Browsing in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago, I
happened across a cookery book by Ainsley Harriott. Remember him? He was a TV
cook back in the Nineties, appearing on shows like Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook and Good
Morning with Anne and Nick. I recall that one year, Alex and I bought one
of his books, Ainsley Harriott’s Barbecue
Bible, as a birthday present for Dad. Like quite a few other things that
were big in Britain in the Nineties, such as Frank Skinner and Red Dwarf, his star may have waned but
he’s still doing stuff, having resurfaced on Strictly a couple of years ago (Frank Skinner and Red Dwarf, by the way, are also still
going, although the former isn’t as funny as he used to be and the latter is on
Dave rather than the BBC these days).
Ainsley is still keeping his hand in with the cooking,
for the book that I found was a (relatively) recent offering, published in 2009
by BBC Books no less. Just Five Ingredients
is just what it says on the cover, offering (so says the blurb) “a collection
of mouth-watering dishes that use a maximum of five ingredients – perfect for
the time-short, budget-conscious cook.” Funnily enough, that’s the concept
behind Jamie Oliver’s latest book, so you could say that Ainsley is ahead of
the curve.
On flipping through Just
Five Ingredients I saw a few recipes that I liked the sound of, so I bought
the book which now stands next to another recent acquisition, Rick Stein’s Long Weekends. The first
recipe as made from the book was Welsh rarebit – cheese on toast, but with the
cheese grated and made into a sauce of sorts before being put onto the bread
and toasted. No rabbits are involved (much like the toads that are absent from
toad-in-the-hole and the woodcock that doesn’t appear in Scotch
woodcock), and quite why it’s spelt ‘rarebit’ rather than ‘rabbit’ I am not
entirely sure, although this dish is the only time when ‘rabbit’ is spelt as ‘rarebit’.
What goes into the sauce as well as grated cheese is a
matter for debate; looking through some of our other cook books, there are a few
variations although Worcestershire sauce and mustard of some sort (usually but
not always English) are common features. Nigel Slater (in Real Fast Food) complains of “mixtures that will not thicken or
that turn irretrievably lumpy”; he reckons on adding butter and a couple of tablespoons
of beer, with the result to be eaten “as a snack with the rest of the beer”.
Delia Smith has a Welsh Rarebit Soufflé (in Delia
Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and Welsh Rarebit Jacket Potatoes (in Delia’s How to Cook: Book One); the
former includes butter, flour, French mustard, milk, eggs and cayenne pepper,
while the latter has finely grated onion and “1 tablespoon Red Onion, Tomato
and Chilli Relish (see page 188)”. Jamie Oliver’s, which can be found in Jamie at Home, is not just Welsh rarebit
but “Welsh rarebit with attitude”, containing eggs, crème fraiche and “4
tablespoons of cheeky chilli-pepper chutney (see page 321) or shop-bought
chilli jam”; like Slater, he says it’s best to have it with beer. Common
consensus is that the cheese to be used is Cheddar, although Slater hedges his
bets; “Stilton or Cheddar have enough of a tang to be interesting, Caerphilly
or Wensleydale less so”. Going way back, Mrs Beeton calls for Cheshire or
Gloucester cheese (she, of course, was writing at a time before Cheddar became
the nation’s cheese of choice); she didn’t grate it, advocating that the cheese
be sliced, toasted and then have “a little made mustard and a seasoning of
pepper” spread over it. Mrs Beeton also has a recipe for Scotch Rarebit which
involves a contraption called a “cheese toaster with hot-water reservoir”.
Ainsley’s five ingredients are vintage Cheddar cheese,
eggs, English mustard, Worcesteshire sauce and, or course, bread (as far as he’s
concerned, salt and pepper aren’t counted among the five ingredients, which is
fair enough). The cheese is grated, the egg is separated. The yolk, along with
the mustard and the Worecestershire sauce, is mixed in with the cheese. Then
the egg white is whisked into stiff peaks – on reading this I groaned, for here
was a job for the electric mixer which would in turn involve more washing-up
afterwards than I’d hoped. Anyway, once whisked, the egg whites are folded into
the mix (just like in Delia’s soufflé; Jamie, by contrast, only uses the yolks).
It’s then baked in the oven until “risen and lightly browned”.
The result was very nice indeed. On the basis of this, I
shall be using other recipes from this book, or maybe even using this one for
other recipes, for Ainsley says that it can also be used to cover his salmon
fish pie “(see page 130)”, or for “an interesting twist on cauliflower cheese!”
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