Random Recipe Adventure, Week 4

2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.

The book

Bistro Cooking, by Patricia Wells

How/where/when did I get it?

I have absolutely no idea. Both Tessa and I disavow all knowledge of its provenance. Oliver is 12 and honestly unlikely to have bought any kind of cookbook. Which leaves the cat. Maybe the cat bought it.

Have I used it since then?

It has never, as far as I can tell, been opened.

So what about it?

Well then.

There’s undoubtedly some good stuff in here. Tempting recipes from old France – roast duck with olives, moules à la Provençale, pissaladière, bouillabaisse. Grilled tuna with sauce vierge, made early in the week, was successful.

But.

Exhibit A: on first read-through, my eye was caught by a recipe for ’seven-hour leg of lamb’, a dish I cooked very recently and decided to use as a point of comparison.
The recipe in this book asks you to cook the lamb for seven hours (great idea) with garlic, thyme and white wine (excellent idea) at a temperature of 220 degrees (staggeringly bad idea). To be fair, she does say ‘it is best to check on the lamb from time to time, reducing the heat if the lamb begins to burn’.

You think?

Now it’s possible I’m being unfair. It’s possible that the lamb, when cooked at such a high heat for so long, miraculously doesn’t burn to a crisp and doesn’t sit for the last three hours in a smoking mess, setting off all your smoke alarms and resulting in an emergency callout of all the fire brigades within a five-mile radius.

Possible, but unlikely. And I’m not going to waste an expensive leg of lamb trying it out (personal opinion: this dish works best with the fattier and cheaper shoulder in any case – both meat and fat become exceptionally tender).

Exhibit B: a recipe for cheese puffs in which the instruction to ‘preheat the oven to 220 degrees’ comes after you’ve done a whole load of other stuff.

Turning on the oven in the middle of cooking isn’t ‘preheating’; it’s closer to ‘post-heating’.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you can leave things to sit while the oven heats, and you can have a nice cup of tea (other hot drinks are available) while you wait.

In this case, literally the last instruction given before the belated preheating is ‘the dough should still be warm’, a state of affairs that is less than likely to prevail once you’ve waited the half-hour it’s going to take for my oven to get to 220.

I get disproportionately irritated by this kind of stuff. It’s a sign that the recipes haven’t been tested properly, or even at all, and erodes faith in the recipe-giver.

So it was with some trepidation that we submitted ourselves to the Random Recipe Generator.

What Did The Random Recipe Generator throw up?

Oh dear. ‘Saucisson chaud pommes à l’huile’. Or, as the translation has it, ‘warm poached sausage with potato salad’.

Poached sausage.

There’s a fashion, inspired by Heston Blumenthal as far as I can tell, for ‘twice-cooking’ sausages: poaching then frying or grilling. I think it’s unnecessarily involved, but there you go. There are those who swear by it. And, again in the interests of fairness, this might well work ok with a French saucisson (as implied by the title) than our good old British sossidge.

However, the idea of serving up a flaccid, sloppy, anaemic flabtube, out of which all the flavour has been deliberately leeched without even the redeeming counter-step of a good browning to deliver a satisfying hit of gooey caramelisation – well God Jed, I don’t even want to know about it. And before you ask, yes the sausages we usually eat are of pretty good quality.

We had bangers and sauté potatoes. Beyond the core ingredients it had nothing to do with the given recipe.

It was bloody delicious.

The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?

Sorry. I wanted to like it, I really did. And there might be hidden gems. But three strikes and you’re definitely out.

EMBARRASSING UPDATE, 27/1/18: Turns out this was a Christmas present from my brother. Awkward and slightly worrying that I didn’t remember this. Might have to keep it now.

---

Like this? Want more? Subscribe to my newsletter.