Читать книгу Love Bites: Marital Skirmishes in the Kitchen - Christopher Hirst - Страница 12

‘YOU WANT TO MAKE LOTS OF PANCAKES?’ Mrs H repeated in a disbelieving tone. ‘Er, why?’

Maybe pancakes aren’t the most exciting of foods, though some are better than others. A crêpe stall rarely fails to attract my custom, and I am particularly partial to the galette, a Breton speciality made from buckwheat flour. Though pancakes were lifted by the invention of baking powder in the nineteenth century, they remain a primitive dish. As Alan Davidson points out in The Oxford Companion to Food, ‘The griddle method of cooking is older than oven baking and pancakes are an ancient form.’ There is a primal satisfaction about food that is cooked in an instant and consumed an instant after that. This is particularly so with drop scones or Scotch pancakes, eulogised by Davidson (‘this excellent pancake’). Where better to start my pancake adventures?

My first renditions of drop scones were a bit too primitive and ancient, but eventually they stopped tasting like shoe soles. Whipped off the pan after a few seconds on each side, there is a delicious contrast between the lightly tanned exterior and the soft, sweet, creamy inside. Davidson insists that these delicacies are ‘best eaten warm with butter or jam or both’, but in my view the main thing you need with a freshly made drop scone is more drop scones. Especially when a sprinkling of dried fruit is added to the mix, they can be a seriously addictive snack. A frequent treat of my Yorkshire childhood, these sultana-gemmed nibbles have lost none of their appeal.

The main problem with drop scones is when do you have them? Not quite right for breakfast, lunch or dinner, they are perfect for that forgotten delight, the high tea. The only time I’ve had high tea in recent years was at a Scottish castle, where Scotch pancakes formed part of a massive late afternoon spread. I didn’t tackle dinner with my customary gusto. Still, judging by Mrs H’s coolness towards these tasty splats (‘I haven’t cooked them since school and I don’t particularly want to start now’), I doubt if I will face this problem very frequently.

The difficulty about time of consumption also applies to the conventional pancake. Once or twice I’ve eaten them for breakfast in America in the form of a big stack dripping with maple syrup. This oozy construction is so substantial – it resembles the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood – that you feel like going back to bed immediately afterwards. Pancakes are better eaten later in the day, especially if that day is Shrove Tuesday. While the Latin world enjoys the unfettered orgy of Mardi Gras, the British tuck into pancakes in an atmosphere hazy with particulates. Though I’ve tried any number of ways with pancakes, I always come back to the traditional partnership of lemon juice and sugar. The lemon counteracts the sweetness of the pancake, while the sugar neutralises the acidity of the lemon. There is also a distinctive combination of sensations: hot pancake, cold lemon juice and the crunch of partially dissolved sugar.

As I remarked, it is customarily Mrs H who stands at the stove on Shrove Tuesday. Wreathed in smoke, she bears a passing resemblance to St Joan. ‘I never get to eat one because I’m always making them,’ moans this modern martyr. ‘I hear noises from the table like a cuckoo: “Feed me. Feed me.” By the time I get to eat mine, you’ve finished and you say “Can I have a bit of yours?” No, I don’t like making them. My clothes always smell of oil afterwards. Pancakes are all right but I wouldn’t want to do them more than once a year.’

I embarked on my first-ever pancake by making batter, which you have to let stand for an hour or so. Even this most instantaneous of foods demands a degree of forward planning. I used a non-stick frying pan, but the technique came from The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse (1747): ‘Pour in a ladleful of batter, moving the pan round that the batter be all over the pan…when you think that side is enough, toss it; if you can’t, turn it cleverly.’ I turned cleverly enough for my pancakes to earn Mrs H’s damning-by-faint-praise: ‘Quite nice.’ The lemon-and-sugar pancake starts light, but ends up as a substantial dessert. The first one disappears as if by magic. Then you take a second and probably a third onboard and begin to feel well ballasted. With this treat as the dessert, it is unwise to have a large quantity of savoury pancakes as the main course. Maybe you shouldn’t have savoury pancakes at any time. It is a dish that lies heavy on the plate and heavy in the stomach. Yorkshire puddings without ambition.

‘Thank goodness we’ve got that over with,’ Mrs H said after my exploration of the British pancake. ‘Crêpes are much better than those doughy things.’ Who is going to argue with that? Ever since we had some holidays in Brittany, when I ate them once a day, sometimes twice, I’ve had a hankering for the crêpe (from the Old French crespe, meaning curled) and the buckwheat galette (imaginatively derived from galet, a worn pebble good for skimming). The problem with making them at home is that, until recently, we did not have a large enough pan. Though fine for an English pancake, our non-stick frying pan produces only a mini-crêpe. A professional electric crêpe maker, as used on crêpe stalls, costs around £250, which seemed a little excessive to bring back memories of St Malo. The solution materialised when we were mooching round a Le Creuset shop in York. In one corner, I came across a pile of cast-iron crêpe pans. Measuring twenty-six centimetres in diameter, with a lip running round the edge, it had a pleasing heft in the hand and radiated homespun Gallic wholesomeness. From the instant I got it on the hob, I felt sure that my crêpes were going to be the stuff of legend.

Confident that I’d mastered the pancake, I thought that it would not take long to get the knack of the crêpe. In order to learn the rudiments, I took an informal lesson by hanging around a crêpe stall in a French market that visited our corner of London. First, le patron lightly lubricated the surface of his electric crêpe-maker with what looked like a large candle. In the centre of the hot plate, he deposited a dollop of crêpe mix and deftly distributed this over the surface of the plate with a T-shaped wooden utensil. It looked like a small version of the wooden rake used by croupiers to rake in roulette chips. When the bottom of the crêpe was cooked, he flipped it over with a spatula and then let the other side cook for a minute or less. Finally, he drizzled an infinitesimal quantity of Grand Marnier (my choice of topping) over the crêpe, folded it twice and handed the fat, multi-layered cone over to me. £3, s’il vous plait. Obviously, it was a doddle. As Ken Albala remarks in his book Pancake: A Global History, ‘Pancakes…are utterly indulgent and completely predictable.’

Unwrapping my Le Creuset crêpe pan from its shrink-wrap, I was assisted by a hole in the plastic. The reason for this hole was because the T-shaped spreading utensil had been removed. Mrs H recalled that the same applied to all the crêpe pans on sale in York. Le Creuset sup plied a wooden spatula with the pan, but the company apparently thought that inclusion of a T-shaped utensil would prompt mystified inquiries from UK customers. That it should have been included was evident from the instruction booklet. This directed purchasers: ‘Use the râteau in a circular motion to spread out the batter.’ Aha! So the T-shaped utensil was a râteau (a word omitted from my big Oxford-Hachette French/English dictionary). At this point, I should have badgered Le Creuset for a râteau, but I thought it would be easy enough to find one in London. This turned out to be a misapprehension. The nearest I got was a shrugging excuse: ‘We had some once…’ Eventually, on a day-trip to Calais, I bought a râteau à crêpe at the Carrefour hypermarché for one euro.

At last I was able to use the griddle. Under Mrs H’s direction, I proved the pan by slowly heating it, pouring a small puddle of sunflower oil in the centre and wiping round with a kitchen towel until only a sheen remained. ‘It seals the pan a bit like a non-stick surface,’ explained Mrs H. ‘You need to do this if you haven’t used the pan for a while. And NEVER wash it up.’ Having made my batter an hour or so earlier, I was now ready to tackle my first crêpe. After heating the griddle to the right temperature (water dripped on the pan should evaporate immediately), I was faced with the task of lubrication for crêpe purposes. Here, the booklet indicated another difference in the treatment of French and English customers. In the English text, we are told to ‘lightly oil the surface of the pan between each crêpe (half an apple placed on the end of a fork and dipped in the oil is a good way of doing this)’ but French readers were told to utilise ‘une demi-pomme de terre piquée au bout d’une fourchette’. A spud seemed to have the greater authenticity for this peasant dish.

After smearing a light coating of sunflower oil on to the griddle with my half-potato-on-a-fork, I poured in a small amount of batter and plied the râteau like the bloke in the market. Instant disaster. The mix started cooking and proved impossible to spread. My attempt to use the râteau ‘in a circular motion’ only shifted a tiny bit of the mix. When the first side seemed to be done, I edged the wooden spatula under and flipped it over. The result was a crepe of a disturbingly alien shape, burnt in some areas, undercooked in the middle. ‘The first one is always rotten,’ sympathised Mrs H. ‘You don’t know how much mixture to put in.’ The second crêpe was equally bad, while my third one looked like a highly inept English pancake. So much for pancakes being ‘completely predictable’.

The Le Creuset booklet suggested that expertise did not come immediately with crêpes: ‘Once you have mastered the traditional crêpe recipe, you can experiment with different ingredients’. Kate Whiteman’s cookbook Brittany Gastronomique is more explicit about the tricky craft of the crêpe: ‘[The batter] is spread outwards in a circular motion using a wood rake. This requires a flexible wrist and a light hand and is definitely not as easy as it looks.’ Lacking both flexibility of wrist and lightness of hand, it would obviously take me years of daily crêpe-making to wield the râteau with the proficiency of the market man. Mrs H pointed out another deficiency in my approach. ‘Your batter needs to be a lot thinner,’ said Mrs H. ‘It’s too floury at present, so your crêpes are too thick.’

Thinning it down helped with the spreading, but the resulting crêpe was too thin, more like a crisp than a pancake. Though thinness is of the essence with crêpes, I realised that I was not putting enough batter in. Obviously, the lip on the griddle was intended to contain the batter. I also discovered that a paper towel dipped in sunflower oil was better for lightly oiling the pan than any vegetable on a fork. When I finally managed to make an acceptable crêpe with my seventh batch, I felt battered but triumphant. Though it would never be mistaken for a professional rendition, it was pretty much circular and, better still, pretty much edible.

There are no end of crêpe possibilities, both sweet and savoury, but I stuck to the topping I’d enjoyed in the market: Grand Marnier, but more of it. My generously doused version won an ovation from Mrs H. We also tried a smear of Nutella as advocated in Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express. This was acceptable in a highly sweet, nutty sort of way, but prodigiously high in calories. Check the ingredients of Nutella and you’ll find that it contains a large percentage of vegetable oil. Nigella’s suggested accompaniment of whipped cream infused with Fra Angelico (a hazelnut liqueur) does little to reduce the calorific content.

There is one significant exception to my keep-it-simple rule for crêpes. This is the late nineteenth or early twentieth century invention known as crêpes Suzette. It is one of the few instances that a member of the pancake family soars in social esteem (blinis with caviar is another). According to Larousse Gastronomique, Henri Charpentier, a French cook working for John D. Rockefeller in the US, claimed to have invented the dish in the Café de Paris, Monte Carlo, in 1896 ‘as a compliment to the Prince of Wales and his companion, whose first name was Suzette’. In his autobiography, the chef said that the Prince gave him ‘a jewelled ring, a Panama hat and a cane’ for his creation. ‘One taste,’ Charpentier insisted, ‘would reform a cannibal into a civilised gentleman.’

While Suzette sounds the right sort of name for a ‘companion’ of the Prince of Wales in Monte Carlo, Larousse says the story is baloney. ‘In actual fact, at that date Charpentier was not old enough to be the head waiter serving the prince.’ (He would have been sixteen.) John Ayto’s A-Z of Food and Drink puts us right. The first reference to crêpes Suzette in print was by Escoffier in 1907. His ‘Suzette pancakes’ was an unflamed dish, as it remains in the recipe offered by Larousse. The encyclopedia notes a bit sniffily that Charpentier ‘introduced the fashion for flamed crêpes Suzette to America’.

Though the pancake-loving Suzette remains a mystery, the dedication was no small honour. The tangy orange sauce marries happily with the blandness of the crêpes and, at least, in the Anglo-Saxon version, the flaming brandy provides a dramatic dénouement to a meal. You don’t often see the billowing alcoholic explosion from restaurant dessert trolleys these days, but my version of crêpes Suzette – which tested my newfound prowess as a crêpe-maker twelve times over – went down a storm when I did it for some friends. You make the crêpes in advance, roll them up like English pancakes and warm them in the oven before performing the coup de théâtre with the flaming brandy. ‘Oooh, it’s lovely,’ said Mrs H. ‘Can we start having it instead of pancakes on Pancake Day?’ I preened like the dubious Charpentier.

For a savoury pancake, I prefer a galette, which is made from buckwheat flour. Its flavour is so assertive that many books, including Larousse, suggest a half-and-half mix with wheat flour. The darkness of the flour explains the French name sarrasin (Saracen). Over 12,000 tons per year are imported into Brittany for galettes. The batter is pale grey (it looks a bit like mushroom soup) and smells rather nutty. Recipes used to be egg-free, but most modern versions are less austere. Spurning tradition, the galette recipe in Larousse includes ‘5–6 beaten eggs’, but I based my recipe on the one in Brittany Gastronomique, which requires a single egg for 250g of flour. The ancient Breton mixing technique is described: ‘You should beat the batter energetically for at less 15 minutes, slapping it from side to side of the mixing bowl.’ I used a hand-held electric whisk for five minutes, which felt quite long enough. The resulting galette was striking in appearance, like a map of dark-brown islands on a light brown sea, edged with lacy filigree. The folding of the galette is different from the crêpe. First, you put a dollop of the savoury filling – two favourites are chopped asparagus in a cheese sauce and shellfish in a cream sauce – in the middle of the galette. Then you fold over an arc of the galette on four sides – about five centimetres left and right, then five centimetres top and bottom – so the result is a squared envelope with the filling visible through a little window.

As with the crêpe, it took me a while to get the knack of galettes, which are thicker and moister. In a less-than-appetising comparison, one Breton writer said galettes are macramé while crêpes are Valenciennes lace. Eventually I steered a middle course between the soggy dishcloth galette and the so-brittle-it-cracks galette. I even managed to do the fried-egg galette. After cooking one side, you flip it over and break an egg in the middle. The intention is that this cooks through the pancake. When both galette and egg are just about cooked, you fold over the four edges so the yolk appears in the little window. This is all easier said than done. When the galette is cooked, the egg tends to be underdone. When the egg is cooked, the galette is heading for burnt. Still, my effort scored highly with my severest judge. ‘Mmm, this is really good,’ said Mrs H, when I presented her with a galette filled with an egg and grated Gruyère. ‘Lots of potential here. It could be breakfast, lunch or light supper. Do you fancy doing another?’

Somewhat less demanding in construction is the galette with sausage, sold at crêpe stalls in Breton markets. The pancake is simply wrapped round a hot meaty sausage. Mrs H is a big fan. This delicacy is known as the galette robiquette after La Robiquette, a district of Rennes noted for the excellence of its bangers. There are a number of rules for the consumption. La Sauvegarde de la Galette Saucisse Bretonne (Society for the Preservation of the Breton Sausage Galette) demands that the sausage should weigh at least 125g, be consumed without mustard, accompanied only by cider and cost no more than two euros. However, local taste is questioned by Kate Whiteman, who advises readers to make sure the galette is hot off the press: ‘The Bretons are partial to sizzling hot sausages wrapped in a cold soggy galette.’ I haven’t tried the cold soggy version, but I once made the mistake of accepting the offer of a double wrapping of galettes round my sausage. I managed to chomp my way through it but the after-effect is a little hard to describe. Have you ever eaten a blanket?

Mrs H on pancakes, crêpes and galettes

To make any pancake, crêpe or galette, you need to think ahead a bit. At least an hour is required to let the batter mix stand or rest in order to release the starch in the flour to swell and soften. A well-stood batter makes a lighter pancake or crêpe. So make an early start if you have a meal at a certain time in mind. You can make pancakes by hand – using a wooden spoon to beat the mix – but for those who don’t want to develop uneven biceps an electric hand-mixer is the gadget you need. A proper crêpe pan (a frying sized pan with a shallow rim) is ideal for batter products as you can flip and turn with greater ease. But you can’t beat a decent non-stick pan that is heated to the right temperature.

N.B. I always look upon the first pancake as a bit of a practice run. Sometimes in your haste and response to the clamours from the table to ‘get a move on’ you find you haven’t let the pan heat up properly or the pan hasn’t quite become non-stick. The first pancake will also tell you if your batter is too thick or too thin. Add a little extra milk if the batter is too thick. Once you get going, pancakes take no time at all to cook – perhaps 1–2 minutes for the first side and about a minute for the second. Give the batter mix a stir before cooking each pancake – the mix can settle.

Mrs H’s recipe for Shrove Tuesday pancakes

This is a standard recipe for the sort of pancake you only have to make once a year – when the price of lemons goes up. A mix with 125g of flour should make about eight pancakes. Alter the ingredients if your table greedily demands more. Because you set up a sort of production line, making this sort of pancake is a smelly business however little fat you try to use for frying – so don’t wear your best clothes and keep the windows open.

125g plain flour

a pinch of salt

1 large egg, beaten

300ml milk

a little oil for frying

caster sugar and lemon juice to serve

Begin by sifting the flour and salt into a bowl and make a well in the centre (or as I saw once in an American recipe, ‘sink a shaft’). Add the egg and mix in. Next gradually add the milk, drawing the flour in from the sides. Continue whisking until a smooth creamy batter is formed. Let the batter stand for at least 30 minutes. After heating the pan and adding a tiny amount of oil, pour in enough batter to coat the base of the pan. Cook the first side until you see that the centre is drying and the sides crisping. Flip or toss and cook the second side. After turning out on to a plate, sprinkle caster sugar and lemon juice on the pancake and roll up in a sausage shape. Add more sugar and lemon if the diner starts grizzling that you haven’t added enough.