap cut of meat towards tenderness. The brisket was bargain enough, as you would expect from a cut situated at the front of the belly, a piece of meat that works hard throughout the animal’s life. I asked the butcher to leave the fat on my brisket in place, so that it would soften to a quivering mass and slowly enrich the gravy during its long sojourn in the oven.
I cut the meat into thick, wobbly slices and laid them in wide, shallow dishes, the sort you might use for pasta, then spooned the shiny, mahogany-coloured broth round the meat. There was a temptation to add soft, pale dollops of creamed parsnips or mashed butter beans, but instead I voted for swede, mashing it to a cream with a ridiculous quantity of butter and black pepper. Ideally, there would have been a thick fog outside, or better still a howling storm crashing at the windows. But you can’t have everything.
What we did have was enough silky brown meat for the next day, which I pulled into jagged strips and tossed with vinegar-crisped cabbage, finely shredded kale (yes, that again) and some sprouted radish seeds from the wholefood shop. I dressed it with a cool dill and mustard-seed-flecked cream dressing. If you want a quick fix, eat an expensive cut of meat, but if you crave homely warmth and bonhomie, the feeling that all is well with our world (especially when it isn’t), it’s the cheap, fat-rich cuts you should head for. The ones that enrich their cooking liquor to a point where you can feel the goodness seeping through to your soul with every mouthful. You’re going to need that spoon.
The dried porcini will add about three quid to the cost of this dish, but you get a lot of flavour for your money.
Serves 6–8
dried porcini – 25g
beef brisket, rolled and tied – 1.5kg
banana shallots – 6
small carrots – 350g
black peppercorns – 12
bay leaves – 4
thyme sprigs – 6
mashed swede, to serve (see here)
Put the kettle on. Set the oven at 230°C/Gas 9. Put the dried porcini into a heatproof bowl, then pour boiling water over them, cover with a plate and leave to soak for twenty-five minutes. This will give you a deeply flavourful broth.
Place the rolled and tied brisket in a large casserole, then put it into the oven and roast for twenty-five minutes. Peel and trim the shallots and halve them lengthways. Scrub the carrots and halve them lengthways. Add them both to the casserole together with the porcini and their broth, the peppercorns, bay leaves and thyme, then cover with a lid. Lower the heat to 160°C/Gas 3 and bake for four hours.
Remove the brisket from its broth and leave to rest for ten minutes. Put the casserole over a high heat, bring the contents to the boil, and leave until reduced by about one-third. Slice the brisket into thick pieces, dividing it between deep plates, then spoon over the broth and vegetables.
And mashed swede to serve
Peel a large swede and cut it into large chunks, then pile them into a steamer basket or colander and cook over a pan of boiling water for twenty minutes, until soft. Tip into a bowl and crush thoroughly with a potato masher. Add a thick slice of butter (about 30g) and lots of quite coarsely ground black pepper. Beat firmly with a wooden spoon until fluffy. Serve in generous mounds, in the broth that surrounds the beef.
17 NOVEMBER
Pork and panforte
Just as I might eat a wedge of butter-soft panettone with shudderingly bitter coffee on a winter’s morning, or break a marzipan-scented slice of stollen after an afternoon spent sweeping up leaves in the garden, I too get a fancy for a tiny triangle of chewy panforte. Looking forward to the gentle slap of sweet spice as much as I do that of Lebkuchen or gingerbread, I am more than a little ashamed that I had yet to warm to its honeyed tone when I visited its rust-red hometown, Siena. With hindsight, I probably thought the slim, white