Jane Dorner Is Celebrating Her 70Th Year in Seven Times 70 Dishes with This Book: 7 X 70 = 490
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Jane Dorner is celebrating her 70th year in seven times 70 dishes with this book: 7 x 70 = 490. These recipes mark the times in the kitchen where some 70,000 lunches, suppers, teas or dinners have been put to the plate. If it is true that you are what you eat, then preparing those dishes tells a story. But this is not slavery in the kitchen. It is a series of vignettes exploring successes and failures of the mixing bowl alongside the triumphs and disasters of life. It tells of one person’s journey through heritage and history; of friendships, love, marriage, and children, with loss in its fi nal pages. It is a life where creativity weaves through writing, publishing, technology, craftsmanship and entertaining friends. This book is a gift to all the people who have made its author who she is. It is self-published although Jane has 17 books produced by traditional publishers and several more co-authored. This is her own book in every sense: the writing; the illustrations; the book design, the index, publishing and distribution – with help and advice from friends in the profession. ‘Such a pleasure to read this moving, funny, clever, quirky, lovely book.’ Andrea Livingstone Jane ‘Food as friendship, food as comfort, food as love: Jane’s delightful recipes and anecdotes demonstrate what we all know in our hearts – that eating is as Dorner much about those we eat with as what we eat.’ Louise Doughty cover_ final.indd 1 11/09/2014 13:16:08 A LIFE IN 490 RECIPES JANE DORNER 490RecipesFinal.indd 1 15/09/2014 09:50:30 Jane Dorner is identifi ed as the author and illustrator of this book in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. Privately published and printed by the author © 2014 [email protected] Set in Monotype Plantin, which was released in 1913 for hot metal typesetting and as a digital font in 2001. The dropped caps are Lucida Calligraphy, a script font developed from Monotype Chancery Cursive in 1992 and released digitally by Adobe in 2014. The cover is set in Gill Shadow. Printed by Berforts Information Press Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author. 490RecipesFinal.indd 2 15/09/2014 09:50:51 dedicated to STEPHEN for family & friends 490RecipesFinal.indd 3 15/09/2014 09:50:51 490RecipesFinal.indd 4 15/09/2014 09:50:52 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Menus 8 3 Breakfast 18 4 Soup 32 5 Couvert 40 6 Breads and pastry 52 7 Fish 64 8 Meat 75 9 Fusion 96 10 Leftovers 125 11 Picnics 133 12 Salads 153 13 Tea 162 14 Desserts 177 15 Parties 204 16 Pick your own 220 17 Preserves 227 18 Drinks 238 19 Playful food 246 20 Cooking for one 253 21 Dramatis personae 262 About the illustrations 278 Index 279 Bibliography 287 Acknowledgements 288 iv 490RecipesFinal.indd 5 15/09/2014 09:50:52 Quick conversion reference 8 oz = 250 g = 1 cup ½ pt = 280 ml = 8 fl oz = 1 cup ½ oz = 3 tsp = 1 tbsp = 14 g 2 oz = 4 tbsp = ¼ cup = 56 g v 490RecipesFinal.indd 6 15/09/2014 09:50:52 Family tree Showing relationships of family members who have either contributed recipes or who are mentioned in the biography sections. vi 490RecipesFinal.indd 7 15/09/2014 09:50:52 490RecipesFinal.indd 8 15/09/2014 09:50:52 1 Introduction his book celebrates my 70th year in seven times 70 dishes. The number has a special magic. It symbolises a multiplicity of good fortune. There are seven colours in the rainbow; seven seas; Tseven wonders of the world; seven notes in a diatonic scale; seven talents in mythology; seven pillars of wisdom; seven ages of man. It is a number to make a fuss over. The 70 years I am marking are times in the kitchen where some 70,000 lunches, suppers, teas or dinners have been put to the plate – seven days a week. If it is true that you are what you eat, then preparing those plates tells my story. The story is a mixture of recipes and refl ections. Some evoke an occasion – like the pork-dressed-up-as-wild- boar that I made when Stephen fi rst came to dinner. Or the terrines for our wedding breakfast that sliced into a hundred portions. Or the sweet-sour cabbage that came from a 1970s calendar and which was cheap, studenty and delicious. As the book grew, I saw that it was becoming a celebration of friendships, so I asked people who play an important part in my life to contribute – though in some cases it was like getting the meat out of a crab claw. If a recipe came from a friend – even if meticulously copied from a book – it’s become ‘their’ dish (though where I do know the source, I’ve credited it). That means a lot of characters are marching across the pages of this book. Mini biographies appear at the end, because these friendships are all nurtured by the breaking together of bread and so they are part of my story of cooking and being cooked for. I also wanted to give background and context, so each section carries a part of my life as it relates to the theme of the chapter. The book is a self-portrait – in recipes and stories relating to food. Maybe I have a future great- grandchild in mind who just might be interested. Or maybe it’s that stage in life when you want to account for yourself. Ironically, one’s nearest and dearest are the hardest to write about, and I couldn’t ever do justice to how much I love them all, and they are a strong presence all the way through the book. Chronology only lightly seasons the section order and for the reader who does not already know who we all are, there is a family tree on page vi to help. Most readers will know that Stephen died before this book was printed and I had to alter the last chapter. For the rest he is there in the present tense, which is historically and emotionally right. chapter 1: introduction 1 490RecipesFinal.indd 1 15/09/2014 09:50:52 Books and people I did not learn cooking at my mother’s knee. She had maids in her childhood so did not learn at her mother’s knee either, but she had a cookbook she favoured whose opening sentence was something like: ‘When you come home, put on a saucepan of water. Why? I don’t know why, but you will certainly need it’. She used to quote this: it amused her. It occurs to me years later that it must have come from Eduard de Pomiane’s Cooking in Ten Minutes fi rst published in France in the 30s and surely translated into German. And that was her style – everything plunged in boiling water. I’m not saying she was a bad cook, but cuisine it wasn’t. I remember with absolute clarity the day I saw unfold before my eyes what cooking actually was. The light-bulb moment occurred when Sarah Westwood made a vegetable soup in my basement kitchen in Islington when we were both at Hornsey Art School at the end of the 60s. Watching her chop and then sweat vegetables in butter and olive oil, onions fi rst, then carrots, sliced Brussels sprouts and whatever else went into it, and then add cold water and a stock cube was a complete revelation. I copied her and learnt. At that time, Robert Carrier had a restaurant in Camden Passage – three minutes from our shared house. One of the boys in the fl at upstairs (who turned up later in life as my sister-in-law Clarissa’s brother Bun) worked at the restaurant and would occasionally come home with some delicacy that couldn’t be sold next day – do I remember my fi rst artichoke hearts from that time? Something, at any rate, that made me buy Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World (1963) and I learned from that. My collection of books has grown since then, but one reason for compiling this collection is my theory of the Law of Recipe Books, which states that in every book there are about six dishes that any one person cooks regularly and the rest sit in the book untried. Additionally, there is always a favoured book that is adored for a few months and then goes back on the shelves with the others – not forgotten, but waiting its turn to be harem queen again. If this is capricious, then that is because it is in the nature of cooking that you want to surprise those you cook for with something new and diff erent. Many food writers seem to have their own style – whether they use butter and cream in everything; or aubergines and pomegranates – and one wants to ring the changes. After a while, an old favourite becomes special again. But often I’ve forgotten about it; and if I remember, am not sure which book it was in. Sauerkraut is one such: I simply couldn’t fi nd the one I’d done before, so looked it up in all my books and cobbled together something based on all of them and on my memory (page 122).