The perfect fillet - and trifle to follow

For Christmas this year we were house-sitting at Eastbourne. The day started splendidly with breakfast at Ali and David's next door  (it was thanks to her that we had found the house).  Gorgeous fruit salad, Ali's home-made Christmas bread wreath, and mimosas - half orange juice, half bubbly.

I kept my own cooking as simple as possible, because I wasn't in my own kitchen, and the last thing I wanted was too many complications.  It all went very well, especially the beef fillet. I think it was only the fourth or fifth one I've ever dealt with, and up until now I felt I'd always slightly over-cooked it. But this year I got it just right - tender, juicy, nicely "set" slices showing the perfect medium rare shade of raspberry pink.
           The recipe I use comes from my friend Lesley, who has been cooking fillets for years. I thought I'd already posted, but I haven't, so here it is. I tend to do the searing and coating well in advance of the actual roasting. The cooking time does depend on the fillet and the oven, so you'll have to be a bit cautious - I start checking it at 20 minutes and then every few minutes after that. I also let the meat rest for plenty of time, at least an hour. It doesn't need to be piping hot when it's eaten. A 1 kg fillet is enough for 6 to 8 of my moderate-eating  friends (and as there were only five of us this year, Jonathan and I managed to get two more delicious small dinners from it).

Fillet of beef
(Lesley Hill)

1 fillet of beef
enough soft butter or oil to coat fillet lightly
grainy mustard
a few cloves of garlic
red wine for roasting dish
foil

Take the fillet out of the fridge an hour before starting to prepare it.
Heat a large heavy frypan thoroughly.
Smear soft butter, or oil, very lightly all over the fillet.
When the pan is really hot, sear the fillet very quickly all over.
Using the back of a tablespoon, coat it all over with grainy mustard and some crushed garlic.
Put it in on a rack in a roasting dish and cover it lightly with a teatowel.
About two hours before you want to eat, set the oven to 220C.
When it reaches the temperature, put in the fillet and turn the oven down to 200C (fan-forced).

After 20 minutes, use a meat thermometer to check the temperature in the middle.
For me, the perfect temperature for medium rare - still really bright pink, but not bloody - is about 60C. The juices that come out of the hole where the meat thermometer went in will be pink but not bright red.
The finger test is useful too: it should be a little resistant when you press it.
If you want it a little more done, but still a bit pink, 63-65C is about right.
Once it starts getting near the desired temperature, it goes up quite fast, so if it needs just a little more cooking, check every 3 minutes. This year my just-over-1 kg fillet took slightly under 30 minutes.
Rest the fillet for 15 minutes, collecting any juices and adding them to the wine in the pan (see below).
To make some jus (rather than gravy), after you take out the fillet, add a glass of red wine to the dish and put it back for a few minutes to bubble up, then scrape the dish. (If you forget, as I often do, you can do this bit at the end - put the dish on the cooktop to heat the wine instead.)
Once the fillet has rested for 15 minutes, put it on a warm platter and cover it lightly with foil until ready to carve.

Of course I forgot to take a photo. Too bad. You'll just have to take my word for how good those slices looked.
     Here's my friend Lynne's delicious trifle instead, with the trifle recipe from my memoir underneath.

Proper trifle

(From The Colour of Food: A memoir of life, love and dinner, Awa Press, 2014)

In my opinion jelly has no place in a proper trifle, but sherry is essential – I prefer medium to sweet. The trifle sponge needs to be dry and I buy it, as my mother did. Dark berries are the best fruit to use because their colour and sharpness contrast so well with the sponge, custard and cream. My mother used custard powder but real egg custard tastes better. The cornflour in the recipe prevents the custard curdling and makes it slightly thicker, though it’s still thinner and lighter than the ready-made custard alternative.

For the custard (makes about 700 ml):

6 large egg yolks

1 tablespoon cornflour

750 ml standard milk

2–4 tablespoons sugar (depending how sweet you like it)

1 large vanilla pod, split or 2 teaspoons vanilla essence

·     Beat yolks with a fork. Mix cornflour with a little cold milk in a small bowl.

·     Pour milk into a saucepan which can fit well over another pan of water. Add vanilla and sugar. Heat slowly to boiling point, stirring with a wooden spoon.

·     Remove from heat and take out vanilla pod. Pour milk onto yolks, stirring well. Add cornflour mixed with milk and stir well.

·     Return mixture to pan and heat over simmering water, stirring gently, until it thickens and coats the back of a wooden spoon, and there is no taste of cornflour.

·     Pour into a jug and cool thoroughly before using, with a piece of cling-film pressed down onto the surface of the custard to prevent skin forming.

For the trifle:

700 g dark berries, one kind or mixed, fresh or frozen

caster sugar to taste

1 large trifle sponge

6 tablespoons medium sherry

700 ml custard, home-made or bought 

300 ml cream

deep glass serving bowl (preferably with a wide base, so that the sponge at the bottom is a similar width to the other layers - Lynne's was perfect)

·     If using frozen berries, take out ahead of time and defrost before using.

·     Place berries in a wide shallow dish. Sprinkle with enough sugar to achieve desired sweetness. (Slightly tart berries taste better.) Leave for 1 hour.

·     Drain off juice. If there is more than ½ cup juice, reduce carefully over a high heat. Pour it back over berries and cool thoroughly.

·     At least 2 hours ahead of serving, break sponge into rough squares and fit into as even a layer as possible in base of serving bowl. Sprinkle evenly with sherry and leave for 1 hour.

·     Cover with a thick layer of berries and juice, then a thick layer of custard.

·     Cover with cling-film and leave in refrigerator.

·     Take out 30 minutes before serving. Just before serving, whip cream and spread over or around the custard, or serve it on the side (as Lynne did).

Lois's lemony beef

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a new idea for a slow-cooked beef casserole.  I had some cross-cut blade beef in the freezer, but I didn't want to make the basic recipe, nor did I want anything using tomato, such as my go-to Italian classic, stufato alla romana - I use canned tomatoes a lot, but this time I fancied something different.
            So I turned first to Lois Daish.  There was nothing quite right in Dinner at Home, so I tried A Good Year - I remember going to the launch with Harvey in 2005.  Sure enough, I found exactly what I was after: Slow-cooked Beef, Carrots, Garlic and Lemon. It sounded both easy and different. The other thing I really liked was that it didn't use any unusual ingredients - I had everything I needed to hand. Although Lois wrote it for slow cooking in the oven at a low temperature, I thought it would work just as well in a slow cooker, and it did.
              I've reproduced Lois's recipe here as she wrote it, with my added notes for using a slow cooker instead. She always seems to include useful instructions that teach me something, such as "Brown the meat on at least two sides" - in other words, you don't need to ensure every side of each chunk is browned. And her introduction to the book's section on "Slow Beef" explains why it's important to allow a stew to cool down for a few minutes before you serve it:

            "This is because as the stew cools the pieces of meat, which always dry out as they cook, start to soak up the gravy (something like a sponge that has been squeezed dry and then put back in the water). This explains why a second helping of stew often seems more succulent than the first. To make up for the heat lost while the meat relaxes, always serve stews on very hot plates."

              Her dish was such a success that I made it again the next week for my neighbour Frances.  The fresh, lemony flavour is unusual with beef, but it worked extremely well. I served it with broccoli and mashed potato one week, and a green salad and baked potato the next.

Slow-cooked beef, carrots, garlic and lemon
(Lois Daish, A Good Year, 2005)
Serves 4

 750g beef blade or cross-cut blade steak
6 medium carrots
2 tablespoons mild oil
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons butter
1 small onion, peeled and finely diced
6 cloves garlic, peeled and finely diced
fresh thyme and parsley leaves, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups beef stock, home-made, canned [or boxed] or packaged          
grated zest of 1 large lemon
juice of 2 lemons
a little water as needed

To finish
chopped parsley
grated zest of 1 lemon

[f you are using a slow cooker, turn it to high. If using the oven, set it to 140C.]

Carefully trim all fat and silverskin from the meat, but leave in place any seams of gristle, which will soften during cooking. Pat the meat dry with paper towels and cut into large chunks.
Peel carrots and cut into chunks of similar size to the pieces of meat.

Put a little oil into a frying pan [preferably cast iron rather than non-stick] and heat until very hot. Place the meat in the pan, being careful not to crowd the pieces - you'll probably need to brown it in 2 batches. Brown the meat on at least two sides and season with salt and pepper.

While the meat is browning [or later if, like me, you're not good at managing tow things cooking at once] chose an enamelled cast iron casserole dish [or deep non-stick pan] and add the butter, diced onion and garlic. Stir over a moderate heat until the onion is translucent, then add the herbs and flour. Stir until the flour starts to colour, then add the stock, lemon zest and juice. Add the browned meat and carrots.

Add a little water to the frying pan [the one you cooked the meat in], return it to the heat and scrape up any juices in the pan. Add this to the casserole. The liquid should almost cover the meat and carrots, so add a little more water if needed. [You need a little less water for the slow cooker.] Bring to the boil, then cover and put in a low oven, about 140C, for about 2 hours until very tender.
[For the slow cooker: after you bring it to the boil, transfer it carefully to the slow cooker. Cook for about 4 hours until very tender.]

Before serving, remove the casserole dish from the oven or turn off the heat.
{For the slow cooker, turn the cooker off 20 minutes before serving.]
Check seasoning and leave to rest for 10 minutes before sprinkling with parsley and lemon zest.

Dinner-time light is always a problem, so the photo isn't great (the mash was Agria, but it wasn't that yellow!). But I hope it gives you the general idea.

Roast sirloin and Yorkshire pudding

For months my neighbour Frances has been talking nostalgically about the roast sirloin of her childhood.  So last week I finally got organised to cook her one. We ordered it at the excellent Gipps St butcher, and she came with me to pay for it and check that it was what she wanted. 

       I'd never cooked a rolled sirloin roast before, and I don't think I'd ever eaten one. As I wrote in The Colour of Food, in my childhood roast beef always meant "a round of chewy beef [probably brisket] criss-crossed with wooden skewers and tied up with string". Only in recent years did we start having roast fillet.  So I was a bit nervous about cooking this magnificent beast, aged for 18 days.

I took advice from the butcher and the internet, where I found very useful instructions from a London restaurant, and adapted them. To make sure it tasted as much as possible like Frances's childhood roast, I used salt only and seared the meat in dripping.

Rolled roast sirloin

1. Take roast out of fridge at least 2 hours before cooking, so that it's at room temperature when it goes into the oven.

2. Pre-heat oven to 180C, fan cook.

3. Season well with garlic, thyme and salt. 

4. Get a roasting pan smoking hot.

5. Sear in hot pan [with a little dripping to keep it old-school] until coloured all over. (2-3 mins approx).

6. Place on oven tray in pre-heated oven. Turn oven down to 170C fan cook for desired time (see below).

7. Rest, uncovered, on a warm plate (not too hot to touch) for at least 20 mins before serving.

Timing

The timing is always the trickiest bit. I usually like my beef rarish or medium rare, but in this case, I knew Frances would prefer medium, and of course sirloin is different from fillet. 

        Our sirloin weighed 2.1 kg. My meat thermometer gives an internal temperature of 71C for medium beef. It took about an hour and three-quarters to go a little over that, but the meat was still spurting reddish blood when I took the thermometer out. So I consulted with Frances's daughter, who came to dinner along with two other neighbours, and we agreed that it needed a little longer. I gave it 5 minutes more and that did the trick - it was about 77C by then. 

It rested for half an hour, loosely covered in foil, while I made the Yorkshire puddings (recipe below). When I carved it (so easy with a rolled roast) it was exactly what I wanted: the inner slices a very pale pink, the outer ones perfect for Frances and others who preferred it medium. 

She got the outside end, of course - as you can see, it was quite crusty and brown. When she took her first bite she said "Oh joy!" So I knew I'd got it right. 

With it, courtesy of my other neighbours, we drank two bottles of beautiful 2008 Trinity Hill syrah which they'd given me a few years ago, and I'd kept for just such a worthy occasion.

         Frances really appreciated the Yorkshire pudding, too. My first husband came from Yorkshire and his mother Marion taught me to make it properly, but I hadn't done it for years. 
          Again, I found the perfect recipe, matching everything I remembered, on the internet - and I did use dripping. (Yes, I know it's bad for you, but once a year is not going to matter.) As this requires a high oven temperature, I made it at the end, after I took out the meat and veges (all very trad - potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli).

Yorkshire puddings

4 large eggs (200 g)

150 g all-purpose flour (about 1 cup plus 2 teaspoons)

200 ml trim milk

2 g salt (about 1/2 teaspoon)

100 ml beef dripping, lard, shortening, or vegetable oil (about 1/2 cup)

1. Combine eggs, flour, milk, water, and salt in a medium bowl and whisk until a smooth batter is formed. Let batter rest at room temperature for at least 30 minutes. Alternatively, for best results, transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate batter overnight or for up to 3 days. Remove from refrigerator while you preheat the oven.



I made the batter the day before and put it into an empty soda bottle, allowing me to pour it easily into the muffin wells. It doesn't look like much, but it did 8 puddings and would have been enough for 9 or 10 less exuberant ones.

2. Adjust oven rack to center position and preheat oven to 450°F (230°C). Divide drippings (or other fat) evenly between two 8-inch cast iron or oven-safe non-stick skillets, two 6-well popover tins, one 12-well standard muffin tin, or one 24-well mini muffin tin. Preheat tins in the oven until the fat is smoking hot, about 10 minutes.  (This is the crucial bit that I remember Marion teaching me.)

3. Transfer the pans or tins to a heat-proof surface (such as an aluminum baking sheet on your stovetop), and divide the batter evenly between every well (or between the two pans if using pans). The wells should be filled between 1/2 and 3/4 of the way up (if using large pans, they should be filled about 1/4 of the way up). 

I used a 12-well muffin tin - this amount of batter makes about 9 or 10 puddings, but I overfilled my tins a bit and made 8.

4. Immediately return tin to oven. Bake until the Yorkshire puddings have just about quadrupled in volume, are deep brown all over, crisp to the touch, and sound hollow when tapped. Smaller ones will take about 15 minutes (popover or skillet-sized ones around 20-25 minutes).

4. Serve immediately. (It says you can cool them completely, transfer to a zipper-lock freezer bag, freeze for up to 3 months, and reheat in a hot toaster oven before serving, but I really don’t see the point of doing that!)

Mine came out enormous and properly brown, but they did collapse more or less straight away (in the photo some have done that already) and were a little difficult to get out of the wells. It might have helped if I'd brushed the fat up the sides as well as putting it in the bottom. But it didn't matter - they were the Real Thing, especially when covered in dark brown gravy.

An Italian classic

This is my battered 35-year-old copy of Ada Boni's classic Italian cookbook, The Talisman. It was first published in 1928, and was a huge success. By the time it had reached its fifteenth edition, it ran to 866 pages and had 2000 recipes, but half of them weren't of Italian origin. When Matilde La Rosa did the English translation in 1950, she kept only the genuine Italian recipes. In 1975 it came out in paperback. I was living in London and bought it there. It was my first introduction to real Italian cooking - until then I'd only produced the vaguest of imitations, like scone-dough pizza and spaghetti bolognese made with a packet of oxtail soup.

Tonight my niece Jenny and her friend Mark were arriving back from a tramp up Mt Holdsworth, so I knew they'd be wanting solid comfort food. At lunchtime I put the slow cooker on and made an old favourite, Stufatino Alla Romana - Roman beef stew. I hadn't made it in the slow cooker before, but it worked very well indeed. We had it with mashed potato and a parsnip and carrot mash. Although I put in 700 grams of gravy beef, there wasn't much stew left over.

The original page with this recipe is well-stained and eaten through with little bookworm trails. (The creatures that ate it aren't really called bookworms, but I don't know their correct name.) Here's my version, slightly adapted over the years:

Ada Boni's Stufatino Alla Romana
(To serve four people)

1 onion, chopped into small but not tiny pieces
2-4 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
50 grams bacon, chopped into small pieces (the best kind is that solid lump of bacon you can buy from some specialty suppliers such as Moore Wilson in Wellington, but ordinary leanish bacon is fine)
700 grams cross-cut blade or gravy beef, cut into smallish cubes
salt and pepper
1 tablespoon (approx.) chopped fresh oregano
250 ml (a third of a bottle) robust red wine (not pinot noir)
1 tablespoon tomato paste (the translation says puree, but I'm sure that's wrong, it's too feeble)

If you plan to cook this either on the hob or in the oven, use a shallow casserole with a lid that you can put directly on the heat. If you want to use the slow cooker, use a frypan and transfer everything to the cooker for the long cooking part.
If using the oven, set it to 180C. If using the slow cooker, set it to high.
Saute the onion and garlic gently in the oil until slightly brown. Add bacon, fry briefly. Add meat, salt, pepper, oregano, and let meat brown gently. Pour wine over and cook until liquid is reduced by half. Add tomato paste and only just enough hot water to cover meat. (If you're using the slow cooker, put everything in it at this point and add more water only if it really looks too dry - you won't need much.)
Cover and cook for at least 2 hours, either on a very low heat on the hob (you will need a simmer mat for gas) or in the oven. Check halfway through to see if it's getting too thick and sticky, and add a little water if necessary. In the slow cooker it takes about 5 hours on high.
"The sauce should be dark and very savoury" says Ada. She recommends serving it with braised celery, but I prefer smoothly mashed potato and whatever other vegetable you fancy.