Nigella Bites (9 page)

Get some if you can, especially if you’ve got children, to whom, though not exclusively, they appeal. And eat these golden miniature maize breads with stews, the black bean soup above, with fried eggs and bacon, or just as they are, for breakfast.

Makes 18 cornsticks, 12 muffins or 9 x 7cm squares of cornbread.

vegetable shortening for greasing cornsticks, or butter for tins

175g fine cornmeal (or polenta: same difference really)

125g plain flour

45g caster sugar

fat pinch of salt

1 tablespoon baking powder

250ml full-fat milk

1 egg

45g unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6 then grease the cornstick moulds with melted vegetable shortening. Those sadly lacking in the cornstick-mould department should grease a square 20cm tin (5cm deep) or 12-bun muffin tin with butter (if you’re not using paper cases).

Mix the cornmeal, flour, sugar, salt and baking powder in a large bowl. In a measuring jug beat together the milk, egg and cooled, melted butter. Then pour the wet ingredients into the dry, stirring with a wooden spoon until just combined. Don’t worry in the slightest about the odd lump. Pour into the greased moulds and bake for 12–15 minutes for the cornsticks or 20–25 minutes for the square or muffin tins. When ready, the cornbread should be just pulling away from the sides.

Cut the square, if using, into smaller, chunky squares or tip out the cornsticks or muffins and eat warm. And these cornsticks, swabbed with butter as if you really were eating corn-on-the-cob, are God’s way of telling you that greed really is good.

WATERMELON DAIQUIRI

The trashy cook should not be stoveside too long without a drink in hand. And preferably this drink. You don’t have to go overboard with the postmodern, anxiously ironic bit: this is ambrosia for even the good-taste gods.

But if on the other hand you’re concerned that commendation might detract from its vulgar charm, just make it and drink it, wearing mules to match.

The watermelon doesn’t come frozen, by the way, engaging thought though that is: just buy it, slice it, chunk it, stuff it into suitable bags and stash them vibrantly in the freezer.

100ml (or to taste) Bacardi

juice of 1 good-sized lime

1 heaped tablespoon icing sugar

approx. 10 x 5cm cubes of frozen watermelon

Put all the above ingredients in a blender and blitz to a pinkly foamy purée. Pour into two waiting marguerita glasses – and tip back, bangles jangling.

SOUTHERN-STYLE CHICKEN

There’s something about frying, especially in vegetable shortening and in such Rosanne-like quantities, that is so refreshingly unchic. But I assure you there’s no element of let’s-go-slumming smuggery about the inclusion of this recipe here, for all the glee I take in the gorgeously garish wrapper in which my vegetable fat of choice comes. This is exceptionally good, a taste sensation and textural heaven; bite into it and savour a finely balanced contrast – tender, poached meat within, crisp coating seared onto it – that the great names of the old Nouvelle Cuisine could only dream of.

Southern cooks use buttermilk for steeping, and fry their soak-softened meat from raw. I use ordinary milk, and poach the chicken in it before frying. Whether this makes it authentically Southern-fried chicken I wouldn’t like to say, but regard this as homage rather than imitation.

Serves 2–4.

2 chicken drumsticks, skin on

2 chicken thigh portions, skin on, bone in

750ml–1 litre full-fat milk (see below)

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon salt

125g plain flour

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 egg, beaten

500g solid vegetable fat for frying

Put the chicken pieces in a dish into which they fit snugly. Pour over the milk to cover and sprinkle over the tablespoon of salt. Dibble with your fingers to mix in. Cover with clingfilm and leave in the fridge for a few hours or overnight. (You don’t absolutely have to do this, but it will help tenderise the meat.)

Tip the contents of the dish into a pan with a lid and bring to the boil, turning it down to simmer until the chicken pieces are entirely cooked through. The pan will look like a horrible, clumpy, curdy mess but don’t be put off – it makes the chicken taste wonderful later, which is what matters. Also it’s hard to fry chicken really well (or I find it so) from raw, as the skin tends to burn before the meat’s cooked at the bone. This is simply my way of resolving this.

Remove the chicken pieces to a rack and let cool; they don’t need to be cold, but you don’t want them still steamy. Put the flour, cayenne and teaspoon of salt into a plastic bag, shake all the pieces of chicken in it one by one, then dip them into the egg, then into the flour again.

Leave to dry on the rack for about 15 minutes. Heat the great white slab of vegetable fat in a frying pan until it’s nearly at smoking point. Don’t worry about using so much: the more fat and the hotter it is, the less the food you’re cooking absorbs. So, untroubled, lower in the chicken pieces and cook for a minute or so each side – just long enough for the skin to crisp and turn a rich golden-brown.

Eat hot, straight from the pan, with crisps and a green salad – or, believe it or not, cold. These gold-and-bronzed beauties make killer picnic food.

ELVIS PRESLEY’S FRIED PEANUT-BUTTER AND BANANA SANDWICH

Let’s not mess around: you want trashy, I’ll give you trashy – I’ll give you the King. This recipe, for want of a better word, comes from a rhinestone gem of a cookbook, Are You Hungry Tonight?, a collection of his favourite foodstuffs bought on a visit to Graceland many years back, prized ever since and a delight from cover to cover. Even my most recent addition to a library already bursting with bad-taste titles, Liberace Cooks!, can’t lose him his crown.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that smearing a couple of slabs of white bread with peanut butter and mashed banana, sandwiching the lot bulgingly together and then frying it in butter, would be at best revolting. But that’s where you’d be wrong. I have no particular fondness for peanut butter, or bananas for that matter, and a downright shuddering aversion to eating them cooked, but what a genius that man was. This sandwich is a wondrous thing, gloriously exemplifying what cooking is all about: the whole is so much intriguingly, confoundingly more than the sum of its parts. It really works. I wouldn’t turn one down now at any time, although, true to form, there is a certain kamikaze calorie-intake involved not always to be calmly countenanced – but for a hangover, to combat seediness and restore the fragmenting self, it’s particular perfection: it doesn’t merely sustain, it resuscitates.

Believe it or not, the quantities below appear in edited, attenuated form. I honour the King but I can’t be him.

Serves 1.

1 small ripe banana

2 slices white bread

2 scant tablespoons smooth peanut butter (don’t use extra-smooth)

2 tablespoons butter

Mash or slice the banana.

Lightly toast the bread, and then spread the peanut butter on one piece and the banana on the other. Sandwich together then fry in the butter, turning once, until each side is golden-brown. Remove to a plate, cut the sandwich carefully in half on the diagonal and eat.

DEEP-FRIED BOUNTIES WITH PINEAPPLE

Or Glasgow meets the Caribbean. Francis MacNeil, the lighting assistant on the series, told me about the joys of deep-fried Bounty (far in excess, I should say, of the more familiar regional dish of deep-fried Mars Bar) and since I had people coming for dinner at the end of that week, I just had to try it. I should say that I offered it as a perfectly serious pudding – more or less – after a starter of tuna with ginger, soy and rice vinegar, a take on the salmon recipe on p178 and the Thai seafood curry on p66: it was a triumph.

The pineapple cuts across the sticky sweetness of the fritters and turns it into a pudding rather than a funny turn. Besides, the combination of coconut and pineapple is a time-honoured one. You might consider putting a bottle of good rum on the table for people to drink alongside, too.

As for the batter: I find the combination of self-raising flour and fizzy water produces the lightest effect possible.

And since then, I have been inspired to move on to deep fried Cadbury’s Creme Eggs (a must for Easter) and deep-fried Dime Bars. There’s no stopping me now…

approx. 2 litres sunflower or other oil for deep frying

1 ripe pineapple

150g self-raising flour

200-225ml fizzy water

8 x fun-sized Bounty bars

Heat the oil in a deep-fat fryer to maximum heat.

Cut the top and bottom off the pineapple, and then quarter it vertically. Trim the woody core off each segment, and then lie it skinside down, and slice the flesh in half lengthways, stopping when you feel the skin. Then cut it across into slices and run the knife between the flesh of the fruit and the outer husk. The pineapple pieces should then come away easily. Squeeze the outer skin of the pineapple over the cut fruit to get every last bit of juice.

Measure the flour into a bowl, and whisk in 175ml of the fizzy water to make the batter, adding the rest of the water if the consistency is still too thick: you want this just thick enough to adhere easily. The best way to check is to turn a Bounty in it: if the batter sticks well enough, it’s fine. I just use my fingers for this, but tongs work well too.

Plunge the batter-blanketed Bounties in the hot oil and fry for about 3 minutes until the batter’s puffed and golden. Remove to pieces of kitchen towel to absorb excess grease, then pile up on a plate to sit on the table alongside the cut-up pineapple.

CHOCOLATE-LIME CHEESECAKE

Perhaps it is eccentric to wait for the last recipe in the chapter before pausing to explain what it is that makes any food trashy, as far as my purposes here are concerned, but nothing exemplifies it better than this cheesecake. Right then: you should know I start from the premise – and this is resolutely the case with all the recipes here – that, all campness aside, it has to be good – better than good: it can taste surprisingly elegant or prejudice-challengingly seductive, but the one thing it mustn’t taste like is a joke.

If that’s understood, we can move on. Trashy food, in its platonic ideal, should contain at least one brand-name product. Here we have the Philadelphia cream cheese leading. Next, it should use a low-rent ingredient, one that gastro-snobs would never normally even consider keeping in the house: may I introduce you to Maryland cookies? (Yes, I like them too, but we’re talking culinary status-queens here, the pose of the label-conscious purist.) Finally, in its loftiest incarnation, it should seek to evoke some food or food-related substance that is industrially produced, not naturally occurring. Here, my inspiration for the cheesecake (itself widely considered a declassé foodstuff, certainly one devalued by inferior evocations) was a sweet – those chocolate limes I ate in my childhood.

That the base is rich and dark and perfectly counters the light, tender cream-cheese custard above it, itself kept all the more delicately smooth by being baked in a water bath (and this is easy: don’t let a bit of wrapping in foil and boiling a kettle put you off before you start) and made intensely, fragrantly sharp by having the juice of four uncompromisingly sour limes squeezed into it, takes us back to the beginning. Trashy is a state of mind, a game of mood: the food itself deserves, demands, to be served and eaten – unsmirkingly, unapologetically and with voluptuous and exquisite pleasure.

Serves 8.

200g Double Choc Maryland cookies (in the purple packet)

75g unsalted butter

750g Philadelphia cream cheese

200g caster sugar

4 whole eggs

2 yolks

juice of 4 limes

20–21cm springform cake tin

kitchen foil

Place a large overlapping piece of foil over the bottom of the springform tin, and then insert the pan ring over it. Fold the foil up around the sides of the tin and place the whole thing on a second piece of foil, also folding it and pressing it securely up around the tin so that you have a water-tight covering. Actually, I sometimes find some water dribbles out from this supposedly secure casing on unwrapping, but it doesn’t seem – as long as you unwrap the outer later straightaway – to cause any sogginess.

Process the biscuits until they are like crumbs, then add the butter and pulse again. Line the bottom of the springform tin, pressing the biscuits in with your hands or the back of a spoon. Put the tin in the fridge to set, and preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4.

Beat the cream cheese gently until it’s smooth, and then add the sugar. Beat in the eggs and egg yolks, then finally the lime juice. Put a full kettle on.

Pour the cream cheese filling onto the chilled biscuit base, place the tin in a roasting tray and pour hot water from the recently boiled kettle around the foil-wrapped cheesecake to come about halfway up the sides of the springform; don’t overfill as you’ll only spill it on the way to the oven. Transfer it as steadily as you can to the oven and cook for 1 hour or so, checking after 50 minutes. It should feel set, but not rigidly so. You want to be able to detect, below the skin, the slightest, sexiest hint of quiver within.

Take the roasting tin out of the oven, then gingerly remove the springform from its water-filled tin, stand it on a rack, peel off the outer layer of foil, tear away the side bits of the first layer of foil and leave to cool. When the cheesecake’s cooled down completely, place it in the fridge and leave it there till 20 minutes or so before you want to eat it.

Transfer to the plate you’re going to serve it on (it will need to be one without a lip, or a cakestand) and unclip. The underneath bit of the first layer of foil, along with the base of the tin, are going to have to stay in place, unless you like living really dangerously. I don’t mind a bit of risk in the kitchen, but fiddling about with something as desirably lacking in solidity as this dreamlike cheesecake is beyond even my clumsily impatient foolhardiness.

It makes life easier if, when you cut it, you heat the knife and cake slicer (and I find I need to use both, the one to cut, the other to lift up and ferry slice to waiting plate) under a very hot tap first.