Mary’s back. Episode 2 has more of her down-to-earth recipes, this time for comfort food. As she says, she’s not one to put her feet up, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t enjoy food that lifts the spirits.
First off is a butternut squash soup, starting with helpful tips on peeling the hard nut of the kitchen. Young ones can be tackled with a potato peeler (my weapon of choice in this particular battle) but with older specimens you are better off hacking it into circles with a big knife and peeling each separately, she says. No advice on how to spot an older squash, but never mind. “You could just roast the squash whole,” remarked my friend Lisa who has popped around, “and sit down with a glass of sherry while it cooks.”
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Appealing as this sounds, Mary has other plans. The cubes of squash go in a plastic bag with peppers and onions, plus a glug of olive oil, and a good shake about ensures everything is well coated. I’d rather use my hands to toss all the ingredients in a large bowl until glistening with oil – the bag will be a pain to clean and probably just end up in the bin, doing nothing for one’s green credentials.
But then I like the tactile side of cooking more than most, and Mary knows her market. She’s taught classes at her house for decades, and hundreds of people passed through her kitchen.
There’s little of the vagaries of these ladies (it was always ladies when I attended, anyway) that Mary won’t have spotted. She has an eye for detail, even keeping notes on regular attendees, to ensure that nobody was taught the same dish twice.
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Anyway, back to the soup. The veg are pureed with a hand blender - no nutribullets in Mary’s kitchen, but then there’s no chia seed or kale smoothies either. What a blessed relief.
It’s a trip back to a more innocent age of cookery, a time when we ate cheese straws (gluten! dairy!) without a pause. And cheese straws there are – but as Mary says, “mega” straws with “a bit more one upmanship” than the 1980s version.
One-upmanship here is in the form of a lot of Dijon mustard, applied to the puff pastry with an ordinary paintbrush, the kind you’d use for emulsion because “a nice wide brush means I can do the job quicker”.
Into the oven they go, hot at first to make them puff and then lowering the temperature to bake them slowly through to the middle – none of the under-cooked pastry of last week’s Beef Wellington, thank goodness. Mary winks playfully at the camera as she tastes the soup – she is brilliant on television, like a just slightly naughty fairy grandmother.
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Next up is mackerel pate with lime. “I can’t believe people don’t know how to make that” says Lisa, who has settled down to watch with me.
Well, we probably do. But many of us have forgotten about these dishes that used to be staples, and good for Mary for dusting down them down. And anyway, my memory was of mushing mackerel and Philadelphia together with a squeeze of lemon juice in my student kitchen – certainly not blending it to airy smoothness with marscapone and fresh lime zest before spooning it into little kilner jars and serving it with chargrilled slices of toast.
And it hadn’t occurred to me that you could freeze it either. Foolproof and you can make it in five minutes, Mary points out, and when it tastes this good “life doesn’t get better than that.”
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We whizz on to a Mexican tortilla bake, a recipe that you can cook “all in one pot, very little to wash up and so easy to serve”. Mary, we feel, is on the side of the cook as well as the eater. That is comforting. For the dish, mince, tomato, onions and spice are all slow cooked, and a dollop of mango chutney added for sweetness.
Not really Mexican, and neither is the marscapone that’s layered up with the tortillas and mince. But this is real British cooking, and amalgam of flavours that’s as authentic as Chicago Deep Pan Pizza or kedgeree – inspired by Mexico or Italy or India rather than actually of it. And I bet it tastes good, even if “the young nowadays do like things hotter than I ever did”, as the Fairy Grandmother remarks indulgently.
There follows a trip out, this time to a garlic farm, and an ode to the allium – “when I started writing recipes I had to list it as optional” Berry recalls, but now we are a nation of garlic lovers.
She nibbles on some varieties – I’d have liked to hear more about the 50 odd grown there - including elephant garlic; actually an enlarged leek, not garlic at all, though they don’t go into that. The farmer promises it will taste of leek, but Berry takes no nonsense.
“Who are you kidding! That’s exactly like very strong garlic,” she cries.
Garlic features in Mary’s version of coq au vin, a garlic and herb chicken casserole. Reduce the wine before you add the chicken or you’ll overcook the chicken, she tells us. This is good advice – especially if you are using chicken breasts, as Mary is.
Why not legs and thighs, which will slow cook happily to a juicy tenderness, while the bones enrich the sauce? Well, because, still there are people who prefer breast to leg. I don’t get it, but there we go.
Like I say, Mary knows her market. But to go with the casserole we glimpse new potatoes roasted in garlic butter and parmesan – now that does sound delicious. Then it's on to pudding.
Crème caramel is a pud that Paul’s mother cookedso, like Mary, he has fond memories – can Mary’s live up to that? As usual, Mary is full of good tips, firstly for the caramel.
Most people, she says, make the mistake of using a non stick pan to make the caramel, so it crystallizes. Better to use a stainless steel or aluminium-based pan. This is great advice – along with adding a little water to dissolve your sugar before bubbling it to a caramel, rather than trying to melt dry sugar – tricky to do.
Now for the real gem: the bubbling mixture will go quiet just before it turns to caramel, Mary explains. This is invaluable, the kind of knowledge that makes the difference between a beginner and an expert.
Extra egg yolks go into the baked custard for a proper unctuous richness, a small amount of sugar, and hot milk. She strains the mixture – she says in case there are bits of shell, but it’ll also catch any stringy bits of egg white – before baking it gently to a wobbly perfection in a water bath.
But how will it taste? The judgement of Paul is magnanimous. “I would say it’s almost as good as my mother’s, yes.” Mary responds archly:
“Everything your mother made was even better. But there we are. That’s the way of the world.” It is indeed. But Mary’s world, devoid of fads and comfortingly full of crowd-pleasing dishes, is a pretty good place to be.
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Find more of Mary Berry's brand new foolproof recipes inMary Berry: Foolproof Cooking.Order now fromTelegraph Books for only £20with free p&p. Visitbooks.telegraph.co.ukor call 0844 871 1514
