Imperative cooking: Christmas counterblasts
L.465 iffirts.1
• •
I HAVE the solution to the Christmas problem, at least one of them: what to give
as presents. The Imperative solution not only saves the agonising, it avoids shopping when and where everyone else is shopping.
The solution is hampers, not bought but made in your own kitchen. Any credit is not mine, however, but belongs to a Greek friend, Elizabeth Leoussi, who unwittingly suggested it by turning up for dinner at the Anderson house recently clutching not expensive and boring chocolates, flowers or a bottle but a casserole full of stewed liver.
Give food. But not the dreary food found in commercial hampers — vacuum-packed smoked salmon, blocks of Christmas cake, III plastic pink Turkish delight, over-sugared stem ginger, stale nuts, endless biscuits and elderflower cordial (I fantasise not: that is what I spotted on a survey last week. Mead is also popular). This nonsense fulfils nei- ther of the two conditions for a welcome hamper. Those who receive the hamper will be eating enough boring food already.
What they want is something which will blast its way through the soggy sprouts and', tasteless turkey. They also want something; which will give them the excuse to stop eat- ing the turkey, something which demands to be eaten in place of the turkey, some- thing which must be eaten immediately — otherwise it will rot.
So, in the hamper go home-made game sausages, with no preservative but with a prominent note explaining that they were made on Monday, 23 December and should be cooked within two days, some pâté, unsealed with butter and with a simi- lar message. And then raw salmon mari- naded in lemon or raw squid with olive oil and crushed dried chillies, again with notes explaining the date when they will be at their peak. I have just done some herrings the same way — salted first in their case and they have proved most robust. You may wish to embellish the note with colour- ful, and not entirely truthful, accounts of the illnesses which will be visited on those who delay consumption — worms, dysen- tery, salmonella, trichinosis, insanity.
For maximum effect add a good slab of salt cod which you have soaked for the nec- essary 36 hours (to remove excess salt), then left for another 24. Wrap it closely: when they unwrap it, it will cry out for attention. Or 'bring on' a good Gorgonzola in the airing cupboard and send it just right. All these will totally subvert the planned regime of the recipient household to the immense gratitude of anyone — of taste — in it.
I have explained in past columns about making pâté and sausages. The ingredients are simple. Take 23 December off and make them and the other hamper presents on that day. It is always sensible to make pâté and sausages on the same occasion. They call for several common ingredients — pork lean, pork fat and in this case hare — and similar chopping and mincing pro- cesses. While idiots bustle their way through sweaty shops buying diaries, suspenders, wallets and cookery books, stay comfortably at home chopping, mincing, soaking sausage skins and rolling them on sausage- making attachments.
This year I have just learned of a new candidate for the imperative hamper. Mike, at the Royal Oak, produced a simple recipe for Kimchi, the Korean cabbage, garlic and chilli pickle (amended from Bruce Cost's Foods from the East, Century). Now if the poor dears have to eat ghastly cold turkeys or whatever, this is an invaluable aid: just soak 61b of Chinese celery cabbage in salted water for 24 hours (2 oz salt), drain, add 3 tbsp each (at least) of ginger, ground dried red chillies and chopped garlic and a little sugar. Stuff it in sterilised pots and get it fermenting at room temperature for four or five days, letting out the gasses every now and then, seal and refrigerate. Contrive that your friends open it with their other pre- sents. Suddenly into a room suffocatingly stinking of six perfumes, two nasal sprays, three after-shaves, one pot-pourri, a hint of damp overcoat from the hall and much more than a hint of yesterday's sprouts will come the refreshing blast from the East. The effect is, what lower-class youf current- ly terms 'magic'.
The recipe can be improved yet further by adding Daikon (what Indian shops sell as Mouli though I have always preferred Daikon: it would make a good Christian name for a lower-class youf: 'I said to stop that, Daikon, I said stop') and anchovy sauce such as the Thai fish sauce. Other recipes such as that in Korean Cooking by Ji Sook Choe and Yukiko Moriyama, Joie Inc., give refinements and explain the bene- fits of Kimchi. It claims the flavours stimu- late the mucous membranes, the organic acids control stomach secretion. Fermenta- tion produces vitamins Bl , B2, B12 and nicotinic acid amide. 'Moreover the fibres activate bowel movement, solving constipa- tion'. There, just the ticket for Boxing Day.
And all that's just one present in the hamper. The best way with hampers is to do lots, in fact give everyone a hamper, varying them according to the worth of the recipi- ent, their circumstances and how much you wish to help, embarrass, kill or cure them. The test of a good present is said to be whether you would like to receive it your- self. If true, that would make the ultimate Imperative hamper one of two sorts. Both have 'blast' potential and both command immediate attention. I'd like either a bag- lined hamper full of live eels or, best of all, one with a variety of wild and domestic ducks — dead ducks, you understand, what the veg-loonies call 'dead animals', each still in the feather; mallard, teal, widgeon, Muscovy and Aylesbury all kept just long enough to be demanding not only instant cooking and eating but that I have an after- noon of peace, plucking, gutting and stuff- ing in the kitchen.
Digby Anderson
Previous page
