Cold lunch
In the best tradition
Minette Marrin
The thought of a cold British lunch in the middle of a cold British summer does not usually inspire much enthusiasm. Too many people have memories of damp, limp lettuce, hard-boiled eggs with sinister grey rings round the yolk and nasty versions of Coronation chicken slung together with cheap bottled mayonnaise and low-grade curry powder long since past their sell-by date. More recently this depressing reper- toire has been extended to include crum- bling factory-farmed salmon, boiled to kingdom come and then left to dry out, gritty rice salad, tasteless shreds of iceberg lettuce and coleslaw dripping with acidulat- ed glop. The more ambitious assemble cun- ning mixtures of indigestible raw vegetables, roughly chopped and smoth- `Sister, are you sure that a "riot of colour" is seemly?' ered with vinaigrette that could do double duty as paint stripper. As for the soggy-bot- tomed quiches, the woolly tomatoes and the repellent things done with cold pasta, one can only say that if there has been a revolution in cooking in this country, a great many people don't seem to have noticed.
This is a pity because a good cold lunch is hard to beat, easy to produce and a won- derful way to feed people for the cook who would like to spend time with her guests and not in the kitchen. And there is a great British tradition of cold lunch; traditional private-house cooking in this country, long before the foodie revolution, was often excellent, and quite as good as anything produced in France or Italy. My late moth- er-in-law's summer lunches were legendary, and I think it was her legacy to me; the only indisputable thing to be said about either of us after death will be that we both did a very good cold lunch.
In her house everything was laid out on a huge side table, with restrained elegance, for people to help themselves. There was usually an enormous, cold wild salmon, perfectly cooked and covered in scales of thinly sliced cucumber to prevent it from drying out; it bore no relation to what peo- ple serve today. There were rare fillets of best beef, sliced raw mushrooms with wal- nuts and walnut oil, dishes full of freshly cooked prawns, memorable salads of scent- ed tomatoes with mint and parsley, and bowls of yellow mayonnaise, as thick as old-fashioned ointment, which she made with tremendous abandon and pints of the most exotic virgin olive oil.
Sometimes she mixed handfuls of herbs into the mayonnaise — watercress, parsley, chervil, marjoram, sorrel, basil or mint and lots of chives — several hours in advance for the flavours to develop. Sometimes she made vitello tonnato, thinning the tuna mayonnaise with juices strained from the pan in which she had roasted the veal. Sometimes she made a sauce for cold beef with fresh horseradish, double cream and Dijon mustard. Sometimes she simply cooked and sliced beetroot, with a little sour cream and chives spooned over. Sometimes she mixed sour cream with black lumpfish roe to fill avocado halves, with red salmon roe on top. When she made vinaigrette she used at least ten parts of olive oil to one part of lemon or good vinegar; she took a very dim view of people who destroy the delicate taste of salad leaves and herbs with too much acid and salt. As she said, it was all so quick and easy.
The secret of my mother-in-law's success, and the secret of any successful cold lunch, is the ingredients. When she was first mar- ried and decided to learn to cook, it was still possible to get the sort of ingredients
SUMMER WINE AND FOOD
we now call organic — what she called proper food — so everything tasted very strongly of itself. Later on in the Seventies, when it became difficult, she paid enor- mous sums to get real Jersey potatoes and real untreated cream and cheeses in ruinous trips to Justin de Blank. It is still expensive, but much easier now, to get proper food. For the serious and competi- tive cook it isn't worth producing cold food unless it is organic. All you need to know is how to shop — surprisingly few people do. And all you have to do with what you buy is avoid mucking it up. You really do not need to cook at all, though of course you have to know how to or you will muck it up without even trying.
I am still in favour of cold salmon, how- ever much the fashionable may sneer. Cold salmon trout is even better, and both are childishly simple to cook properly: just one bubble at boiling point in the fish kettle. Vitello tonnato is just as good or better made with loin of pork, and cold pork is delicious by itself, and more acceptable to the tender-hearted than veal. A seriously good ham on the bone, cooked by a proper butcher, is always delicious, as is the best smoked fish from somewhere fashionable like Loch Awe. And rather like Lord Lucan, who always lunched at the Cler- mont on hot lamb cutlets in winter and cold lamb cutlets in summer, I think that boned, stuffed chicken is good both hot and cold — one for the winter party menu, and one for the summer. The depressing and floppy piece of flesh that is a boned raw chicken turns miraculously when stuffed and roasted into something that looks pleasantly ostentatious, but is really no more difficult to make than meat loaf. A stuffing of ground meats, breadcrumbs, fresh herbs and different kinds of nuts lay- ered with chicken fillets works well, but there's nothing wrong with a cold roast chicken, if it's free-range and organic, except that some people, on first eating a chicken which actually tastes of chicken, think that it must have gone off. Let them eat coleslaw.
Anyone who feels that simple food like this lacks attitude could try some retro chic. Prawn cocktail is now thoroughly overdone, but there are still all those deli- cious and still unfashionable savoury mousses — the word 'savoury' itself is immensely retro. Avocado mousse and smoked haddock mousse, carefully made in the old English cordon bleu manner in ostentatious moulds, are easy and very good. So are stuffed eggs, filled with prawns and mayonnaise or simply with fro- mage frais and herbs. Cold avocado soup is both retro and the easiest thing to make I know. It looks good in a tall glass jug, as does dusky pink beetroot soup, or green- flecked cucumber and mint soup. I think aspic is about to make a comeback, though not in my household.
There are all kinds of easy ways to pro- duce delicious vegetables. One is to assem- ble a huge dish of cooked and raw vegetables surrounding a bowl of aioli, or anchoiade, or mayonnaise spiked with green tapenade. If you have made mayon- naise of some other kind to go with the fish, it will also go with a dish of plain asparagus, or plain green beans. If you have boiled new potatoes, a dressing of the most intense truffle oil will turn them into an effortless luxury. Another approach is to try harder and to assemble salads like the ones Hugo Arnold makes — rocket, radish and orange with black olives, or beetroot spiked with lemon, allspice, paprika and parsley. Broad bean purée is quick and easy, with olive oil and mint, and so are skinned broad beans with sliced baby radishes, or finely sliced fennel with roast- ed peppers and a few anchovies. Particular-
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ly delicious are artichoke hearts covered with a mixture of artichoke purée, smoked salmon or scallops, chervil, parsley and a vinaigrette with a touch of horseradish and crème fraiche. This involves scraping each artichoke leaf for a tiny spoonful of purée, but it is not nearly as laborious as it sounds, particularly if you make a point of making an effort with only one dish.
And why try harder? You need not both- er with an ambitious salad of burghul or couscous or laboriously barbecued aubergine. You only need best salad leaves and herbs, interesting bread and biscuits, and well chosen fruit and cheese. Those who insist on pudding could have goose- berry fool or syllabub, which are both extremely easy and retro, but suitable only for British summer weather. That is all there is to it. The British cold lunch really does not need to be nasty.
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