COOKING WITH KNIVES

 A few years back I bought a cookery book titled One Knife, One Pot, One Dish. It was by Stephane Reynaud who I’d never heard of at the time – though he looks a cheerful enough fellow

And I certainly didn’t know he ran a restaurant in Shoreditch named Tratra, though I gather it’s now closed.

 

Nevertheless, the concept of one knife, one pot, pot dish sounded and continues to sound like a great idea.  The problem with the recipes in the book was that many of them involved ingredients that I’m unlikely to obtain in my current place of residence, despite there being a reasonable local butcher and a decent fish man who comes on Saturdays. I’m talking about things such as beef cheeks, pork cheeks, oxtail, veal shoulder, veal knuckle, speck, shadefish (no idea what that is), bintje potatoes (likewise). 

 

But the idea of the one pot dish never quite went away and so at the weekend having a bought a chicken and wanting to do something easy and mildly interesting with it, I chopped it up, marinated it, and in due course put it in an oven tray along with with potatoes (not bintjes) and some sprouts and then roasted the heck out of it.  Does an oven tray count as a one dish? I’m not sure but it worked pretty well.  And it looked like this:

 

To be fair, the end result isn’t a million miles away from Reynaud’s ‘Footy Chicken,' though that involves ketchup and a jar of chilies, but I only found that out afterwards.

 

Anyway, once my chicken was eaten, the carcass made a chicken stock.  Some left over potatoes and sprouts were added and liquidized, and there you have a very acceptable soup.

 I suppose this is in fact two dishes, and making the stock and the soup required a saucepan too, so in the end it may be two dishes, two pots, but still just the one knife.  Not such a catchy title, I know.

 

OH CANADIA!

So, since July 1^st was Canada Day and since July 4^th was US Independence Day, I decided to enjoy a joint celebration by turning to my copy of Mme. Jehane Benoit's Encyclopedia of Canadian Cooking, published 1970, and making something Canadian but using all–American ingredients.  I went for cream of parsley soup. 

Mme Benoit was quite a big deal in Canada back in the day, it seems, but her encyclopedia is a plain affair - “don’t look in this book … for recipes that resemble esoteric puzzles you must read ten times to understand” and the parsley soup recipe certainly doesn’t ask too much of the cook. (The book also contains a recipe for dry bread soup but I was aiming higher than that). 

a l'avant-garde du temps,  indeed

To make cream of parsley soup you chop up some parsley: probably best to use more than the recipe says, and also probably cut it smaller than I did.  Then you boil it in stock for 20 minutes.  

Simultaneously, and separately, you make a white sauce (butter, flour and milk) and when that’s done you combine it with the boiled parsley.

Trying to make the dish just a little less plain I added some onion and a splash of lemon juice (yes, I am a wild man) –and you could use sherry, I’m sure.

Now some might say this is just a slight variation on parsley sauce – but it was perfectly good – if not necessarily the very most exuberant way of celebrating a national holiday.  The recipe also recommends you serve the soup with a bowl of grated cheese, which arguably converts it into a slight variation on cheese sauce, or I suppose cheese soup.

You know when I first saw those Andy Warhol soup can images that include Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup (“great as a sauce”) – I imagined this was Warhol’s own playfully ironic invention.  I couldn't imagine there was any such thing as cheese soup.  It took me decades to realize this was a real thing.  Thus the gulf between the two Anglophone sides of the Atlantic.

You know, if you dig around on the interwebs you can see Andy Warhol eating all kinds of thing, but I haven’t ever seen a picture of him eating cheese soup.  I think, on balance, this is not very surprising.