THE GOOD LIFE -7 *:1 - 'r •
Pamela Vandyke Price
Despite the people who write to me saying I am corrupting youth by suggesting one should drink wine, encouraging drunken driving by advocating a tablespoonful of plonk in a stew and being sinfully luxurious by bothering about food and drink at all, we are drinking more wine — hurray! In the first six months of this year we slurped back more than 400 million bottles, 28.7 per cent up on the same period for last year, the main increase being in table wines.
But to show that I bear no malice to the vituperative correspondents (I suspect the majority are very plain ladies, with immacu° late kitchens and husbands — if they have them — whose pockets bulge with indigestion tablets), am going to give a reallY economical recipe which I used to serve to hungry medical studentS when my household budget waS very skimped. It makes a good lunch, or supper, dish, with whiell you need nothing but some fruit and, if you like, a green salad. It is one that Elizabeth David wrote years ago for the Merrydown Wine Company, which I have never seen reprinted. Sausages baked in cider (ssh — you can also use dry white wine!), with hot potato salad: Alloy/ 2-4 pork chipolatas per person, prick the skins and put in a baking tin, half covered with dry vintage cider, and bake in a moderate °ye! 35-40 minutes, turning once, whey 1
they are brown on one side. Boil Waxy potatoes in their skins (2-4 Per person), peel them while hot, slice them into a warmed dish, mix with a dressing of olive oil, a drop or two of cider vinegar, salt, pepper and about 2 tablespoonfuls of dry vintage cider. Turn the Potatoes carefully, to absorb the dressing. There must not be so much that they swim in it. Take the sausages, by now brown on both Sides, and arrange on top of the dish. It is essential to follow Mrs bavid's instructions for cooking the potatoes, which must not be floury, or become soggy. I allow more oil than vinegar for the dressing, as I always do, but you can make a sharpish version by using half and half, and if you use a spicy sausage (I'm a fine-cut bland type myself) then check you do not put too much seasoning in the dressing, though you may like to use a little mild mustard. as Well
Spike and Charmian Hughes's Eating French and Eating Italian (Methuen, £1.60 each) are now in hardback. They enable one to cope With menus, wine lists, housekeeping abroad, shopping for Picnics and are happy in style and candidly personal — if the authors don't like something, they say so. I would have liked something on aP4ritifs, mineral waters and liqueurs, and I regret that, in the French book, they include only the wines of the Loire and RhOne in detail. But it's an indication of the Pleasant practicality of the books that I would have liked them both to be longer.
Previous page
