The Duke of Cumberland Arms

 

 

I can be extremely demanding, often. One one such occasion I wanted to have lunch in a country pub that had all of the following things: a log fire, beams, a display of friendly dogs, relaxed and amiable staff, proper ales, nice wooden tables and rustic charm in abundance. Not to mention a total absence of a TV blaring in the background, silly posh furniture and novelty ornaments. When it came to the food, I wanted delicious hearty home-cooked food NOT served on irritating square plates, and not heated up out of a sous-vide packet. Not much to ask is it??? Well I find that sometimes country pubs have all the charm of a Harvester, with those horrible over-long menus filled with flowery menu descriptions, that always have some strange kind of faux-Asian crispy duck pancakes in the starters menu, or something ‘drizzled in balsamic jus’. (Weird).

This pub happily ticked all of the boxes that I needed it to – no mean feat! Tucked away down a verdant country track, flanked on either side by tiny houses that look like fairytale woodcutter cottages, The Duke of Cumberland, near Midhurst in West Sussex, is a little jewel shining in a sea of lacklustre country taverns, serving wonderful food and ales in a blissful setting.

 

It looks like something out of a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale:

 

 

 

The homely interior, like a cosy front room:

 

 

On one afternoon in February, the friendly staff at the Duke accommodated 16 hungry adults and 3 energetic toddlers with such a chilled out friendly attitude I thought I’d died and gone to service heaven. They seated us in a lovely snug room with wooden trestle tables at the front of the pub, which we had all to ourselves. Even though we were chaotic, noisy and messy, the staff catered to all whims with wide smiles. It’s not easy finding a pub that will happily let kids run riot and make a mess. The Duke has pretty gardens and ornamental trout ponds which kept the kids captivated, and the adults didn’t feel they were having to compromise on having a grown-up style lunch. Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention a splendid wooden outdoor seating area inside which a log fire was kept roaring all day, so you could sit outside and have a ciggy while keeping warm and dry.

And now to the food…

Ham, egg and chips - mighty fodder:

 

  

 

Hare pappardalle: rich delicious sauce, light buttery noodles:

 

 

The Duke’s signature Cumberland sausage and mash - hearty:

 

   

 

A crab risotto, full of spring-like flavours:

 

 

Desserts were also good, although I was slightly mystified by the need for the sticky toffee pudding to be cut up into several ornamental pieces and presented on a swanky square (tsk tsk) plate – I would have preferred it wedged in a bowl drowned in custard. But it still tasted lovely:

 

 

 

The chocolate fondant was deliciously gooey:

 

I can’t wait to go back to the Duke of Cumberland for a lazy summer afternoon where we can all sit outside in the beautiful gardens and sip ales in the sunshine – followed by a light lunch of sausages and puddings!

The Duke of Cumberland Arms: website
Henley, nr Midhurst
West Sussex

Fire & Knives

This is a delicious new(ish) print quarterly on all matters to do with food and drink. And I’ve got an article published in this month’s issue, hot off the press! You'll find all sorts of quirky articles in here from a wide spectrum of writers covering weird and wonderful topics - retro food, knives, ham and all things nostalgic. One contributor has submitted photographs of his deceased grandfathers's beautifully handwritten food shopping lists, and there is even has a crossword! Fire & Knives is lovingly put together by The Guardian's Tim Hayward.

You can subscribe to it here.

Lemon curd cheesecake

I used to work as a freelancer on various food magazines – when I was allowed to write something, I loved it. But most of the time I did sub-editing and proofreading of recipes and supplement sections – it could be the most toe-curlingly-dull work ever. Not least because everyone typically ignores the freelancer, stuck at the crappy corner desk, as though they are some kind of alien species. But one benefit of my time on these magazines was that it made me super-anal about recipe quantities. I get so irate when cookbooks and mags don’t get their quantities right. It’s easily done, though – we’re all human.

I often find that Nigel Slater’s recipes in the Observer have mistakes in them. I know too well how that must happen – the recipes get sub-edited down to death to fit a tiny space. Many was the time I was driven around the bend by the same problem – trying to make 250 words fit a 50 word space – argh! I probably did exactly the same thing 1000 times over during my years at Delicious or Waitrose Food Illustrated magazines. And probably do it all the time on this blog. Oh well!

Anyway, since the news is unrelentingly depressing at the moment, I thought I’d put up a nice cheesecake recipe to cheer everyone up. I love cheesecake, and recently have been craving lemony tangy flavours. This one is based on two recipes by Nigel Slater, which I’ve tweaked around a bit. It’s a bit bloody good.

Serves 8 – 10 people who don’t count calories

You will need:

Lemon curd topping

Zest and juice of 4 unwaxed lemons
150g sugar
100g butter cut into cubes
3 organic eggs and 1 egg yolk

Cheesecake

Biscuit base:
90g butter
350g digestive biscuits (or a mixture of 200g shortbread and 150g oatcakes)

Filling:
1 x 284g tub double Jersey cream
100g sugar
500g full fat cream cheese (eg Philadelphia)
Scant capful of vanilla extract (use cap from bottle)

First make the lemon curd. Put the lemon zest, juice, butter and sugar into a heatproof bowl set over a simmering pan of water – make sure the bowl doesn’t touch the water. Stir from time to time until everything is melted. In a separate bowl, mix the eggs and egg yolk with a fork, then stir into the lemon mixture. Let the mixture cook over the simmering water, using a whisk to stir regularly, for between 10 and 15 minutes, until it thickens up like custard. Take off the heat and let cool down. As it cools, give it an occasional stir with the whisk. (If you can wait that long, it will keep for 2 weeks in the fridge)

 

Your lovely lemon curd:

 

 

Now make your cheesecake base.  Line the base of a 23-cm springform tin with a disk of greaseproof paper. Blitz the biscuits to fine sandy crumbs in a food processor, then melt the butter and mix everything together in a bowl. Press the buttery biscuit crumbs into the base of the tin with your fingers, pressing hard to compact the crumbs together. Put the tin in the fridge to let the base harden for about 30 minutes.

To make the cheesecake mixture, whip the cream and sugar together until just stiff – it will take mere seconds if you use an electric whisk. Then using a spatula  (not the whisk) mix in the cream cheese and vanilla extract. Then take your cooled lemon curd and fold two thirds of it into the cheesecake mix – try not to mix it in totally as it’s nice to get a ‘ripple’ effect. Tip the mixture into the cake tin and spread flat with a spatula. Then spread the remaining lemon curd on top of the cheesecake – you want to get a nice even spread of lemony goodness. Chill in the fridge for at least 4 hours before serving with a dollop of lemon curd on the side if you have any left…

A deliciously untidy slice of lemony heaven:

 

Parmesan, mozzarella and pomodoro bake – thanks Joanna Lumley

       

Last night I was gripped by a food memory that I hadn’t had since I was an angst-ridden teenager. I thought I wanted macaroni and cheese for dinner, and while I was going through the list of what I needed to buy, I suddenly recalled a recipe that my mum had made at my 18^th birthday party way back in the early 90’s. It was inspired by a Joanna Lumley ad for Sainsbury’s where she coaxed the viewers, in her posh velvety tones, through making a pomodoro pasta bake with mozzarella, parmesan and tomatoes. One sighting of this ad and I was hooked!

The sight of Joanna Lumley tearing fresh basil leaves up with her glossy lacquered fingernails was mesmerising – in the late 90’s I don’t think I had even seen fresh basil outside of a jar of pesto sauce. The mozzarella I was used to was the rubbery grated stuff on top of pizzas, and parmesan came as a dried powder in a tub smelling of sick. Joanna talked through the process of adding chunks of fresh mozzarella and grated parmesan to a tomato sauce, then adding fresh basil to it and mixing with penne (penne? How exotic!) then baking in the oven, topped with more fresh parmesan. By the end of the advert, I think most of the UK was drooling. Sales of those ingredients must have soared.

I begged my Mum to make it for my 18^th birthday party, which she did very graciously. I don’t think she was quite expecting that her weird daughter wanted all her friends to come to the dinner wearing drag, and since the majority of my mates were male, we had a few of bearded ladies with comedy makeup sitting around the table. Some of the boys were squeezed into ballgowns with their hairy chests poking out at the top. The few girls that came along had drawn burnt cork moustaches on themselves. (KW do you remember this?!)

Everyone arrived with bottles of cheap booze in carrier bags, which my Mum, horrified, promptly confiscated. We were allowed exactly 1 bottle of Martini Rosso on the table, shared between about 15 of us. Luckily, I managed to ‘release’ the rest of the booze from its prison and we hid it under the table, furtively topping up our glasses. It was a hilarious night. But my most abiding memory was this amazing pasta dish, courtesy of Joanna Lumley, Sainsbury’s and those trusty recipe cards given out at the checkouts – does anybody out there still have this one in an old ringbinder somewhere?

Here’s the recipe, which is entirely cooked from memory, so it won’t be accurate. Not bad recall, though, after such a massive gap of years – it tastes just how I remember it!

Serves 4 – 5 people

You will need:

300g penne shaped pasta, cooked until just underdone. I like wholewheat penne – it has a nice flavour.
2 x 400g tins plum tomatoes (use the best quality you can afford)3 tablespoons tomato puree
2 medium sized balls of fresh mozzarella, chopped into large chunks
100g + 70g fresh Parmesan cheese, grated
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 small stem fresh rosemary, chopped
3 tablespoons fresh chopped oregano
1 large bunch fresh basil, chopped into thin slices
6 large fresh tomatoes, chopped into large chunks
Olive oil
Salt & freshly ground pepper

Preheat your oven to 180C. Oil a large baking tray. Put the chunks of fresh tomatoes in the tray and whack in the oven while you sort out the sauce and pasta.

Then make your sauce. Gently heat the crushed garlic over a medium heat in some olive oil. Add the chopped rosemary, then when everything is fragrant (but don’t burn) add the tinned tomatoes. Chop them up over the back of a wooden spoon if they’re whole ones. Add the tomato puree and oregano and simmer for about 15 minutes. Then add 100g grated Parmesan and all the chopped mozzarella. Let it melt slowly in, simmer for about 5 minutes, then season to taste with salt and pepper and add the chopped basil right at the end. Remove from the heat and set aside.

Phwoar – tomato-ey cheesy goodness!

Once more with herbs – I could probably drink this like a smoothie:

While you make the sauce you can get the pasta on the go. Don’t cook it through completely – it has to be a little bit hard as it’ll cook more in the oven.

When your pasta and sauce are ready, take the tray of tomatoes out of the oven. Mix everything together in the tray, then top everything with the remaining 70g of grated Parmesan. Bake until the top is crusty and golden – about 20 minutes.

Woah, it’s like food porn – look at those crunchy bits just tempting you:

It’s intensely savoury, cheesy and herby with a lovely rich taste of tomato. Great for a big carbo blow-out!

I was so hungry I couldn’t be bothered to make the bowl look smear-free for the camera:

Does anyone else remember the Joanna Lumley Sainsbury’s ad?

Food sharing anxiety

I have long harboured a realisation which I’ve felt too ashamed about admitting for years, but now I’m going to come out into the open with it. In a nutshell, I absolutely HATE sharing small plates of food with other people – ie tapas style dishes. It really drives me round the bend and ruins many an eating out experience. It just won’t do for me!

I think it probably stems from university days. I would be minding my own business eating my beans on toast, or tuna and cheese toastie, and then from out of nowhere my annoying housemate C’s fork would plunge into my plate from across the table as she cheerfully helped herself to my dinner. I would cry out ‘Oi what the hell are you doing’ and she’d retort with ‘Oh stop being so uptight’ while plunging her fork in for a second time with complete impunity. I would feel almost murderous rage at what she’d done – she had violated my dinner. It amounted to a complete lack of respect for my personal space and annoyed the crap out of me.

Then began my first forays into Spanish-style tapas eating. I would find the whole process unbearable – people umm-ing and ahh-ing about how many plates of food to order: did we have too much, did we have too little? Then I’d find that the plates that I’d ordered would be placed at the opposite end of the table to where I was sitting, and by the time I’d get it passed to me, someone else would have polished off most of it. There would never be enough tapas for everyone, but no-one would really speak up and order more. I would find the whole thing an ordeal and leave feeling disgruntled and still hungry, cheated out of a proper dinner. I still can’t get the memory of an unbearable tapas meal I experienced in Bloomsbury out of my head – there were at least 20 people around the table, and tapas is only bearable for two people at most, perhaps a maximum of four, but 20 is sheer insanity. How I hated the ridiculous dance of forks around the last morsel of chorizo or mushroom, and the fact that a lot of the food came in portions that were impossible to divide among more than two people. Spanish tortilla, I rest my case.

I have two good friends who have a habit of always ordering two separate dishes when we eat out and dividing them down the middle to share them with each other. I find the whole thing incomprehensible – imagine if you are really enjoying your plate of food to know that halfway through you have to surrender it and swap over to something that you might not like as much? It's like they don't want to commit to anything. I’m clearly far too impatient and greedy. I like nothing more than to have my plate of food in front of me, safe in the knowledge that I’ll get to enjoy the whole thing, without someone’s fork plunging rudely into it for a taste. Unless I give them permission first…

The only real exception to my dislike of sharing food is in Asian cuisine, where you traditionally order a lot of plates between you and share. It just isn’t really the done thing to order one dish for yourself. For some reason this experience is really satisfying as the portions tend to be larger, and you get to try a lot of different things. (Actually I've just thought of one annoying thing: there are four of you dining, but three spring rolls arrive on the plate. Trying to carve them in half with chopsticks is SO annoying!) But I’m afraid tapas, and all those small trendy plates of food that seem to be cropping up everywhere in gastropubs and Soho Italian tapas restaurants just make me feel on edge and perpetually irked. How on earth are you meant to share a soft boiled duck egg and soldiers between four hungry diners? Gah!

Are you as intolerant as I am, or do you think I should just mellow out? I’d love to hear from some similarly picky diners…