Random Recipe Adventure, Week 6

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.

WEEK 6

The book

Gammon and Spinach, by Simon Hopkinson

How/where/when did I get it?

Me and my memory. I bought it myself. At least I’m fairly sure I did. Yes, definitely. I think. And as for when, it was definitely some time in the past, of that much I’m certain.

Have I used it since then?

Many, many times. The ‘fish pie’ page is more fish pie than paper; the recipe for bacon du Bedat used to be a regular snack in our household and is simply crying out to be resurrected; and I’ve just been reminded of the simple brilliance of the casserole of roasted chicken with bacon and vegetables, which I want to cook RIGHT NOW.

What Did The Random Recipe Generator throw up?

Grilled lamb cutlets with buttered parsley purée.

So what about it?

As we progress through the early stages of this project, I’m beginning to realise that some things are preordained. The idea was always to make these books earn their place on the shelves, and I knew at the outset that a few would be effectively subject to protected status. Gammon and Spinach, like all the Hopkinson books, was one of them.

Back back back in the day, I used not only to buy newspapers daily, but devotedly removed all the Simon Hopkinson recipes from The Independent and kept them, folded, gravy-spattered and raggedy, in a file of sorts. They have, at some point, disappeared, but that needn’t matter, because all the very best of them appear in his various books, of which this is the third.

Why do I love Hopkinson so much? Let me count the ways.

1. He’s what my mum called ‘good and greedy’. He clearly loves food. You might think this a prerequisite for a chef and food writer, but I sometimes wonder what, at heart, some of them are really interested in. Everything I’ve ever read by Hopkinson tells me that for him the food comes first, second and third.
2. He can really write. I can think of few food writers from whose prose oozes quite so much pure glee. Add to that a wealth of knowledge and experience, and an innate understanding of what’s what – and particularly what isn’t and should never be allowed to be what – and you have a persuasive combination.
3. He doesn’t take any nonsense. As an example I give you this introduction to the (excellent, of course) fennel soup recipe:
   ‘A creamed vegetable soup is a difficult thing to find in these days of incessant garnish. As far as I am concerned, the only ‘garnish’ to such a bowlful is a sprinkle of very small crisp croutons. Anything else simply gets in the way of the very idea; by which I mean diced fennel (why laboriously purée and sieve if you put bits back in?), its fronds (green on white may be pretty, but very white is very pure) or another pointless herbal scattering. Leave it alone! Croutons, however, are different. Croutons do nice things to the inside of the mouth.’

‘Croutons do nice things to the inside of the mouth.’ ‘Pointless herbal scattering’. That’s why I love Hopkinson.

I cooked the food the way he told me to, and ate it with people I love. That’s what it’s all about.

The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?

Need you ask?

---

Like this? Want more? Subscribe to my newsletter.