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

Stir the oil and basil into the tomato sauce, then smear the sauce on to each circle of dough and scatter the mozzarella on top. Bake until the outer edge bubbles and turns crisp and the mozzarella is melted but not browned. Shake over a little extra virgin oil and grind over some black pepper before you eat the pizza.

Liquidised canned Italian tomatoes or passata can be used in place of the tomato sauce, but the pizza must cook fast at a high temperature for the tomatoes to sweeten and the juice to evaporate.

Try the Tuscan Schiacciata con l’uva , which is eaten during the grape harvest. Roll out the dough to a thin rectangle, sprinkle over a little Pernod or aniseed-flavoured alcohol, then fold it in three and roll again to about 5mm/ 1/4inch thick. Scatter over a few red grapes – red wine grapes, if available, because their thin skins make them good for cooking. Bake at your oven’s highest setting until the dough is crisp, then serve sprinkled with a little sugar.

To make garlic bread, infuse 2 chopped garlic in 4 tablespoons of olive oil for an hour or two, then shake it over the uncooked pizza bases. Cut a few slashes in the centre of each one and bake as for pizza. Shake a little extra virgin olive oil over the bread as it comes out of the oven.

To make goat’s cheese pasties, roll out the dough thinly and cut it into rounds with a tumbler. In the centre of each one, put a spoonful of mild, fresh goat’s cheese and a little finely chopped dill or lightly cooked greens (such as chard or spinach, with all the water squeezed out). Brush the edges with water, fold over and pinch together to make little pasties. Bake until crisp and golden in an oven preheated to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8.

It is easy to glance around the kitchen and say, ‘I have nothing in the house’, but that is not strictly true if the end of a loaf is lurking in the bread bin. This section of the bread chapter is intended to change ‘I have nothing …’ to ‘hmmm, well perhaps …’, or even to, ‘I have eggs, I have some herbs and I can make toast …’ Then there are breadcrumbs, so quick to defrost after storage in the freezer, then fry in olive oil with a little garlic and parsley to serve with pasta, or use as a coating for meat that has been hammered thin (see here).

The art of making bread go further has become almost extinct – partly because of the preservatives in commercially baked bread, but also because it is the kind of hand-me-down information that disappeared when mothers stopped cooking and broke the chain of food lore. It is not that recipes using stale bread are old-fashioned – Tuscan bread soups are now championed by contemporary chefs as one of the most delicious things in the world. Their recipes invariably suggest using the ubiquitous ciabatta but it is fine to make use of that old loaf of everyday bread.

Good bread deteriorates faster than sliced and wrapped factory-baked loaves containing preservatives such as citric acid. They will not, however, develop a mould quickly, but gradually dry out during the week. My experience with factory-made breads is that they deteriorate suddenly approximately six days after they are bought, when an outbreak of mouldy spots appear and the whole lot must go in the bin.

Sourdough bread, on the other hand, has an extraordinary life. The crust will dry but no spots appear for up to two weeks. Because it costs more, I tend to scrape or cut any mould away and continue popping the bread under the grill, where it obediently becomes springy inside and crisp on the outside – edible again.

This is what a home-made loaf can give, assuming it yields 10 slices of bread. Half the loaf is eaten fresh over a day for breakfast, or in packed lunches; 4 slices of the drying remains are toasted and put in the bottom of four soup bowls, then a vegetable broth spooned over; the remainder is made into breadcrumbs. Half the breadcrumbs are used to coat some hammered chicken thigh meat and the other half fried with herbs and nuts beside a separate dish of roast pheasant or partridge. Fifty pence goes a long way with food.

There’s nothing new. The French have croûtons, Italians crostini – we have toast. Crostini sounds so neo-Italian, so latter-day peasant that it is easy to forget that it is simply toast. Putting things on toast is genius – ordinary, everyday items of food are greatly elevated by their toasted mattress of bread. Toast belongs to the British Isles, and it is one of those things that we do better than anyone else. Thick slices of toast with butter and marmalade, what better breakfast? Apart from perhaps boiled eggs and toast. Or scrambled eggs on toast.

My father was very fond of savouries. These were small dishes, often on toast, served after the main course. They are out of fashion now, outside the gentleman’s club. His favourite was sardines on toast – and yes, they were from a can. We quaked with horror at the table, but out came the macho Worcestershire sauce: ‘They must have Worcestershire sauce!’ And he was right. They were very good after a liberal shaking.

I tried them again the other day, with very little modification, and liked them all over again. It is the same story of good and bad food in England. They do need good bread, good butter and good sardines. You can buy line-caught canned sardines from Spanish shops and delis. Ramon Bue is an excellent brand that has been around for ever – as long as Worcestershire sauce, in fact.

Serves 4

8 canned sardines

4 medium-thick slices of day-old bread

butter

Worcestershire sauce

chopped parsley

Pick over the sardines without damaging their silver skins. Where possible, remove the gritty spines or obvious bones. Toast the bread and spread it with butter while it is still hot. Lay fillets from 2 fish on top of each slice, skin-side up, and put under a hot grill for 2 minutes. Dress with Worcestershire sauce and sprinkle with parsley.

When well-hung beef is roasted, it produces a full-tasting dripping with a jelly beneath that can only be described as nectar. Hot toast or Melba Toast (see here), cut nicely into triangles, with a fifty-fifty mixture of dripping and jelly spread on top, finished by black pepper and maybe a watercress leaf, is a completely respectable thing to serve with drinks. It fed the poor for centuries, but was killed off by tasteless, poorly hung meat. It is not an everyday dish; a little dripping is good for you but too much is not. But on those occasions when you splash out on the best beef joints, make sure you collect the dripping to make Roast Potatoes (see here), pilaffs (see here) – and for toast.

Melted cheese – Try some of the new British and Irish cheeses as well as traditional farmhouse Cheddar and Double Gloucester. Lord of the Hundreds is used often in this book – a hard ewe’s milk cheese that melts to a tart, white cream. Other good melting cheeses include Saval, Malvern and Coolea, plus the obvious European mountain cheeses, Gruyère, Cantal, Emmental and Tilsiter.

Fresh, young goat’s cheeses – Soft white goat’s cheese can be crumbled on to toast, with herbs, salad leaves and olives, and dressed with a few drops of those piquant oils you can buy, infused with chilli or aromatic herbs.