Welcome All Eaters - Raspberry Ripple Hazelnut Meringue - Bee Wilson 🌞

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Welcome All Eaters

‘To invite a person to your house is to take charge
of their happiness for as long as they are under
your roof.’
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825

The first rule of cooking for other people – whether it’s low-key meals for
friends and family or more lavish entertaining for larger numbers – is to
cook something that you actually like eating yourself. That way, at least one
person at the table will be happy and, strangely, your happiness will be
contagious. If you focus first on making yourself feel at ease, this sense of
ease will transmit itself to others at the table. Some of us struggle even to
know what it is that we most want to eat because we have spent so many
years suppressing our natural appetite through diets. When deciding what to
make, I sometimes find it helps to imagine I am ordering from a restaurant
menu on a cold evening when I am in search of simple comfort and this
usually leads me to figure out the answer. ‘All anyone really wants when
they go round to someone’s house is spaghetti bolognese,’ said one of my
friends the other day.

It has taken me a long time to get there but I find that if you offer
someone food in the spirit of ‘I think this is delicious and I hope you will
too’, it is likely to receive a more positive response than food which is
offered with doubts and apologies or an anxious view to impress. Nadine
Levy Redzepi – who is married to René Redzepi, the chef of Noma in
Denmark, which is widely considered one of the best restaurants in the
world – has cooked numerous dinners for top chefs, something that many of
us would find intimidating. In her cookbook Downtime: Deliciousness at
Home, Redzepi remarks that she has found that chefs are ‘happy and
appreciative’ to be served an informal family meal rather than something
pretentious with ‘fancy garnishes’. When she has a chef coming round, she
might cook something like a roast chicken or roasted ribs and sweet
potatoes. She has found that the most relaxed approach to cooking is to try
to blur the lines between food served for company and food eaten in
private.

The question remains of how you can happily share a table with people
who have radically different eating habits and tastes from yours. This
question is at the heart of all social cooking, whether you are making a meal
for picky children or for friends and family with very different dietary
requirements or tastes to your own. Many cooks find it a downer when they
have planned a meal only to have half the possibilities closed off because so
many of the guests have food intolerances or they are vegan or on a diet or
they simply have a series of foods that they very much dislike. But it’s
worth remembering that however awkward it may be for the cook in these
situations, it is far more difficult to be the guest having to explain time after
time that they can’t eat gluten or meat or shellfish as the case may be
without wishing to put anyone to extra trouble. The onus is on us as the
cooks to make guests feel that their diet is no trouble at all and to cook for
them with as much love as we can muster.

I found it helpful to discover that the root of the word hospitality is
hostis, which is the Latin word for stranger or enemy (and which is where
the word hostility comes from). It’s in the very nature of being a good host
that you are feeding someone with whom you may not initially have much
in common. Part of hospitality is providing for a guest’s needs even if you
don’t share or even understand those needs. By the end of the encounter, the
enemy has become a friend. I’ve met couples where one of them is a strict
vegetarian and the other feels that a meal is incomplete without red meat;
yet somehow, they make it work.

As the great food writer Claudia Roden once wrote, in relation to the
hospitality of the Middle East, ‘If two people have eaten together, they are
compelled to treat each other well.’ It’s a lovely idea, even if it doesn’t fully
ring true to anyone who has eaten tense family dinners where no matter
how nice the food was, you could cut the atmosphere with a knife.

When you make the generous decision to cook for others, you are not
expecting that everything will always be plain sailing, but that doesn’t mean
it isn’t worth it. The secret is to try to make yours a table at which all eaters
are welcome, no matter how divergent they may be in their habits and
inclinations: the ones who can’t eat gluten, the picky ones, the vegetarians
and the keto carnivores, the carb dodgers and the pasta lovers, the people
who yearn for second helpings and the ones who feel happiest with small
portions – come one, come all. Yes, it won’t always work out perfectly.
When eating together, people don’t always see eye to eye over grapefruit
(never mind over politics). Sometimes – mostly when feeding children –
lovingly cooked food may even be hurled back in your face. But the attempt
to carry on sitting at the same table sharing a meal despite our profound
differences is one of the greatest of all human endeavours.


One Meal To Feed Them All

‘I like to make sure that everyone sitting at my
table can enjoy whatever I’m making.’
Julia Turshen, Small Victories

When I am invited to a dinner and asked for dietary requirements, I am one
of those lucky people who replies, ‘I eat everything’. But as time goes by, I
know ever more people who have much more complex and particular food
needs. Some of my friends are coeliac and some have type 2 diabetes and
some have serious nut allergies and when I see the world of food through
their eyes, I see how frustrating it can be to be the person who can’t go out
to dinner without explaining what they can’t eat and why. This is before we
have even got on to questions of not eating whole categories of food for
religious and ethical reasons.

In a world of varied human tastes, there is no such thing as a dish of
universal acceptance. But I do think that it’s not a bad idea, as a host, to
come up with a series of ideas for truly delicious things you feel happy
cooking for various occasions to suit different diets without leaving you
feeling in any way resentful about the process. The aim is that you will not
feel thrown when catering for friends who have no-go areas with food but
will welcome them easily and confidently. I have made a point of starting to
collect recipes I really love that happen to be gluten-free or dairy-free or
low-carb or vegetarian or vegan as the case may be. Vegan recipes can be
handy to serve not just to friends who are actually vegan but to people
following a kosher or halal diet, who often choose to eat vegetarian when
out.

As well as collecting recipes that work well for a range of dietary
restrictions, it also helps to think about ways to structure a meal that work
well when people at the table have different diets. Regardless of whether
you are cooking Chinese food or not, the Chinese system of serving dishes
‘family style’, with various dishes placed on the table for people to help
themselves, is generally much more accommodating than the Western
pattern of dishing everything up on individual plates. As Yan-Kit So writes
in Yan-Kit’s Classic Chinese Cookbook, ‘As a Chinese meal is a communal
affair, a round table is usually used, being more conducive to sharing of the
dishes.’ It’s a very tactful and accommodating way of serving food, which
gives a lot of leeway for different tastes and appetites. A hungry person
might eat three bowlfuls of rice. A tofu sceptic can easily avoid a dish of
bean curd and focus on the chicken or fish.

Another dinner format that works well when accommodating different
diets and tastes is any kind of build-your-own meal. An obvious example
would be a meal of tortillas with various fillings and salsas. This is the sort
of meal that makes all the eaters at the table feel free, whether you are
someone who likes to cram their tortilla with every possible filling, or you
are a child of selective tastes who would rather have a few separate
spoonfuls of vegetables and/or meat with a plain tortilla on the side.

‘On the side’ is a concept I find helpful for accommodating different
palates and diets. In the rom-com When Harry Met Sally, the character of
Sally (played by Meg Ryan) is forever ordering stuff ‘on the side’. When
they finally get married, they have a coconut cake with rich chocolate sauce
on the side. Harry explains it is ‘because not everybody likes it on the cake,
because it makes it very soggy’. Years of catering for children has made me
very comfortable with the idea of ‘on the side’, whether it’s sauces or
spices.

To take one example, I almost never add chillies direct to a dish
because my son Leo won’t eat it if I do, so I have got used to having a range
of chilli-based condiments on the table. But actually, almost anything can
be served ‘on the side’, depending on the occasion. You can even serve
meat on the side. If you are catering for a party of mostly vegetarians but
know that you have one person – they do exist – who won’t tolerate a
dinner without meat, you could cook a small amount of steak or lamb
cutlets to have on the side.


*******************



Raspberry ripple hazelnut meringue
(gluten-free)

If you feel you have enough cooking on your hands with the stuffed
vegetables, there’s no need to cook pudding. No one would be disappointed
with a big bowl of raspberries or strawberries, a jug of cream and a bowl of
sugar. But this meringue is spectacular and very easy – a pavlova flavoured
with toasted hazelnuts and filled with cream rippled with raspberries. I got
the idea from Jeremy Lee, the chef proprietor of Quo Vadis restaurant, who
makes a similar meringue but with almonds and whom I am not alone in
considering the king of puddings. The addition of the nuts makes the
meringue twice as nice, in my view, but obviously if you are serving the
meal to anyone who can’t eat nuts, you can just leave them out and it’s still
a thing of splendour.

The meringue itself can be made ahead of time (even 1–2 days ahead),
and then all you have to do is whip the cream and assemble it with the fruit.

Serves 8

120g (4 1/2 oz) blanched hazelnuts
5 egg whites (save the yolks to make pasta or custard)
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar (optional, but helps the egg white to hold its shape)
275g (9 1/2 oz) caster or granulated sugar
400g (14oz) raspberries (washed)
Icing sugar
400ml (13 oz) double cream

Line a large baking tray with baking parchment. Heat the oven to 170°C fan
(325° F).

Scatter the hazelnuts on the baking tray and roast in the oven until their
colour is just starting to deepen and they smell wonderful (about 10
minutes). Tip them into a food processor and grind them very coarsely
(there should still be some big pieces). If you don’t have a food processor,
chop them by hand.

Using an electric whisk, beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar in a
large, clean mixing bowl until they are stiff and very white. Slowly add the
sugar and continue to beat until glossy. Fold in most of the ground nuts,
keeping back a large handful, using a large spatula or metal spoon. Tip the
meringue on to the lined tray and spread it out to make a rough circle shape
of approximately 24cm. Scatter the remaining hazelnuts on top. Bake the
meringue for 20 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 120°C fan
(225° F) and bake for another 40 minutes. It should look a divine pale biscuity
brown: the colour of a fawn whippet. Leave it to cool out of the oven.

While the meringue is baking, take 125g (4 1/2 oz) of raspberries and press them
through a sieve to make a purée. Mix this with 3 tablespoons of icing sugar
to sweeten. Whip the cream with 1 tablespoon of icing sugar until it reaches
soft peaks. Swirl half the raspberry purée into the cream to make a ripple.
Dollop the cream over the meringue, followed by the rest of the whole
raspberries. Drizzle the remaining sweet raspberry purée over the top and
dust with icing sugar. At this point, according to Jeremy Lee, the cook
should ‘take a bow’.


From " The Secret of Cooking" by Bee Wilson


Thanks Bee! That's SOME DESSERT!!!