(Not up for the chitchat? Completely get it. Click the email title to go to a web-based version then jump straight to the recipes, or Cultural Fun.)
I know one can over-commit to feeling vernal at this time of year. Which only leads to disappointment. I mean, we haven’t even cleared February yet and it is chucking it down outside right now. But this morning I spent about half an hour watching a tit (a great one I think) go in and out of a nesting box so I can’t fully suppress the little voice inside me chanting: “spring is coming, spring is coming…”
Also there are some early magnolia blossoms coming out which is always exciting. Did you know you can eat magnolia flowers? Raw they’re like slightly gingery chicory and are a pretty addition to salads. But they really come into their own flavour-wise when pickled. Here are some I made and ate last year. Click through to Instagram for the method.
I’m also going to try making cheong this year - a traditional Korean method for creating fruit or flower-infused syrups. It just involves layering up your chosen ingredient with an equal weight of sugar in a clean jar and waiting (anywhere from days to months) for the sugar to dissolve. Maybe a ferment too, depending on how many petals I can forage.
Let me know if you eat or preserve any magnolia petals…
More Preserved Lemon Recipes
Yes. More. Following last year’s mini-series of preserved lemon recipes (check the archive to find salad dressing, pasta and a cake), we are returning to the subject. Of all the things I make in my workshops, I get most questions about how to use the lemons. I get that they are a bit mysterious to people but heir flavours are endlessly versatile and I want there to be no excuses for not using up your jars…
If you were inspired by last week’s edition and made some alternative preserved citrus, they would work here too when ready. I’ll also have my favourite tagine recipe for you next week along with some truffles. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out!
Recipe: Browned Butter with Preserved Lemon
Like the salad dressing I brought you in November, this butter has an exceptional effort-to-reward ratio. It’s a great culinary trick to have up your sleeve and a good reason for having a jar of preserved lemons in the fridge. (As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to blitz my batches into paste which makes life even easier.)
Browning butter makes an already good thing even better. It helps to do it in a pan with a shiny metallic or pale interior: something light-coloured against which the browning milk solids will stand out. If not, make sure you have a metal spoon on hand and scoop regularly to see what’s happening.
This makes enough for two servings of the fish dish below. Or to toss with a couple of portions of just-drained pasta (add a splash of the cooking water and plenty of parmesan). It can also gussy up a bowl of veg or be spooned over poached eggs and yoghurt for breakfast with a sprinkle of chilli flakes. But I would recommend scaling up and making more than you need as the butter stores well and is a useful thing to have on hand.
Put the butter in a pan over medium heat and let it melt. I like to use a stainless steel sauté pan.
When the butter is completely melted, turn up the heat. First the butter will bubble as the water boils off, then the milk solids will start to brown. As this happens you’ll see brown specks appear on the bottom of the pan and the butter will start to smell nutty. If you don’t have a pan with a pale interior, regularly scoop up spoonfuls to check for the brown specks. Keep a vigilant watch as thing can go from brown (delicious) to black (eurgh) very quickly. This isn’t the time to do a Wordle or look at TikTok.
Once the specks are turning from golden to deeper brown, whip the pan off the heat and stir in the preserved lemon. Taste and add more salt if necessary.
Use immediately or allow to cool and store for later.
Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)
If you’ve made a lot of butter, the best way to store it is to let it cool and solidify then roll up in clingfilm or baking paper to form a sausage shape. You can then take a slice off this whenever you need it.
I think this butter is pretty perfect as it is. The lemons bring plenty of complexity and it’s good for all sorts of things as outlined above. But, if you want to gild the lily, add some sage leaves whilst the butter is browning or some chopped leafy herbs just before serving. A smooshed anchovy fillet or two would also be good and bring extra umami.
Recipe: Sea Bass Fillets with Browned Preserved Lemon Butter
Serves 2
I got the idea for this from Justin, one of the owners of Borough Kitchen. If I’m setting up for a class in the Islington branch he’ll sometimes stop for a chat on his way out. Originally a bit of a fermenting agnostic Justin pronounced himself a convert having made a fish dish for a dinner party with a preserved lemon browned butter “so good people were drinking it from the pan with a spoon”. He rushed off to do important business boss stuff before I could ask what recipe he used but here’s mine.
I served this just with tenderstem broccoli but some new potatoes would have been very welcome on the plate too.
Ingredients
100g preserved lemon butter, melted (see recipe above)
4 sea bass or sea bream fillets
vegetables of your choice to serve
Method
Put a frying pan on high heat and add a drizzle of oil. It doesn’t have to be a non-stick pan but don’t use a pan that you know sticks…
Season the skin side of each fillet and lay them carefully in the pan. Season the flesh side.
Cook until the fillets are opaque almost all the way through: about three minutes. Press them down with the back of a spatula if they begin to curl up. You want all the skin to be in contact with the pan so it gets nice and crispy.
Once the fish is almost cooked with just the top few millimetres still translucent, take the pan off the heat and use a spatula to carefully flip the fillets over. They will finish cooking in the residual heat in about 30 seconds.
Serve immediately, two fillets per person, drizzled with the lemon butter and alongside your vegetables of choice.
Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)
I’m not a habitual plate warmer. I can’t be faffed with it. But I’ll make the effort for anything with a butter-based sauce as otherwise it will start to set on the cold plate.
Recipe: Tapenade with Preserved Seville Orange
When preserved Seville oranges I knew that I’d have to use them in small quantities to add complexity to sweet dishes or else alongside salty ingredients to reduce the perception of bitterness. Here, I’m going with the latter: olives and anchovies in the tapenade itself and halloumi cheese as the serving suggestion.
Put the capers, anchovy, garlic and preserved citrus in a food processor and blitz until a relatively even paste is formed.
Add the olives, oil, lemon juice and a good grind of black pepper. Pulse to form a coarse paste. Taste and adjust with more lemon juice, oil or pepper if necessary.
Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)
If you want a veggie or vegan version use a little miso instead of the anchovy.
I served this with pan-fried halloumi slices, tenderstem broccoli and cherry tomatoes which all combined together into something really special. If you fancy doing the same try soaking your halloumi for an hour or so before patting it dry and frying. I got this tip from Peter Gordon who was one of the guest chef speakers when I was at Leiths. He was really inspiring but it’s this simple tip that really stuck with me. It makes a huge difference to the taste and texture of the cheese, drawing out the salt and improving the texture. Here is a side-by-side comparison, the unsoaked slice on the left wasn’t just saltier but denser and drier and cooked less evenly. The soaked slice on the right was plump, had a lovely soft chew almost like mozzarella, and cooked to an even golden crust.
Let down with a bit more oil and lemon juice or vinegar, the tapenade would also make a great salad dressing for green leaves, asparagus, beans or tomatoes. Or a nice accompaniment to a tuna steak.
Cultural Fun
We went to see A Mirror at the Trafalgar Theatre last week. It was pretty meta stuff. Johnny Lee Miller plays Čelik the Deputy Culture Minister of a fictional but vaguely Balkan totalitarian state. Or does he? There are many levels of truth here. At one point we were watching a play-within-a-play-within-a-play. But A Mirror is clever enough to make such structural japes worthwhile, dealing with the power (or otherwise) of art, the nature of stories and the idea of autofiction. It was funny too.
With something so multi-layered, emotional resonance is slightly sacrificed for intellectual intrigue. But I was entertained and challenged and it was unlike anything else I’ve seen lately. Or indeed ever.
We also saw Standing At The Sky’s Edge, a musical set in Sheffield’s Park Hill housing estate with songs by Richard Hawley. (It’s on at the Gillian Lynne Theatre near Covent Garden but I got £10 tickets via the National Theatre’s Friday Rush scheme which is well worth setting a reminder for if you don’t mind spending a bit of time in an online queue on a Friday lunchtime.)
The show tells the story of three different families on the estate in three different time periods. I hadn’t realised beforehand that Richard Hawley hadn’t written original songs for it, instead adapting existing tracks (mainly from his album of the same name). I really love his music but this sort of “jukebox musical” approach will always mean that the songs can have emotional resonance and lend atmosphere but never really move the story on. So the narrative relied heavily on the book and the actors but fortunately both were great and the whole thing was a real tear-jerker.
Park Hill is famous for its graffiti: I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME. This detail was worked into the set but otherwise barely touched on. One character says: “It’s a sad story, not mine to tell." I was glad to have read this piece in the Guardian a few years ago which gave context to the show’s themes of Thatcherism, bruised masculinity, community and gentrification. So a jukebox musical, yes, but one with depth.
Like absolutely everyone else I have been watching One Day and weeping buckets. I resisted it for a while as I loved the book (I never saw the much-mocked Anne Hathaway film version) but I can withstand only so many texts from friends saying “you will love this” before caving.
And I kind of loved it, but in a complicated way. Like with T2 Trainspotting, it was hard to tell if my strong emotional reaction was because it explicitly deals with nostalgia or whether watching it made me specifically nostalgic for the time I first encountered the story. It’s sad but so is the fact that my own youth has gone, taking my even skintone and sense of immortality with it.
Basically: was I crying for Emma and Dexter or for me? Probably both.
My only beef with this adaption is that, for a drama set over 20 years, both leads don’t look that much different in the later episodes than the earlier ones. They’re not even defined with particularly distinctive haircuts. Which makes the odd flashback less resonant than it could have been.
Bye! See you next week!
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In Good Taste is a Sycamore Smyth newsletter by me, Clare Heal. You can also find me on Instagram or visit my website to find information about my catering work, cookery lessons and upcoming events.
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Just made some browned butter and was looking for a way to use it. We love preserved lemons and use them with almost everything. What a great pairing of preserved lemons and brown butter!
Just made some browned butter and was looking for a way to use it. We love preserved lemons and use them with almost everything. What a great pairing of preserved lemons and brown butter!