Rose Prince - The New English Kitchen - Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat

Makes 8

1/ 2quantity of mashed potato

2 eggs, beaten

flour for coating

sunflower or groundnut oil for shallow-frying

For the sauce:

1 bunch of watercress, finely chopped

150ml/ 1/ 4pint crème fraîche

1 egg yolk

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Mix the mashed potato thoroughly with the eggs and return to the fridge to firm up. Form the mixture into little cakes, about 5cm/2 inches in diameter and 1cm/ 1/ 2inch thick, and coat them in flour. Heat a thin layer of oil in a frying pan, add the potato cakes and shallow-fry over a medium heat for about 5 minutes on each side, until lightly browned.

Meanwhile, heat the watercress, crème-fraîche and egg yolk together in a small pan, whisking gently. Remove from the heat before it boils and season to taste. Serve the potato cakes with the sauce poured around the edge.

Follow the above recipe, mixing 2 flaked fillets of hot-smoked trout into the mashed potato, together with 2 chopped hard-boiled eggs, if you like. These fishcakes are very good with the watercress sauce.

What more can be said about a classic leftovers hash? Except that I add egg yolks for richness, which is not authentic but very good. You can leave them out, if you prefer.

240g/8oz leftover cooked cabbage

1/ 2quantity of mashed potato (see here)

2–4 leftover egg yolks

3 tablespoons dripping

Mix the cabbage, potato and egg yolks together. Heat the dripping in a large frying pan, add the potato mixture and fry over a medium-low heat on both sides, until it forms a crisp cake that is hot all the way through.

You can use the same method with all the brassica family, whether the much-maligned Brussels sprout or the ultra-chic Italian cavolo nero. You can also use cooked leeks, anything from the squash family, or sweetcorn – a hash is a hash.

Salad potatoes are small with firm skins. They are available all year round, and while it is always the right move to buy British during our own new-potato season – from April to July – imported types can be fine when there are no home-grown to be had. Varieties omnipresent in supermarkets are Charlotte and Nicola but do seek out the rarer breeds, too. These include La Ratte, Pink Fir Apple, Belle de Fontenay, Duke of York and Kestrel (see the Shopping Guide). Organic salad potatoes are grown slowly, a factor that no doubt accounts for their deeper flavour. Cook more than you need and use them to help other meals happen. Don’t confuse year-round salad potatoes with specialist seasonal types like the papery-skinned Jersey Royals, which begin to arrive in Britain as early as February, or their Cornish early equivalent.

This is the best salad to eat with cold ham or beef. The sweeter the onions, the better it will taste. If you can find Breton or Roscoff onions – they are still sold in strings – so much the better. So-called banana shallots, which are in fact onions, make a good substitute.

Serves 4

1kg/2 1/ 4lb salad potatoes

1 teaspoon salt

6 shallots, or pink Roscoff onions if you can find them, sliced

Mayonnaise (see here)

Put the potatoes in a pan, cover with water and add the salt. Bring to the boil and cook until just tender – they should still be waxy in the centre when you cut them open. Drain and leave to cool, then slice thickly. Put them in a bowl and add the shallots and enough mayonnaise to coat. Mix well.

Before you run screaming from the room, I am not about to make you cook for the freezer. I do freeze extra food, but not great bags of every type of vegetable and fruit, which only become soggy and tasteless when defrosted. I make a few shepherd’s and fish pies, and braised meat stews and sauces to store in the freezer. Otherwise I prefer to cook from stored ingredients. However, there are foods that are ideal for freezing: peas, broad beans and spinach come to mind. Sweetcorn freezes well – so much better for the children than canned – as do all red berries apart from strawberries.

Frozen broad beans have to be used in a certain way because one of their weakest points serves them very well in the freezer. The pale skin that surrounds the inner, podded bean toughens unpleasantly but in doing so protects the flesh of the bean from the ice crystals that make most frozen vegetables go soggy. Broad beans are inexpensive, so the method that follows is not as wasteful as it seems.

Defrost the beans in a colander and put them in a pan. Pour over boiling water and reheat to boiling point. Drain, splash with plenty of cold water and then pinch off the pale skin of each bean. It doesn’t take long and you are left with beautiful bright green kernels, perfect to dress with oil and lemon juice and eat with dry-cured meat, hard-boiled eggs, soft goat’s cheese, or even quite alone.

A terrific vegetable, and ingredient. It is true that frozen peas often taste better than fresh, unless you can be sure that your fresh supply has been picked within two or three days. This is because fresh peas deteriorate quickly, becoming hard and starchy. It is now possible to buy organic frozen peas and petits pois. I recommend them. not least because it is an inexpensive way to eat naturally produced food (see the Shopping Guide).

Blend frozen peas with stock for an almost-instant pea soup, stir them into rice dishes, or combine them with skinned broad beans (see above), spinach, olive oil and fresh mint for a simple salad that will put the colour green into your winter food.

Serves 4

1 litre/1 3/ 4pints chicken, beef or vegetable stock

2 spring onions, chopped

480g/1lb frozen peas, defrosted

150ml/ 1/ 4pint single cream or whole milk

4 rashers of unsmoked back bacon, cut into thin slivers

8 salad potatoes, boiled in their skins until just tender then

thickly sliced

leaves from 4 sprigs of dill

sea salt and white pepper

Heat the stock to boiling point and add the spring onions and peas. Bring back to the boil and simmer for 1 minute. Allow to cool for a few minutes, then liquidise with the cream or milk. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Fry the bacon over a low heat until crisp, then add the potatoes and stir to warm them through. Serve the soup in deep bowls with a large spoonful of bacon and potatoes in each. Scatter the dill on top.

Defrosted slowly, frozen spinach can be as good as fresh. All the water must be squeezed out, and the spinach cooked either with plenty of butter, or heated with good olive oil to make this quick vegetable dish.

Serves 2

2 tablespoons pine nuts

480g/1lb frozen whole-leaf spinach, defrosted and the water

squeezed out

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Dry-toast the pine nuts in a frying pan until lightly browned, then set them aside in a bowl. Warm the spinach through in a pan and add the oil. Transfer to a dish, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and scatter the pine nuts on top. Finish with the lemon juice.

Canning is ideal for certain foods, a good and pure way to store them without preservatives. It can even improve them in some cases – skipjack tuna being an example.