So let’s get the history out of the way: No, it wasn’t invented at Cambridge University in the 19th century; it existed at least as far back as the 17th century in France, Catalan, Flanders and elsewhere. Because frankly, the idea of mixing together eggs, milk and cream isn’t something that takes hundreds of years of thought to come up with.And yes, some people call it ‘burnt cream’. Some people also eat burgers while walking down the road.There’s a line, somewhere, between crème brulée, flans, crème patissière, custard, crème anglaise and all the other set creams. Not to mention pana cotta, custard cream and so on.I have two recipes for crème brulée: a refined one using just egg yolks, cream and sugar; and this quick and dirty one which is, I confess, more like a flan than a real crème brulée. Whatev.This one calls for a dozen whole eggs – not yolks separated out, whole eggs; I told you this one was quick and dirty – 1.4 litres of cream and milk mixed in whatever proportions you like – I used 40cl of cream and a litre of milk this time – 200g of sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. I put a pinch of salt in lots of things.Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whizz them together with the mixer of your choice. I used a hand-held stick mixer this time. You just need them all combined together.I then pour this mixture into a jug as it makes the next stage, pouring into ramekins, easier.These quantities gave me enough mixture for 18 ramekins.I set them in a baking tray and add boiling water to the tray, about halfway up the sides of the ramekin. This bain marie ensures that the crèmes don’t burn on the bottom – water keeps the temperature to a maximum of 100°C. Top tip: put the bain marie as close to your oven as possible, then add the water to save carrying a heavy, boiling hot pan across your kitchen.They go into a warm oven at about 150°C for 20 minutes when I turn them around to ensure they cook evenly. I check them again after 20 minutes to see if they’re set – just shake the baking tray gently to see how they wobble. If the mixture in the centre of each ramekins wobbles more than the outside, they’re not quite cooked yet. When the mixture wobbles as one, they’re done. If the tops are starting to brown and they’re still not set, cover with aluminium foil to stop them browning further. This time it took 45 minutes for everything to be set properlyOnce cooked, remove them from the oven and the bain marie and allow to cool before refrigerating them.Just before serving, sprinkle a half teaspoon or so of sugar on top and caramelise it with your blowtorch – I now use one which uses cigarette lighter refill fluid, although I’ve used regular plumbers’ ones before.Allow the caramel to cool and harden before eating.You can flavour the crème with many different things: I’ve used basil, rosemary, lemon verbena, lavender and other herbs from the garden many times. You heat up the milk and/or cream with the herb in it and allow it to infuse for an hour or so before making the crème.You can also add fruits in the bottom of the ramekin – strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, banana, whatever takes your fancy. 

I have said – boasted, even – elsewhere that the only electrical device I use in a kitchen is a hand-held immersion blender. A cheap one, to boot, a €10 device bought from Lidl, Europe’s favourite discount supermarket chain.This is a lie.I also have a hand-held mixer. For mixing cake mix and for whipping up meringues.But that’s all.I have an excuse. A reason. A medical note, even, for straying from the hand-beaten path: carpal tunnel syndrome. 25 years typing on keyboards as a journalist followed by 7 years chopping, cutting and dicing ingredients in restaurant kitchens did for both my wrists. To the point, in fact, that I have permanently lost a sizeable portion of the use of both hands, even after corrective surgery, and am now declared officially Unfit For Kitchen Work by the Medecin de Travail, the work doctor whose word is law in France. It would actually be illegal for me to work as a professional restaurant cook now.This is all a long way round to say that I use a hand mixer to make meringues. Making meringues is the only time in my life when I wish I had a stand mixer, a big old Kenwood like my mother had for 20 years before giving it to me and which I wore out after another 10 years of use.And then I think about the other things I’d rather do with €500 and continue holding on to the hand mixer as it beats the meringue mix until my wrists simply can’t take it any more. Yes, even holding an electric mixer is painful, which is why I wish I had a stand mixer.But, as the French say, you can’t have your butter and the money for the butter so I spend that €500 on something more useful, like food for my children or books. Mostly books, actually. And foie gras.Meringues are not really difficult to make: you use the egg whites left over after making crème brulée,  crème anglaise, crème pâtissière, crème whatever. You add 75g of sugar per egg white little by little as you beat the egg whites. That’s it.Well, OK, there are a few points.First, when you’ve finished separating the whites from the yolks, making sure there’s no  yolk at all in the whites, put the whites in the fridge. Get them and the bowl you’re going to beat them in nice and cold. Same as for whipping cream, cold is your friend. Put the beaters for your mixer in there too if you like, can’t do any harm. Make sure everything is scrupulously clean. Then you’ll have only yourself to blame when it doesn’t work.Start beating the whites on the lowest speed to break them up a little, throwing in a couple of pinches of salt. For the 12 whites I used in this recipe, I put three decent three-finger pinches.When they’ve broken up, turn the speed up on high and start pouring in the sugar. I do this from the packet – the recipe calls for 75g of sugar per white so 12 x 75 = 900g. I put 100g into my vanilla sugar box and just poured the rest of the 1kg packet into the meringue mix bit by bit.So, this will make French meringue. It gets fairly stiff and will hold a medium peek, but as you can see in this picture they don’t always hold up perfectly after piping them out:Some do, some don’t. Your piping technique will also have an effect, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.If you want good, stiff peaks and meringues that hold their shape then you need to make Italian meringues, not French ones. The ingredients are the same except to make Italian meringues you need to heat the sugar to 115°C, which is quite hot. You slowly drizzle this hot sugar into your beaten egg whites as you keep stirring, which is hard to do if you don’t have either a stand mixer or a third hand. Or a commis. I have a commis but she’s 8 years old and I’m reluctant to let her near molten sugar.So, French meringue it is. As you can maybe see in the picture above, the meringue should take on a glossy sheen when it’s getting towards being beaten enough. And, of course, when you lift the whisk up the mix should form a peak which holds its shape well.There are schools of thought about when to add the sugar – before, during, after or a combination thereof. Me, I get it going and then as the egg whites start to get their form I start drizzling in the sugar, slower or quicker depending on my mood and what’s on the radio.The real secret to meringues, if there is one, is to beat them for MUCH longer than you think is necessary. Time yourself and see how long it takes to get them to the point where you think they’re OK; now beat them for the same amount of time again. They’ll get much stiffer. Me, I beat them until I can’t bear to hold the mixer any longer and my 8-year-old commis has gone to make meringues in her Minecraft kitchen.And then you pipe them out onto a baking sheet or dollop them onto it with a big spoonYou see giant dolloped-with-a-big-spoon meringues in many French patisseries being sold pretty cheaply, €1-€1.50 each as the patissiers try to get rid of their excess egg whites – most creams and crèmes are made with just egg yolks so there’s always a surplus of whites. Which is why, incidentally, there’s a wealth of patissiers around the Seine river in Paris: vintners importing wine by barge from Burgundy and Bordeaux into the capital used egg whites to clarify their wines, giving them an excess of egg yolks which were snapped up cheaply by medieval patissiers who set up shop near the river.Anyway, choose the form you like.The results go into the oven to dry, not bake – if they’re coloured at all they’re overcooked – at 80°C for 3-6 hours, depending on their size.Professional patissiers and restaurant kitchens have ovens with ‘ouilles’, vents you can open to let out moist air from the interior. Domestic ovens mostly don’t, so I prop mine open half a centimetre or so with a folded tea towel. It helps the drying process go quicker.When I worked with Jean-Remi Joly he used to dust his perfectly identical baby meringues (served as mignardises with after dinner coffee) with chocolate or cinnamon powder. One day he tried dusting on the powder just before putting them in the oven and the resulting colour and taste were gorgeous, so I recommend trying that if you like such things.Otherwise you can mix in flavourings like strawberry coulis or pistachios when the mixture is fully beaten.I pipe the meringues onto greaseproof/silicon paper, which seems to be the easiest thing to unstick them from; you can test if a meringue is cooked sufficiently by trying to peel it off the paper – if it leaves its base on the paper it’s not yet dry enough, keep cooking it. 

Several people have asked for details on how to make this, so here we go.You need potatoes, lardons, onions, cream, milk, salt and pepper. And grated cheese. And butter.Slice up the onions fairly thinly – about 1-2mm slices. Put them in a pan with hot butter and the lardons and fry them off until the onions are transparent and the lardons cooked through.While this is cooking, slice your potatoes. I cut them 2mm thick using a mandoline (details on mandolines here – bonus chip recipe!) – be careful not to cut your fingers.You need enough potatoes sliced to roughly fill your chosen container – I use a Pyrex dish, something more rustic is fine. I don’t bother peeling the potatoes first because I’m lazy and the skin’s good for you.Put the potatoes in the dish, pour in enough cream and milk to almost cover them, put the lardons over the top and squish them into the crevices and in between the slices of potatoes.Cover with a piece of tin foil and pop into the oven at 180°C for an hour. Uncover and check the potatoes are cooked, then sprinkle over a couple of handfuls of grated cheese, then back into the oven for another 10 minutes. Finish it with a few minutes under the grill if you like it really crispy.A couple of notes:

1. Yes, you can add garlic, either minced up with the onion or just cut a piece in half and wipe it around the inside of your baking dish. I don’t do this because my young daughters find the taste too strong.
2. Yes, you can add Reblochon cheese to the recipe. The problem with this is its price – the entire cost of the above version of the recipe is about €2; adding €12-15 worth of Reblochon changes the economics completely.
3. No you can’t add mushrooms. Mushrooms? Really?
4. Actually you can add anything you want. Except white wine, as Felicity Cloake does in The Guardian. That’s just wrong.

I hope that, when I’m even older and creakier, my daughters will continue their love of cooking. Right now at 6 and 8 they love cooking with Papa; we’ll see if it continues, but it’s a good start.First things first, write out your prep list. This is very important – work out what needs to be done first and so on. No point working on the meringues first since they take 4 or 5 hours to dry out in the oven so we put them in last, otherwise the oven’s out of use while they do their stuff.We made the madeleines first, the full recipe – 9 eggs, 500g sugar mixed to the ribbon stage, 400g of softened butter, 400g flour, baking powder, the lot. We made dozens and dozens of them in the end.Three bags full in fact, as it were.Best part of baking is, of course, licking the bowl clean afterwards.Then we made brioches. Two of them, one smooth and one gnarly – someone in the house likes chunky crusts.Not me, I like a smooth crust.Then we made quiche. Two in fact.One with onions and bacon lardons, the second with tuna and sun-dried tomatoes.And Tartiflette and rosemary and thyme ciabbata.Tartiflette is very popular in our house, so we made two of them.And then we got to the meringues with the egg whites left over from making a dozen crème brulées – which I forgot to photograph, it’s true. But hey, they’re all the same. Ours were vanilla flavoured today as the lavender plants’ flowers are over now.The little meringues piped ready to go into the oven to dry. The little ‘blobs’ on the sheet next to the meringues are drops of mixture under the baking paper to hold it down while I pipe the meringues themselves.Some of the larger ones at the top of the oven, and two giant ones lurking at the bottom. When you’re 8 years old, the bigger the meringue the better.Unlike commercial ovens, my domestic oven doesn’t have vents at the top you can open to let out the moist air, so I prop the door open slightly with a teatowel. Works fine.The finished baby meringues. They won’t last long in our house.To round out the day we made 4 litres of yoghurt – 4 litres of milk, 4 small tubs of activated yoghurt, leave it in the warm oven (50°C) overnight. One litre gets strawberry syrup, one litre gets chocolate powder, and the final two litres are strained down to just one litre of thick Greek-style yoghurt to eat with honey for breakfast.A good haul for the day in the end: 2 quiches, a few dozen madeleines, 12 crème brulées, half a litre of ice cream, two tartiflettes, two brioches, a ciabatta and 4 litres of yoghurt. I think that’s everything.

This is a very simple sauce, condiment if you will, that I use mostly on Trilogies but which also goes very well with carpaccio of beef, tomatoes on their own or more or less any place where you find a need for something a bit vinaigrette-y.And best of all it’s really simple to make.Buy a basil plant or, if you’re a gardening whizz, grow one. Go on, I’ll wait. Tum te tum. Ok.Now, pull of the leaves. You can leave the tiny stalks attached to the leaves but nothing more.When you have a container full of leaves, add about 4 cms of olive oil and a small pinch of salt, then whizz it up with your cheap stick mixer. Add more olive oil as you go. Keep mixing until your mixer feels to hot, then taste the oil. You can add a fair amount of oil – I reckon one plant’s good for about 250-400 ml of oil.You can use it as it is, or add lemon juice or another acid to really transform it into a vinaigrette. Add parmesan too and it goes well on crunchy salad leaves or beef carpaccio.It’ll keep a bit in the fridge but be careful, you’re smooshing all sorts of bugs into the basil which could harm you. 

Well, crêpes really I suppose. I think of ‘pancakes’ as being the thick, stodgy affairs my mother cooked on Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras) when I was a kid, or those things served in American diners. Which are fine and which I love with maple syrup and butter and bacon, but crêpes are finer, more delicate.At catering school we used to compete to see who could make the most from a one-litre batter (that is, a batter made with one litre of milk, not one litre of batter itself). I managed 28 and a half; David, my arch-rival at school, managed 32 but only by cheating – some of his crêpes were undersized and full of holes. So I won.The recipe is pretty simple: 1 litre of milk, 450g flour, a pinch of salt, 50g of sugar, 6 whole medium eggs and 50g of melted butter.If you do this properly and your catering school teacher is standing over you, you cream together the sugar and eggs and gradually stir in the flour and salt, and then the milk and butter; if he’s not watching you dump everything in the mixing bowl at once and whisk it all together. I then leave it for half an hour and give it another going over with the electric whisk – until all the lumps are gone.Next, cooking your crêpes. Many will know the maxim that “the first one always sticks” and has to be thrown away; this is either because your pan isn’t hot enough, or because you didn’t add a little oil to the pan, or both. Basically, get your pan hot – leave it to warm for at least five minutes – and then just before adding the batter wipe it over with a paper towel dipped in your oil/butter/fat of choice. I use a mix of butter and sunflower oil and never have any sticking. I have a 5cl ladle which is the exact size necessary for one crêpe, but don’t be afraid to add in a bit too much batter and swirl it around the pan before tipping out the excess – just don’t make them too thick or they’ll taste claggy.And then it’s just a question of churning them out. Keep two pans going, more if you have them, and don’t let your attention wander. Also, don’t have your stove too hot – on my electric hob the rings are at 7 on a scale of 1 – 9, which means the crêpes get about two minutes each side.Stack them up and serve them with, well, whatever you like; Nutella’s a big favourite here as is a sugar/lemon mix; sometimes they go for butter and maple syrup, too.And chantilly cream, obviously.This is a half-successful attempt at chantilly cream – it was hot (over 30°C today) and I hadn’t chilled the cream, bowl or whisk as I’d normally do as a matter of course. The problem when it’s hot is that the cream separates quickly into a solid and milky liquid, but it still tastes good albeit a little heavy.Bon appetit!

We (OK, OK, my wife) picked a sack of blackberries when we went for a walk along the old railway line the other day, and she’s been hassling me to do something with them ever since.Like, she said, make a tart. With crème patissiere. And pâte sablé.Well, me and pastry – as they say in French – that makes two; I can’t, won’t make it. I buy it. And pre-made chilled pastry here is nicer than anything I can make myself, so good that people believe me when I say I made it myself. So I bought a 30cm round of ready-made pastry and blind-baked it, 25 minutes at 180°C turning it two or three times to ensure even cooking. Don’t forget to repeatedly stab the base with a fork to stop it rising. And don’t forget to put in your baking beans like I did – this forgetfulness leads to the sides sagging down.While this is cooking, make the crème patissière: for a tart this size, use 500ml of milk, 100g of sugar, 5 egg yolks, 70g plain flour, a vanilla pod and a pinch of salt.Put the milk on to heat with the split/scraped vanilla pod (put the whole pod into the milk to infuse – lots of the vanilla flavour comes from the pod itself rather than the seeds). Whisk together the sugar and egg yolks to the ribbon stage (lift up your whisk and trail the dribbles across the surface of the mix – it should stay in place looking a bit like a ribbon for a second or two). Then whisk in the flour thoroughly.When the milk boils, pour a little into your flour/sugar/egg mix to make it liquid, then add the rest stirring all the time. When it’s thoroughly mixed, pour it back into the saucepan and gently bring it to the boil. Stirring ALL the time, or it will go lumpy. Bring it back to the boil and simmer it for a couple of minutes to thoroughly cook the flour, then decant it into a clean bowl, whisking all the time to avoid those lumps.When it’s cooled a little, cover the surface with a layer of clingfilm (may be called Saran wrap in your part of the world) and refrigerate it. The plastic film stops a skin forming on top. At catering school we learned to dab a little butter onto the surface to stop the skin forming; my restaurant chef, after looking at me like I was a Martian when I suggested doing this, showed me the clingfilm method.When everything has cooled down, check your crème for lumps. Whether there are any or not I like to whisk my crème patissière with an electric whisk at this point to make it easier to handle – a couple of minutes with the electric mixer and it’ll pour easily into your pastry case, allowing you to smooth the surface nice and flat.Then put the blackberries on top. In this example I’ve used the artisanal ‘higgledy-piggledy’ method, i.e. I just poured them on top, roughly smoothed them into a more or less even layer and then tucked in. If you have time and patience you can make them look more artistic, like this one I made earlier (three years earlier, in fact, that’s how often the mood takes me to take the time to do it properly).One last note: for various reasons (OK, I’m lazy and it was the first packet that came to hand) I used brown, less-refined sugar to make this crème patissière and it turned out very well, a subtly caramelised taste which is very pleasant.

So when I was younger – OK, over 40 years ago – I went to an English Public School. The thing you have to know straight away about English Public Schools is that they’re not Public, they’re Private. Not just anyone can go there, OH no. You have to pass an exam – commonly called the Common Entrance Exam – and pay for the privilege. Pay handsomely, in fact.At the time, since my parents were poor and I was outstandingly clever, I got a County Scholarship to go to the school, and a great time I had there too.This is the school, or at least the bit of it that goes back the furthest – all the way to 1616, in fact, when it was founded by William Jones and the Haberdashers’ Guild in London, making it 400 years old this year.Anyway, one of the features of the school of my youth was the school Tuck Shop, a small room in the cloisters where we could queue up at 10.45 every morning to buy sticky currant buns. And very delicious they were too.I’ve had these buns in the back of my mind for the past 40 years, and have now succeeded in reproducing them pretty well, using a recipe for French brioche dough.Well, recipe; I exaggerate – I follow the instructions on the packet, mix it up in my bread machine (my old hands are too stiff to pound dough, what with the carpal tunnel problems and my innate laziness), form the dough into buns and pop them into the oven.Simples.So I buy ‘Farine T45 de force’, strong gluten-rich flour specially made for brioches with added gluten and powdered egg yolk; there’s a regular T45 for doing other patisserie which works, but this works even better. You don’t have to read the small print or delve into details – you just buy the one marked ‘Brioche’ on the front. It’s the powdered egg yolk plus the egg you add later that makes it yellow.The recipe is quite simple: 175ml cold milk, 40g sugar, 8g salt, 75g cold diced butter, a whole medium egg (50g) and 350g of the special flour plus a sachet of dried active yeast (you can get a special brioche yeast here, regular works fine too).I add these ingredients, in this order, to the bread machine and set it going on its 90 minute mixing and raising program (the small curious child above is optional). After about 20 minutes I add the raisins I love (and which the small child above hates) and they get mixed in appropriately. Sometimes I do have a tendency to add a few too many and it looks, as my good friend Caroline’s granny always said, as if they’ve been ‘Thrown in from the top of the stairs’.After an hour and a half the dough has risen; I take it out and divide it into eight (roughly) equal balls and leave them to rise again for half an hour while the oven warms up to 180°C.They rise quite nicely, and when they’re ready to go into the oven I give them a quick egg wash (roughly beat one egg in a bowl or mug, paint it on with your pastry brush).After 12 minutes in the oven I turn the baking tray around 180° and give them another five minutes, to ensure even cooking. Then when they come out and have cooled I give them a sugar syrup coating to make them really shine, nice and glossy.Miam. Serve with some nice salted butter and good strawberry jam. And, if you can get it, clotted cream. 

Just some bread and madeleines.But, miam!

I have made thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of these madeleines. I can make them in my sleep. I may even have made them in my sleep, in fact. I can make them in an hour, enough for a giant birthday party with enough left over for breakfast.In fact, I’ve made so many of these and done it so often that I never even thought of putting the recipe up here. I might as well explain how to make a cup of tea.*But. I got into a discussion over on eGullet about making them. Someone posted a question about where to find new madeleine pans, and I posed a question asking why they didn’t even consider the possibility of using silicone molds? I’ve never, ever made them with metal molds. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen metal molds, and if I had I’d have thought them something from the ancient past, a museum piece.Rusty, in fact. I think of the one or two cake molds I have in metal as rusty antiques which I should throw away. Silicone molds are practical, easy, cheap, durable. Superior.Anyway.So Jean-Rémi Joly taught me this recipe that winter when it was just me in the plonge and him cooking to do all the meals from November to Easter. I’d wash up, prep everything, do the amuse-bouches and the patisserie. Madeleines were a nice touch with our cafés gourmets and we made them by the hundred every day.You start with 500 grammes of sugar and 400 grammes of butter, and cream them together. Use your food mixer, please, unless you want to end up with carpal tunnels swollen to the size of the Blackwall Tunnel like mine.Then add, one by one, nine medium eggs (50 grammes each). Beat each one in gently until it’s fully incorporated before adding the next.Then sieve in 400 grammes of flour (type 45 patisserie flour, if that helps); you may call it ‘plain flour’, or something else. It’s the kind with the most gluten in it. Fold it into the mixture along with a hefty pinch of salt (say, 8 grammes) and bicarbonate of soda (7 grammes).Finish with a slug of rum and the grated zest of a lemon.Then put a small teaspoonful of the mixture into your greased silicone or metal moulds (I grease them with melted unsalted butter) and pop them into a pre-heated oven at 180°C for 12 minutes. Then turn them around 180 degrees and leave for another 3-5 minutes until they’re browned nicely.If you’re the sort of person who likes your madeleines to have a little ‘hump’ on the top, bump up the temperature 10 or even 20 degrees, but check on them after 10 minutes so they don’t burn.The baby madeleines you may be able to make out in these pictures are from, natch, baby madeleine molds. Cute, eh? And so tiny they contain no calories at all.Remove them from the molds after allowing them to cool for 5 minutes – otherwise they’ll stick to the inside – and cool on a wire rack for as long as you can resist eating them. The advantage of silicone molds is that they’re very easy to pop out, pushing them from the other side to get them onto your wire rack.Miam, as they say in Proustian.