The Vintage Chef Olivia Potts | The Spectator columnists & writers

Hot, cold, sweet, salty, boozy, spiced: Bananas Foster has everything

I’m a sucker for a challenge. I absolutely cannot resist a little competition. Throw down a gauntlet, and I am compelled to pick it up. That’s probably one of the reasons that I love bananas Foster so much: it owes its existence to a challenge. In the 1950s, New Orleans was a major port of entry for bananas shipped from Latin America. Owen Brennan, owner of the eponymous French-Creole restaurant Brennan’s, was no fool: his brother Joe’s produce firm, Brennan’s Processed Potato Company, was running a large surplus of bananas and he wanted to make the most of these readily available fruit. He challenged one of his chefs to come up with a banana dish that could be served at his restaurant. So the chef Paul Blangé (working with Owen’s sister Ella, who later took over the restaurant, and was largely responsible for its subsequent success) set about recreating a dish that the Brennans’ mother used to make in the family home.

The comfort and joy of a treacle tart

‘Come along, kiddie-winkies! Come and get your treacle tart,’ the Child Catcher trills in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, to lure children away. The youngsters are particularly taken with the idea of treacle tart, and it’s not difficult to imagine why: unapologetically sweet and sticky, it’s irresistible to small, greedy hands. It’s easy to dismiss treacle tart as a nursery food. But that, of course, is part of its charm. It’s the Platonic ideal of a childhood treat, and a byword for comfort. In Harry Potter, the love potion Amortentia smells of whatever someone loves most in the world; to Harry, it smells of broomsticks, Ginny Weasley’s hair and treacle tart, the first dessert he ever ate at Hogwarts. Anyone making a treacle tart goes in with their eyes open.

Moules mouclade, as big a hit as Beyoncé

Mussels were probably the first thing I ate as a child that I knew at the time was ‘an acquired taste’. They made me feel impossibly grown up, coming with a brigade of bowls, one for the mussels themselves, one for chips, one for bread, one for empty mussel shells, and a little lemon-scented bowl of water to dip my fingers in. My dinner alone must have taken up half the table. From then on, I ordered mussels every time they were on the menu, knowing they would transform me from a gawky 12-year-old girl wearing cargo pants into a veritable sophisticate. But I never once tried moules mouclade. Like Socrates, Casanova and Beyoncé, mouclade is usually known only by its first name, la mouclade – the ‘moules’ implied by the ‘mouclade’.

The sweet satisfaction of a burnt Cambridge cream

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, then a Trinity or Cambridge burnt cream must taste as sweet as its French twin, the crème brûlée. The two cooked custard dishes are essentially identical: an egg yolk-rich baked custard served cold and topped with a layer of hard caramel. Both are similar to the crema Catalana you find throughout Spain (known as ‘crema cremada’ in Catalan cuisine), but Catalana is made with milk rather than cream. It means it is lighter, and tends to have a thinner, paler caramel layer. Lemon or orange zest and a cinnamon stick are often used as flavouring for the Spanish pudding, whereas a burnt cream or crème brûlée is traditionally only flavoured with vanilla. The British version comes from Trinity College, Cambridge.

Fit for a king: kedgeree is the most regal of all Anglo-Indian dishes

How does the saying go? ‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.’ Well, if you’re looking for the highest possible status of breakfast, then kedgeree is the dish for you. Bran flakes just don’t quite scratch the same itch. Kedgeree cannot be casual; it requires time, both for preparation and enjoying, and it makes breakfast an occasion. It came to our breakfast tables (or mahogany sideboards) in Victorian times, brought back to Britain by returning colonial officers. It was served in silver chafing dishes, set alongside steaming urns of porridge. Kedgeree is a rice-based dish, flavoured with curried spices and cooked with smoked haddock, onions and boiled eggs. There are a host of other ingredients or accoutrements that can be served in or with it – peas, lime pickle, any herb you can think of – but these are the essentials.

The ultimate chicken pie recipe

Laurie Colwin wrote: ‘No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.’ It is one of my favourite quotes about cooking, mainly because it feels true: everything you cook is informed by other dishes, those that you’ve cooked, those that you’ve tasted or read about, the successes and the failures. In quiet moments of kitchen solitude, it is reassuring to know that there is an army of cooks behind me, each offering their experience, their recipes and books, a hand to hold when I feel uncertain. I never feel the truth of Colwin’s words more than when I’m making a chicken pie.

I’ve finally learned to love baked cheesecake

I used to be a baked cheesecake sceptic: I didn’t feel they were worth the effort when other cheesecakes required you simply to stir together some ingredients and bung them in the fridge. My thinking was: why waste your time? Was the result really worth the extra effort? In turns out that yes, it was. It is. I just hadn’t ever eaten a really good cheesecake. That changed on a visit to San Sebastián. La Viña is a small bar and restaurant serving pintxos (the Basque version of tapas), but it is best known for its ‘burnt’ baked cheesecake. Inside, you feel as though you’re in a cheese shop that has recently suffered a fire: the walls are lined with shelves on which sit rows of cheesecakes, slowly cooling in their charred baking-parchment wrappers.

How to make a true apple strudel

It’s possible that, like me, your first encounter with the Grande Dame of the Austrian pastry world, the apfelstrudel, was not in fact in one of the famed Viennese grand cafés, but rather from the freezer aisle at the supermarket. If it was anything like mine, it was probably a latticed, puffed version; the one I remember from childhood had blackberries mixed into the apple, which peeked through the holes in the pastry. I have no interest in denigrating our Sunday lunch pudding staple. In fact I loved it, served with thick, cold custard, straight from the carton. But it is fair to say that a true apple strudel is a little different. Strudels – meaning a filled, enclosed layered pastry – can be sweet or savoury, but the apple version is by far the most famous.

Sole Véronique: there’s no need to fear fish and grapes

One of the joys of writing about old-fashioned food is coming across dishes that are new to me, and turn out to be such a delight that they gain a recurring role in my cooking. Of course, some I’ve encountered were already among my established regulars – boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin. Others were childhood staples – shepherd’s pie, proper rice pudding. But a few of the dishes I take into my kitchen to work with I’ve never even tried before. The first recipe I wrote for The Spectator was for blancmange. Having grown up during the brief period when milk jelly was fashionable, I’d avoided blancmange like the plague. I was sure it must be rubbery, flavourless and a bit, well, creepy. Quite a bit of persuasion and research were needed before I was converted: blancmange is delightful! Cool, wibbly, creamy – and the perfect vehicle for all sorts of flavourings and aromatics.

How to poach peaches (and why you should)

I’ve never been very good at leaving things be. I tend to gild the lily. I may plan to do something simple, but I always find myself adding to it, primping, faffing. This is true in every area of life, but never more so than when I’m cooking. For that reason, this time of year can make me a little uncomfortable. When summer arrives in earnest – as opposed to those brief, misleadingly sunny weekends of late April and mid-May – we are inundated with beautiful fresh fruit. Right now, it’s strawberries, gooseberries, peaches and cherries; raspberries, blackcurrants and figs are just around the corner. And we are told over and over that it is impossible to improve on ripe, raw fruit, fresh from the tree. But I promise you (and this is not just me being a fusspot): there are occasions when it is worth cooking ripe, seasonal fruit; where it improves the fruit, and heightens its deliciousness.

How to turn your pineapple into a showstopper

You can’t please me: the grass is always greener. I spend the summer months longing for a time when crumbles and stew, cardigans and the big duvet, are not only welcome but required. Then as soon as we hit the autumn and the weather changes, I’m trying to hold onto the last vestiges of sunshine. This, I suppose, is as close as I can get to a compromise, a middle ground: pineapple, peeled but whole, still sporting its Sideshow Bob haircut, roasted until cooked all the way through, and caramelised on the outside. Served hot with ice cream, or boozy cream, and drizzled with the spicy, dark glaze that drips off during cooking, it captures all the flavours of summer and yet still delivers warmth.Vanilla and pineapple were made for each other: the fragrant seeds bring out the natural complexities in the sweetness of the fruit, and the smokiness of the vanilla pairs well with a little chilli pepper, giving a gentle hum of spice to the dish.

Greek salad: the ultimate heatwave dish

Good lord, it’s hot. I mean, really, really hot. Right now, the heat is so overwhelming as to feel like it is tangible, as if you could reach out and touch it. All we’re capable of talking about is the heat; any other polite conversation is too much for our fried brains. Normally, when our annual heatwave hits, I proffer some halfway house of a recipe: a dish that only needs the hob, not the oven, or is sufficiently refreshing or brightening that it justifies the added kitchen heat. But, this year, even that compromise seems unmanageable.At this stage, it would feel disingenuous, nay cruel, to offer up a recipe even for something like for ice cream, as that’s going to require making a custard base and honestly, who can bear the thought of standing over a stove waiting for eggs to coagulate? Not me.

Sundae best: how to make a knickerbocker glory

I grew up by the seaside. More precisely, I grew up near South Shields, on the north-east coast – somewhere which is British summer beach country for one, maybe two days a year, and salt-lashed and grey for the rest of it. But come rain or shine, ice cream is a permanent fixture. Ice cream was such an important part of life that the first school trip I ever went on, aged three, was to an ice-cream factory. I remember being handed an ice cream as big as my (admittedly then quite small) head, and vehemently declining the bright red sauce offered, known locally as ‘monkey blood’. A kindly nursery nurse reassured me it was just raspberry sauce, but I simply wasn’t taking the risk. But while ice cream by the beach was a deliciously regular occurrence, it was always a passing one.

Lemon drizzle cake: how to bring out the zing

Call it nominative determinism, but a lemon drizzle cake is perfect for disappointing, drizzly weather. It’s cheering: brightly flavoured, and packed with zest, but still comforting, filling your home with a warm citrus scent as it bakes. It’s also a more enjoyable food-based activity than picnics or barbecues when winds are high.A lemon drizzle cake is really just a pound cake – equal quantities of butter, sugar, eggs and flour – that’s then spritzed up with zest and juice. But it’s a pretty glorious one, managing to be both zingy and sweet, light and sticky. The key to a superlative lemon drizzle is packing in as much citrus as possible: mixing the sugar and lemon zest together before adding other ingredients bashes up the zest a bit, helping to release the fragrant oils and, once baked, the cake should be drizzled with the lemon syrup while still warm – and pierced with a chopstick or skewer to let the tart syrup penetrate.

The trick to making good focaccia

Focaccia is one of my favourite breads: glossy and golden on top thanks to the olive oil, but firm and crisp, with a chewy, aerated, oil-soaked crumb with a real spring. You should be able to squish a good focaccia with your hand and watch it slowly rise back up to its former glory.Focaccia’s a brilliant bread to make if you’re a little nervous of yeast and dough: the ‘shaping’ of focaccia is far easier than that of a traditional loaf, or even a ciabatta or baguette. To make focaccia, you spread your dough out in a tin – an imprecise art – and then paddle it with your fingers, creating divots and dimples. When the dough has proved for its final time, you again dibble the dough with your fingertips, and then pour a generous quantity of olive oil over the top.

What are the true ingredients of a Bakewell tart?

Northerners take their puddings seriously: Eccles cakes from Manchester, sticky toffee pudding from Cartmel, and Bakewell tart from Derbyshire. These hyper local puddings have been adopted by sweet tooths all over the country, but woe betide anyone who tries to mess with their traditions. In this, Bakewell tart provides its own challenges: the locals call it a pudding, and many will argue that it should have a puff pastry base rather than the shortcrust that it tends to have elsewhere, and even feature custard rather than frangipane. And we also have to contend with another variety – those made famous by Mr Kipling, which use a cherry jam, and decorate with a thick layer of fondant icing and a glace cherry.Bakewell’s origin story contains the two most important aspects of any origin story: a kitchen accident, and an extremely spurious factual basis.

Why you should never buy scotch eggs

One of the perils of being a recipe writer is that people regularly ask me why I bother making things from scratch, because ‘You can buy that in the supermarket’. Now, let’s put aside the obvious question – do they think I’m not aware of supermarkets? – and engage with the issue. I love supermarket food. There are many products which are simply better shop-bought: baked beans, mango chutney, Jaffa Cakes. Countless chefs and home cooks have tried to improve on Heinz tomato ketchup; all have failed. There are also supermarket foods which, while not necessarily better-tasting, are simply radically more convenient. Oven chips, say, or filo pastry. But consider the Victoria sponge. A shepherd’s pie. The humble crumble.

Why your summer pudding needs a splash of elderflower

Is there a sight more pleasing, more cheering, than the vermillion dome of a summer pudding? Its vibrant colour cannot fail to raise a smile, even on dreary June days, suggestive as it is of all that is best about the British summer when it plays ball: gluts of sweet, juicy fruit, that sweet-sour tightrope that our summer crops walk so deftly, long lunches in the garden, and sticky fingers. Each time I make a summer pudding, I am convinced it won’t hold. That, after a day of soaking, the flimsy bread frame will give way, spilling forth its berry contents all over the plate. Each time I turn out the pudding, I am freshly delighted and surprised; triumphant, as if it is my structural skill rather than berry juices that is to be congratulated.

Tarte au citron: serve up a slice of sunshine

There is something inherently uplifting about a lemon. Even in literal or figurative dark times, lemons shine bright – little bumpy orbs of joy that cry out from the fruit bowl or the greengrocers to be turned into something mouth-puckering or, once paired with enough sugar, that perfect balance of sweet-sour. Perhaps I am overly sentimental, but lemons always strike me as cheering, and full of promise. Lemon curd was one of the first things I learnt to make when I began cooking, but I’ve held off turning it into a tart for a while, unable to work out how to create the exact pudding I wanted to eat. For a long time, I have wanted to make this perfect lemon tart, but have been thwarted in my attempts. I have strong opinions on the ideal tarte au citron: I want a tart almost shocking in its lemoniness, so ridiculously zesty that it elicits inadvertent exclamations on eating.

The sheer delight of Cherries Jubilee

Cherries Jubilee is a dish with real heritage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its name, it was created to celebrate a jubilee: it is thought to have been created by Escoffier for Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee celebration in 1897. It consists of cherries cooked in flaming brandy, and then served warm over vanilla ice cream, although in the original dish it was even more pared down, lacking the ice cream element. The dish is flambéd, which means that the alcohol from the kirsch is ignited with an open flame, and cooked off quickly. Of course, safety is paramount: don’t let your six year old nephew take charge of this bit, make sure you’re doing it in an area which doesn’t contain flammable materials, and not in the vicinity of anything else which could catch light.

The ingredient that guarantees the flakiest Eccles cakes

When I first made Eccles cakes, I’m not sure I really knew where Eccles was. I certainly didn’t think I’d end up living there a few years later. The only Eccles cakes I’d encountered were at train station coffee kiosks, or at London’s St John restaurant, where they are a permanent fixture on the menu. Don’t tell my neighbours. In Eccles, the cakes are ubiquitous. They’re such a part of the regional identity that as far back as 1838, a guide to British railways journey stated simply: ‘This place is famous for its cakes.’ My kind of place. And today, whatever the season, Eccles cakes still line the entrances to the local supermarkets. Eccles is a small town in Greater Manchester, formerly part of the country of Lancashire.

The secret ingredient that transforms banoffee pie

I have been labouring under a misapprehension for some time, perhaps my whole life. I thought that the ‘offe’ in ‘banoffee pie’ was a reference to the thick, gooey toffee layer that sits between the biscuit base and the cream. But no, the ‘offe’ has nothing to do with what is, in any event, really a caramel, but the coffee flavour that should be folded through the cream topping. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a banoffee pie that features the sort-of-eponymous coffee, and I am relieved to discover that wide swathes of the internet (including the fallible wikipedia) has made the same mistake. But as I experiment with the recipe, it’s clear that the coffee is an important counterpoint: the cream, barely sweetened, with bitter hints from the coffee, prevents the rest of the pudding from being overbearingly sweet (although, let’s be real, this is not a pudding for someone who lacks a sweet tooth).

Why I’m wild about Waldorf salad

You don’t see Waldorf salad so much nowadays. It’s a simple dish: raw celery, apple, grapes and walnuts, tossed in a mayonnaise-based dressing. Although you might still find it packaged in the bigger supermarkets, it’s fallen off dinner tables and restaurant menus alike. We wrinkle our noses at the prospect of combining fresh fruit and mayonnaise: the combination always makes me mentally place the Waldorf salad in the 70s, alongside big platters of dressed salmon, covered in wafer-thin cucumber scales, and a host of other mayonnaise-coated, tricky-to-identify bowls purporting to be salads, possibly involving tinned mandarin oranges. But it’s actually much older than it feels: it was invented in 1896 for a charity ball being held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York.

The delicious silliness of pink lemonade jelly

The onset of summer makes me feel giddy. And it seems from those piling into beer gardens and loading up their hampers for picnics in parks, I’m not alone. Perhaps this is because it is of course too early for summer, I’m not ready for it. And to be fair, it’s barely arrived. Spring is still stamping its feet with April showers, and shaking its blossom filled trees to remind us of its presence. But those hot hazy golden days are creeping in, even on bank holiday weekends, the traditional domain of miserable, dreary weather, which we bravely brazen out, so determined are we to make the most of the one day vacation from work. No need this year: sunshine and giddiness prevails. Such giddiness calls for something silly, something bright and zippy, and maybe a bit childish.

How to use up your spare hot cross buns

It always feels criminal to throw away hot cross buns. Hot cross buns are marked by their scarcity in my house: no sooner do they cross the threshold than they are pounced upon and demolished. Assuming that you are capable of more restraint than me, this recipe deals with the unlikely scenario of how to use up those leftover buns. The ravenous will be relieved to hear that only two buns are required. And if you have more willpower than I do, you can even hold back a couple more hot cross buns and serve the ice cream between two halves of a bun, as a particularly Eastery ice cream sandwich. This is a bit of a cross between traditional brown bread ice cream and my a spice-infused ice cream. It has a custard base, infused with cinnamon and nutmeg.

The secret to baking the fluffiest hot cross buns

What makes a hot cross bun a hot cross bun? Is it in the bun: the spice, the dried fruit and citrus peel, or even the type of dough? Is it the way you eat it – hot! – sliced in half, toasted and dripping with butter? Or is it the cross itself? Hot cross bun purists will tell you that it’s all of the above, and that any deviation from the classic is, well, deviant. And more-over, that the buns should be eaten only on Good Friday, never before or after. But if recent examples are anything to go by, the rules are very loose. Each year, as soon as Christmas is over, unorthodox hot cross buns line our supermarket shelves and cause opprobrium among the sticklers. There’s chocolate chip, chocolate orange, lemon and white chocolate, mocha; rhubarb and custard, strawberries and cream, sticky toffee pudding; cheese, cheese and Marmite, cheese and jalapeño.

Whisky syrup sponge: the perfect pick-me-up

Bringing something golden, sweet and uplifting into your kitchen and life is exactly what is required at this time of year. And it doesn’t get more golden, sweet or uplifting than a syrup sponge. A syrup sponge is a steamed pudding, laced with golden syrup. The pudding itself is made by pouring a cake-style batter into a basin or bowl, sealing it with paper and foil, and then placing it in a half-filled pan of water, where it is gently cooked by the steam, until the sponge is light and risen. Golden syrup is an inverse sugar, which means it is created in the process of refining sugar, or after a sugar solution has been treated with an acid. Its flavour is distinctive: lighter than honey, like the palest of caramels, with a clean sweetness which tastes almost metallic.

Rhubarb and custard cheesecake: a true romance of flavours

Sometimes, when I am planning a pudding, it can feel like there is a hitch in my brain, a little sticky spot that I catch on, and have to release myself from before I can move on. That hitch, that sticky spot, is rhubarb and custard. I know that there are other pudding bases, sweet dishes that are more original, more popular. I know that there exist other marvellous fruits that deserve the spotlight, that there are chocolate concoctions that will ooze and impress, bitter caramels that will shock and delight. But in order to get to them, I have to move past my first instinct which is always: rhubarb and custard. It’s not simply that it is a default combination in my mind. ‘Default’ suggests something boring and uninspired, like toast for lunch, or tomato pasta for supper – not unenjoyable, but not exactly interesting.

The joy of sticky toffee hot cross buns

When it comes to cooking, I make no secret of the fact that I’m something of a traditionalist: I like old-fashioned steamed puddings, I like the classic and the heritage. I like blancmange and rice pudding and suet. I am unashamedly unfashionable. I’m not sure whether I chose the Vintage Chef recipe writing life, or whether the Vintage Chef recipe writing life chose me. I just don’t see the point in reinventing the wheel, or injecting unusual flavours and twists just for the sake of it. But, as I look back through recipes I’ve written, Easter has always been my exception: hot cross bun ice cream sandwiches, hot cross bun bread and butter pudding, cakes topped with mini eggs. I fell head over heels into the hot cross bun as a bacon sandwich bandwagon a few years ago, and never looked back.

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