Soup 2

Another soup in this occasional autumnal series of soup and today it is pumpkin and mascarpone soup from 'The River Cafe Easy Two' by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. The ingredients just shout "AUTUMN!":

800g pumpkin, cut into 2cm chunks
3 medium potatoes, cut the same
3 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 tsp fennel seeds
250g plum tomatoes (I used a tin of plum tomatoes)
500ml stock
salt, pepper
150g Mascarpone
Olive oil to finish
50g Parmesan

Using a heavy bottomed saucepan, put the pumpkin, potato, tomato and garlic in and cover with the stock, seasoning with salt, pepper and the fennel seeds. Simmer for 30 minutes until the vegetables are tender. Mash with a potato masher and serve with spoonfuls of mascarpone, drizzles of olive oil and shavings of Parmesan.

Soup 1

Inspired by lunch at the Griffin Inn and the onset of Autumn, the time seems right for soup. For tonight, as a starting point, we thought we'd revisit the French classic soup a'l'oignon. There are possibly as many recipes for this soup as there are onions in France, but we used one of several from the brilliant soup book, A celebration of soup by Lindsey Bareham. This is a pretty definitive book to turn to when you want a soup recipe. There have been others since but to me, this is the best soup book you can buy.

1 tbsp olive oil
40g butter
700g onions, thinly sliced
1 tsp salt
pepper
pinch of sugar
40g flour
150ml white wine
2l stock
3 tbsp brandy
slices of toasted bread
100-200g cheese (e.g. Gruyere, Emmental or Parmesan)

Heat oil and butter in a heavy pan with a lid. Add onions and cook very gently for 15-20 minutes. Remove lid, add salt and sugar and cook for 30 to 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want the onions a deep golden caramelised colour but not burnt. Stir in the flour and cook for a few minutes before adding the white wine and stirring through. Add the stock and bring back to the boil before simmering for a further 30 to 45 minutes. When ready, place the slices of toast in the bottom of soup bowls and top with the cheese. Add the brandy to the soup and serve over the toast slice in the soup bowls.

A recipe for onion soup from 1802 is relatively terse in its instruction as recipes of this period tend to be, unlike the title of the book; The art of cookery made easy comprising, ample directions for preparing every article requisite for furnishing the tahles of nobleman, gentleman and tradesman (second edition) by John Mollard:

Onion Soup.
TAKE eight middling-sized peeled onions, cut them into very thin slices, pass them with a quarter of a pound of fresh butter and flour till tender; then add three quarts of veal stock; make it boil twenty minutes; skim it, season it with salt, and add a leason; mix it well with a whisk, make it simmer, and serve it up.

Griffin Inn, Fletching

Faced with a sunny, autumnal October Monday, we decided to have a day off and go out for a spot of lunch followed by a stroll. Luckily Penjamin remembered a recommendation from friends for the Griffin Inn in Fletching, Sussex. I'd passed through Fletching previously and had eaten in another pub there but had not yet tried the Griffin, despite the high praise that is heaped upon it (Sussex dining pub of the year, The Telegraph, etc.)

As the weather was so clement, we got a table out in the garden, looking out over the supposed 10-miles of views. I tried the draft beer from Harvey's, which was as good as it should be, whilst Penjamin had the house Chardonnay, of which she ventured no opinion as she necked it.

For the food, I tried the "Bruschetta of wild mushrooms with some sort of cheese that I forgot", not an inconsiderable £8.50 for a single slice of mushrooms on toast. Penjamin had a soup of lentils with cabbage, somewhere around a fiver.

Whilst these are "gastropub" prices, the food was certainly a notch above the norm, probably on a par with the George and Dragon at Speldhurst. The bruschetta was a slice of good sourdough, grilled and toasted and piled with a heap of real wild mushrooms, rather than a handful of cultivated mushrooms bulked out with a few soaked dried mushrooms. The soup was a tomatoey broth with lentils and some strips of shredded cabbage. I feared the lentils might have leant it towards a thick stodge or the cabbage towards Eastern European peasant gruel, but it was an almost Italian light soup with the lentils and cabbage providing flavour rather than body. Still my bruschetta was better.

Lacking imagination of choice, for mains we chose the same, "Samosa of butternet squash with some sort of cheese that I forgot but different to the mushrooms on a bed of chard with some roast potato disks". This came as two large triangular pillows of filo pastry straining to contain volcanic pureed squash with some wonderful spicing. These sat atop the chard and the disappointingly overcooked and chewy potatoes. The samosas were fantastic and the chard faired well as a supporting pile of greenery. At £12-ish they had to earn there price which I think they did, leaving us both sated and the plates emptied.

It's not the sort of everyday pub (and these dishes were from the bar menu, not the a la carte which pushes the prices up another notch) unless you're a retired city gent with a penchant for large lunches and cricket, the ranks of which seemed to be filling the interior of the pub. Service was very good and the kitchens, visible as you passed from inside to the garden, were running full tilt with a large team of staff that goes someway to show that good food and service can be a fairly staff-heavy operation.

They also have an outdoor wood fired oven that sadly wasn't in operation on the day of our visit where they prepare roasts and, I hope, pizzas and breads.

Radio 4, The food programme

This Sunday's Food Programme on Radio 4 was a corker. Penjamin and myself were listening and as the guests, Henry Dimbleby and Anissa Helou, talked about mezze we just sat drooling and getting hungrier and hungrier by the minute. Henry Dimbleby, of the Leon restaurant chain was visiting a mezze festival in Lebanon. It sounded to me like he was visiting a place I've heard of before, somewhere up in the mountains where over the years a collection of mezze restaurants has grown up, centred around the Bardouni river in the Bekaa or Beqaa valley as it is variously known.

The other guest was a cookery writer who I'd vaguely heard of but not followed up on her writing until know. Anissa Helou is a writer and broadcasting regular on Radio 4 (Woman's hour, Veg talk, Food programme) originally from Beiruit but now based in London. Some of the recipes from her books are on the Radio 4 Food Programme website.

We weren't alone in the rumbling of our stomachs threatening to drown out the radio as when we visited friends that evening, they didn't require much effort to force us to join them in a dish of tabbuleh, the creation of which had been inspired by the same programme.