Cooking my way around the world, dish by dish

January can be such a dull month, a let-down after all the hype of December, the days still dark, winter at its coldest, and miserable weather.

And this January in particular is a difficult one, with lives still very restricted because of the evil bug, and threatening to get a lot worse before the springtime of mass vaccination. It may be a long time before we can travel easily again.

So I had the idea to cook my way around the world, as though I were visiting by land and sea, cooking or eating a dish from each of the countries that I would have passed through.  

Originally I wanted to complete it by the end of the month, but as two of my New Year’s Resolutions are to take life more calmly and to limit my food wastage as much as possible, I decided to take my time and stick to my usual rhythm of cooking a few dishes a week.  This also means that I can get out for long bike rides and walks without feeling that I have to rush home to cook a new dish.

For those of you who haven’t endured my cooking, I should note that I am really not a very good cook: put me in front of a collection of ingredients and ask me to improvise a dish and I would be hopeless. My chopping skills are hopeless. My timing is even worse.

But I am a relatively adventurous cook, ready to try out new challenges and cuisines and I can – more or less – follow a recipe. And I am learning the real stuff, bit by bit, burnt steak and squishy potato by burnt steak and squishy potato.

Week One

Thursday 31 December: Belgium 🇧🇪: Moules frites / Mussels & chips

Why start the day before? Because every adventure must have a departure and surely then a departure meal. I live in Belgium so that must be my departure meal.

I mull over the options and am initially tempted by carbonnades de boeuf, a deliciously meaty stew that feels just right for winter. But looking at my itinerary, I realise that I will have plenty of stews as I ‘travel’ in the Balkans and Middle East. Other options are chicken waterzooi, a chicken stew, so again no, and paling in t’ groen, eels in green sauce but I’ve always found the green sauce – mostly parsley – rather insipid.  Eels need something to spice them up. 

So the obvious dish has to be moules frites, or Mussels and Chips, the Belgian dish above all other: a dish redolent of Belgium’s supremely ugly seaside but also of wood-panelled taverns and a dish that you can eat nearly all the year, though really it is best enjoyed during winter and autumn when the mussels are fresh off the Belgian and Dutch coasts.

I settle for a simple moules marinière recipe from Ruth van Waerebeek’s “Everybody Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook”: chopped and sautéed shallots and celery stalks, a bit of thyme and parsley, all washed over with dry white wine before steaming the mussels.

But first I have to clean and check the mussels and frankly, every time I do this, it makes me feel awful. Because you go through, examining each one to see whether the shell is closed and if it is open, you give it a quick tap on the counter and give it a minute to see whether it closes or not.  If it closes, it is alive and can be… sentenced to death by steaming… If it does not close, it is already dead and can be thrown in the rubbish with the other mollusc corpses… I feel like a mass murderer.

The consolation is the smell of the brine that the mussels came in: instantly taking me back to the salty air of my childhood on the edge of an estuary. I am transported to rockpools and shrimping and deep green seaweed.

Then I chuck the mussels into the wine stock and only slowly realise that I have made a big mistake by not adjusting the amount of stock to the smaller amount of mussels that I am using, so instead of steaming them, I am boiling them and when they come out, the alcohol has not burnt off and the mussels are still salty from the brine. The mussels are still delicious but the mariniere is clearly still drunk: white wine fumes overpower the celery and shallots.

But the frites are fantastic. A simple recipe: cut up potatoes into chip sized bits, deep fry them once at 170C for 5-10 minutes, let them cool and then fry them again at 190C for 2-3 minutes. I make use of the deep fat fryer that I have bought myself for Christmas.  To avoid the smell permeating the entire house, I cook outside on my freezing patio, but still the waft goes everywhere. The result is fabulous, especially dipped in a bit of Belgian mayo and mustard.

Friday 1 January: France 🇫🇷: Soupe à l’oignon / French onion soup

Again, many recipes to choose from but only one serious contender as most of the rest are regional ones: choucroute alsacienne, bœuf bourguignon, bouillabaisse… French onion soup must surely be the embodiment of French cookery. My friend Magali tells me that it is reputed to come from Louis XV getting hungry during a stay at a hunting lodge and finding only onions, butter and champagne to cook with.

My recipe comes from a British writer – Felicity Cloake – but a British writer with a deep commitment to French cooking. She is also a keen cyclist and fan of the Tour de France and combined all three in her book “One more croissant for the road”, the story of a summer spent cycling round France, eating regional delicacies and in search of the perfect croissant. It is not a classic but it is good fun and Felicity really knows her stuff, writing a regular feature for The Guardian on “How to cook the perfect …”.

This is taken from that series and combines the best elements of recipes.  She does though warn that it takes a lot of time. And it does. Doing one thing: slowly browning four chopped onions in 80g of butter without the onions sticking or burning.  I spend over two hours, having to stir the onions every few minutes, patiently waiting for them to turn ‘golden brown’, taunted by the deep brown pictures in her article.

For most of the cooking, it is not so much onion soup as butter with onions, the sheer smell of the butter cooking the onions. It reminds me of the famous advice for making perfect mashed potato: “Du beurre, du beurre, et encore du beurre” (Butter, butter and yet more butter”.

Finally I get to mix in some flour, some thyme, some balsamic vinegar, some dry cider and some beef stock before simmering for a further hour.

For the final result, I slice a baguette, rub garlic over the slices – of course – then grill them before adding melted cheese, and grating a bit onto the soup as well.

After all the work: delicious, sublime: sweet, sweet onions in their own heavenly gravy with the croutons absorbing the butteroniony sauce and just a hint of the cider. Utterly French. Utterly delicious.

Sunday 3 January: Italy 🇮🇹: Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

I take a day off to recover from a fever that thankfully turns out not to be COVID but to be a mild flu. Luckily my next dish is the easiest of the lot and an old favourite.

Why spaghetti alla puttanesca?  Hard to find a dish that sums up the wonders of Italian cookery, but I think that this has a good claim. For a start, how many Italian dishes have so many of the key ingredients of Italian cooking all rolled into one? Pasta, fresh tomatoes, salted anchovies, capers, tuna, flat leaf parsley, red chilli, olives, lemon, all cooked with extra virgin olive oil.

I also love the fact that like much Italian cookery, it is so damned simple: boil a pan of hot water, put in some pasta, cook up a loose sauce based with whatever you have in the store cupboard or on the window sill.  When travelling in Italy, I have often admired the sheer simplicity and unpretentiousness.

And then there is the combination of the salty umami of the anchovies and capers with the subtle kick of the red chilli, cinnamon and lemon juice.

Utterly simple, utterly delicious.

Monday 4 January: Slovenia 🇸🇮: Idrijski žlikrofi – Idrian dumplings

After the familiar and easy, the totally unfamiliar and challenging. Slovenia is a beautiful country and I have eaten very well there, most memorably a ten-course meal on a cold December night in a hamlet out in the middle of nowhere, yet only 30 minutes from Ljubljana with my friend Marjan.

So I go for dumplings with a warm chicory salad.  I have not done much baking and have never made dumplings, but why not try?

As soon as work is over, I start making the dough, pounding and kneading away, almost pleading with it to soften up and become smooth.  After well over half an hour of this, I conclude that good enough is good enough and leave it to set for half an hour. While doing this, I have put some potatoes on to boil… and in the heat of the kneading completely forgotten about them. By the time I remember them, they are totally soggy.  Still, I figure that this will make mashing them easier: no big deal. Then I mix them with some freshly fried bacon and some chopped chives and marjoram – the recipe is unclear on the quantities. I also chop and boil some more potatoes and a chicory for the salad.

I move back to the dough and start rolling it. The recipe calls for a thickness of 1-2 mm, which I try to do, again figuring that enough is enough after a solid 10-20 minutes of rolling. The dough is just about 2mm but hey, what can possibly go wrong?

I then try to squeeze the potato mixture into compact hazelnut-sized balls, but the mixture is still hopelessly soggy.  But I have already spent about two hours on this and am getting seriously hungry, so I persist and make lines of soggy balls and then roll the dough over them and cut, trying to make little dumplings and then squeeze the dough together to make little hats.  My dumplings are rather bigger and much less elegant than those in the recipe, but again, what can go wrong?

Finally, I boil them, waiting for them to rise to the top of the water – with them ballooning as they do so, before fishing them out, whipping up a bit of salad dressing for the potatoes and chicory, scattering some lamb’s lettuce on top and serving it all up at around 10.30 at night. I manage to take a plausible photo, but when I finally bite into the dumplings, the dough is disgusting, like undercooked pasta but much softer, still ballooning in my stomach, and the filling is totally insipid. Even the salad is boring.  

I chuck the sad dumplings into the organic waste bin… and dream of one day sitting down in a small Slovenian town to a plate of delicious dumplings in a beautifully meaty sauce… and thinking “Wow! I couldn’t do that…”

A disaster but at least I had the guts to try.

Wednesday 6 January: Croatia 🇭🇷– Grilled sea bream with blitva greens

After my disaster with Slovenia, I opt for a much simpler recipe, one from Rick Stein’s book “From Venice to Istanbul”: grilled sea fish with a potato and green beans side.

And it really is simple: boil the potatoes and French beans and then toss them in some lightly fried garlic. Baste the fish with a bit of olive oil and grill until done.

Even before I start cooking, I have the wonderful smell of the fish as they come out of their wrapping, reminding me of the smells of my childhood in a fishing village.

Grilled lightly until the flesh is soft and white, the sea bream is quite delicious, taking me back to happy sunlit evenings on the Croatian coast. A reminder of how easy fish is to do if only you have the nerve.

And the blitva greens? The tender but firm potato, the soft and juicy beans both absorbing the garlic make a wonderful solid counterpoint to the fish. Surf and turf.

The whole washed down with a glass of Slovenian white.

I can almost hear the waves…