Kitchen notebook · folio 014 · winter

Salt & Season

Fourth edition · 3 recipes
Tested in a domestic oven
Yield scales from the stepper

The winter pantry

A pantry in winter is a slower thing. The fresh herbs are gone, the tomatoes are memory, and what remains is the durable architecture of cooking: flour, salt, fat kept cool in a crock, dried beans that have waited a season without complaint. This notebook is written for that shelf.

Every recipe here starts from what keeps. Quantities are given at a stated yield, and the stepper beside each title rewrites them for however many people are actually at the table — no mental arithmetic over the sink. Tick an ingredient as it goes into the bowl and it files itself into the shopping list on the right, so the notebook doubles as the note you take to the shop.

Season at the end, taste again, then season once more. Salt is not a finish, it is a volume knob.Marginal note, page 41

Nothing here needs a machine you do not own. The bread wants time rather than technique; the soup wants a low flame and a lid left slightly ajar; the pears want a pan that is genuinely hot before anything goes in.

Rye & treacle loaf

1 loaf
Total 3 h 10Rise 2 h Oven 220 °CDifficulty easy

Ingredients

  • 300 g dark rye flour
  • 200 g strong white flour
  • 7 g fast-action yeast
  • 12 g fine salt
  • 1 tbsp black treacle
  • 330 ml warm water
  • 20 g butter, softened
  • 1 tsp caraway seed

Method

  1. Stir the flours, yeast, salt and caraway together in a wide bowl while the kettle cools to warm.
  2. Work in the treacle and butter, then the water, until you have a stiff, shaggy dough — wetter than you think, drier than you fear.
  3. Cover and leave two hours. Fold the dough over itself twice during that time, at whatever intervals suit you.
  4. Shape into a long tin loaf, prove forty minutes, then bake 220 °C for twenty minutes and 200 °C for twenty more.
  5. Cool completely on a rack. Rye finishes cooking as it cools; cutting it warm ruins the crumb.
Margin noteIf the loaf domes and cracks along one side, your oven is hotter at the top than the dial admits — drop a shelf and rotate at the halfway mark.

Brown butter pears

4 servings
Total 45 mHands 10 m Heat mediumDifficulty easy

Ingredients

  • 6 firm pears
  • 60 g butter
  • 60 g demerara sugar
  • 1 lemon, zested
  • ½ tsp ground cinnamon
  • 150 ml dry cider
  • 1 pinch sea salt

Method

  1. Peel and quarter the pears. Melt the butter in a wide pan until it foams and then smells of hazelnuts.
  2. Scatter in the sugar, wait for it to darken one shade, then lay the pears in cut side down and leave them alone for four minutes.
  3. Add cider, cinnamon, lemon zest and salt. Shake the pan rather than stirring, and reduce until the sauce coats a spoon.
  4. Serve warm, with cold cream or nothing at all.
Margin noteUnder-ripe pears hold their shape and take the sauce better; a soft pear collapses into jam within a minute of the cider going in.

Leek & potato soup

6 bowls
Total 55 mSimmer 30 m Heat lowDifficulty easy

Ingredients

  • 5 leeks, washed well
  • 700 g waxy potatoes
  • 40 g butter
  • 1.2 l vegetable stock
  • 2 sprigs thyme
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 4 tbsp crème fraîche

Method

  1. Sweat the sliced leeks in butter with the lid on, over low heat, until collapsed and sweet — eight minutes, no colour.
  2. Add potatoes, stock, thyme and bay. Bring to a bare tremble and hold it there for thirty minutes with the lid ajar.
  3. Blend until pale, then loosen with hot stock. It should fall from the spoon in a ribbon, not a lump.
  4. Finish each bowl with crème fraîche and a grind of pepper.
Margin noteSand in leeks ruins a soup invisibly. Split the leaves lengthways and rinse under a running tap before slicing.

Colophon

Set in Georgia on a cream ground, printed one folio at a time. Quantities round to sensible amounts when you scale them; where a fraction would be absurd — half a bay leaf — the recipe says so instead.

Winter
folio
014