Let's Take This Outside: Towpath Recipes & Stories by Lori di Mori & Laura Jackson and Simple by Diana Henry
#FiftyTwoCookbooks Weeks Sixteen & Seventeen
Towpath: Recipes & Stories by Lori di Mori & Laura Jackson
• Confit garlic, curd cheese & toast
• Sausage ragu and polenta
• Smoked trout & potato salad
• Baked sweet potato, chorizo, mushrooms & egg
Over the course of the year, our wooden garden furniture develops a patina of neglect. During the winter months they live under the old ash where they are weather-beaten, moss-covered and shat on by the jackdaws who live in the tree’s tallest branches. By spring the chairs and tables look tired and old and grey, like they should be stacked in the rear of a pub’s carpark, adorned with folded crisp packets wedged between their slats and an upturned flower pot ashtray.
At some point every spring the weather starts to turn and I start to want to eat outside: the next free weekend sees the pressure washer emerge from the shed and I spend a truly satisfying few hours hosing off the furniture’s grey scales, exposing the warm wood hiding underneath. It’s a symbolic catharsis, a baptism for the nascent summer, hinted at in the blossom and the diminishing darkness. All that remains to be done is paint on a layer of teak oil to try and keep the furniture looking loved, until it is time to stack it back under the shade of the ash tree, in the firing line of the corvids.
But that is a long way off.
The Towpath Café, situated on Regent’s Canal in Dalston, also break their year down into key moments, sensibly closing their doors once the sparklers that light the gloom of early November have fizzled out and re-opening only when the grip of winter has eased at the start of March. The intervening months provide plenty of opportunities to cook food that nourishes both cool mornings and warm nights, as well as everything in between. The book was gifted to me by dear friends who live close to Towpath and have sung its praises for many years. We will join them there at some point: in the meantime, recreations from its wonderful pages will have to suffice.
Brothers, the brilliant local Turkish supermarket on Mill Road, had plenty of fresh garlic in stock – more than enough to confit. This was less of a recipe and more of a technique and assembly: once it had bubbled into submission in warm oil, the garlic was squeezed out and onto toasted focaccia (we always have some leftover at the restaurant) and topped with fresh curd cheese to make a simple but wholesome family lunch for the team.
Slightly more time-consuming, albeit more satisfying, was a slow-cooked sausage ragù. I adore using sausages in ways that go beyond serving them with mashed potatoes or baked into Yorkshire pudding. They come ready seasoned with a near-perfect fat-to-meat ratio, and I’ve often used them as a substitute for minced meat by stripping them of their cases and mashing them up with a wooden spoon in the base of a casserole. Here, red wine, a soffrito of carrot, celery and onion, and a couple of tins of tomatoes burbled away with the insides of half a dozen Sicilian-inflected sausages flavoured with wild fennel. Served on top of a slick of polenta with plenty of Parmesan cheese, it made a perfect blanket against an unseasonably cool Spring evening.
Diana Henry writes books that are inspiring and accessible, with a focus on ingredients and bold flavour pairings as opposed to complex technique. Simple is Henry’s ninth book with recipes gleaned from all over the world, several of which are collections or assemblages of items that, through some simple alchemy and understanding of key principles, make sense on a very uncomplicated, but satisfying, level.
We had three smoked trout in the fridge. They were gifted (or loaned, I suppose) by a neighbour who had caught them the week before, and I promised to smoke them and return two, keeping one as payment. Thankfully, the smoker is now working after the travails of a few weeks ago: when it’s operational, it really is a wonderful piece of kit, and I look forward to getting better acquainted with it over the summer. The trouts were hot-smoked with hickory and then quietly sat waiting in the fridge for the right moment.
A joyously Scandinavian collection of ingredients proved to be perfect bedfellows for the trout: boiled potatoes and eggs, a dressing made of sour cream and mustard and a few leaves from the garden as well as the first, tentative spears of asparagus crafted a perfect warm salad for a perfect bank holiday weekend evening.
The following day was almost as pleasant, but the colder air of the evening demanded a dish a smidge more robust: baked sweet potatoes topped with mushrooms, a fried egg and (in place of the suggested chorizo) some nduja, the warmth of the Calabrian chilli slightly more assertive than the paprika but no less delicious and, as indicated from the title of Diana’s book, supremely simple.
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Next week’s book is Syria: Recipes from Home by Itab Azzam and Dina Mousawi, and I have finally caught up with myself despite the pop-up-induced lag a few weeks ago: we’re back to single edition newsletters from here on. The start of a new month also means we’re releasing tickets for the restaurant: tables at Vanderlyle in June will go on sale midday tomorrow, Tuesday 2nd May. If you’d like to join us on Mill Road for a summer feast, you can make a reservation through Tock. Thank you, as ever, for reading.