Cradock - Opposites attract, each offsetting the other. Add a splash of something contrary and the first is enhanced by the second.
Like the cactus flower suddenly coming into bloom, a burst of soft beauty in a forest of spikes. Or slicing into a prickly pear to find its sweet, alluring heart.
Sometimes it’s worth throwing two disparate things together just to see what the outcome might be. Famous recipes may never have been invented had somebody or other not thrown two ingredients together, whether intentionally or by chance, followed by a Eureka moment on tasting it later.
Like the Chinese chef who accidentally spilt a packet of cashews into the wok when he was making a chicken stir-fry. Or the Frenchman who dropped the cup of orange juice he was about to drink into the pan he was roasting a duck in. Or the Northumberland farmer who first added some chopped kidneys to his steak pie.
The Swiss dairyman who accidentally ground some black pepper over the bowl of strawberries instead of the plate of spëtzle next to it, before dolloping some cream on it, deserves a golden clock as a reward. You’d never expect that to work, but it seriously does.
Pork served with apple jelly, sweet, smooth and glutinous, is a delight – the leg of a pig complemented by a jelly made from an apple fallen from a tree. Hardly obvious teammates. And that great tradition, the Sunday roast of leg of lamb served with sweet mint sauce. Few unlikely combinations are just as ‘right’ as that one. Whoever thought that up must have done so by chance.
Similarly, poached pear and creamy Gorgonzola, or closer to our own shores preserved green fig with any stinky cheese, are combinations which you might think could never work but which do.
Talking of cheese, even the ubiquitous combination of cheese with onion is not necessarily an obvious teaming, and there must have been earlier human times when such an off-the-wall mish-mash of two ingredients with apparently nothing in common must have seemed as outlandish as slapping a vienna sausage inside a long bread roll with some mustard and ketchup and suggesting to people that they pay good money to eat it.
In recent years I’ve paired watermelon with feta, strange bedfellows which somehow make sense on the palate. Add a little olive oil mixed with honey, and black pepper, and you have a treat to serve as a starter.
It is these seemingly happenstance marriages of disparate things that makes me try new things in the kitchen. Not madly. There are some things which you can be sure won’t work together, although in the hands of a Ferran Adria or a Heston Blumenthal even the least likely pairings can be made to work with some culinary trickery or laboratory genius.
So, this week we needed to make an apple crumble, but it was really cold outside and we had no apples in the restaurant kitchen. Crumbles have become a staple, and a staple, in this business, is something which you keep on the menu because people do come in and order it.
That’s the barometer, more than “what chef feels like cooking today”. What chef feels like cooking today might well be something the punters have no interest in at all.
So you don’t change that thing which the customers do come in and order. But. On the kitchen shelf was a can of litchis in syrup I’d bought from the little Chinese section of the Chinese-owned supermarket in Cradock, Tams SuperSpar. And in the freezer was a punnet of frozen raspberries.
What if…
We weren’t sure it would work, but I had a suspicion it would – a litchi and raspberry crumble. One is tart (the raspberries, which have hardly any sweetness at all) while a litchi, even outside of a syrup, is a sensuously sweet thing. Perhaps the very difference between them would make them a tantalising combo.
So the changes were rung.
Litchi and Raspberry Crumble
150g litchis, from a can,with their syrup
2 star anise,whole
150g raspberries, fresh or frozen
50ml raspberry syrup or other berry syrup
2 eggs
125g butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsps vanilla essence
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
Pour the syrup from the can of litchis into a saucepan and add the star anise. Bring this to a simmer and reduce gently until you have a thick syrup rather than the very runny one you started with. Add to this a little raspberry syrup or similar, if you have some (but leave out this stage if it’s a hassle, it’s not the end of the world, just a tart).
Add the raspberries and drained litchis and leave off the heat until the mix is at room temperature. Remove the star anise. When, and only when, it is properly cool, beat one egg and fold it in.
For the crumble, cream butter and sugar, add egg and vanilla, then sift the flour, baking powder and salt together and add to the mixture a little at a time.
Divide the mixture in two, and press half into a 23cm pie dish, greased. Spread the litchi and raspberry filling over the base and then crumble the rest of the pastry on top with your fingers.
Bake in a 180°C oven for half an hour.
The punters have been coming in, intrigued to see “litchi and raspberry crumble” on the blackboard, ordering it and saying they love it.
We may well have a new staple.
Weekend Argus