Portuguese Custard Tarts

Let me introduce you to the most delicious thing I’ve eaten so far this year: the Portuguese custard tart, or a pastel de nata if you want to be fancy about it. The discovery that there was a Portuguese café about three minutes down my road that sold them for 80p a pop stopped my Saturday right in its tracks. More moreish than your average Bakewell and a bit less in-your-face than a cupcake, my childhood memories are punctuated with these perfect little pastries thanks to yearly family holidays spent in the Algarve.

The first bite was delicately flaky, then soft and chewy as the pastry gave way. The second sank into the cool, creamy custard, scorched on top and accented with a faint egginess below. And the aftermath? An afternoon spent savouring a haze of sunny memories.

My advice would be to find a bakery that sells them and scoff one still warm from the oven, but if you’d like to try your hand at making them then lucky for you the ever-useful Jamie Oliver included a jazzed-up version of them in his recent 30-Minute Meals extravaganza. Recipe below…

Jamie Oliver’s Quick Portuguese tarts with orange caramel

Makes 6 tarts

Plain flour, for dusting

1 x 375g pack of prerolled puff pastry

Ground cinnamon

125g (4½oz) créme fraîche

1tsp vanilla paste or vanilla extract

5tbsp golden caster sugar

1 egg

1 orange

Preheat oven to 200C/ gas mark 6. Dust a surface with flour. Unroll the pastry, then cut it in half so you have two 20cm x 20cm (8in x 8in) squares (put one in the fridge for another day). Sprinkle over a few pinches of ground cinnamon, then roll the pastry into a Swiss-roll shape and cut into 6 rounds. Put these into 6 of the holes in a muffin tin, and use your thumbs to mould the pastry into the holes, so the bottom is flat and the pastry comes up to the top. Put on the top shelf of the oven and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, or until lightly golden.

Spoon the créme fraîche into a small bowl. Add the egg, vanilla paste or extract, 1tbsp golden caster sugar and the zest of 1 orange. Mix well.

Take the muffin tin out of the oven, and use a teaspoon to press the puffed-up pastry back to the sides and make room for the filling. Spoon the créme fraîche mixture into the tart cases, and return to the top shelf of the oven. Set the timer for 8 minutes.

Put a small saucepan on a high heat. Squeeze in the juice from the zested orange and add 4tbsp golden caster sugar. Stir and keep a good eye on it, but remember caramel can burn badly so don't touch or taste.

Pour some caramel over each tart (they'll still be wobbly). Put aside to set.

The Foodie Revolution

We popped it out of its plastic case steaming hot and treacley, the whole candied orange at its centre peeping out like a jellified jewel in the crown. So what was it about Heston Blumenthal’s Waitrose Christmas Pudding that made it December’s hottest buy? Whilst my canny mother had bought ours in November for what at the time seemed like a rather pricey £13.99, come Christmas these limited-edition puds were selling like, um, hot cakes for as much as £200 on eBay. £200! For some contraband sultanas in sponge? For a nation that once accepted boil-in-the-bag cod and a bowl of Angel Delight as fair game, such frenzy over food seemed like something of a revolution. And that’s exactly what it is.

Jamie Oliver and olive oil, Yo! Sushi, those Marks and Spencer’s food-porn ads, knowing how to pronounce “prosciutto”: 30 years ago this was all a distant dream, a foodie paradise found only in more clued-up countries like Japan or Italy. Over the past few decades however, there’s been a tsunami of a sea-change in the UK's view of food. Whether it's Nigella, Jamie or Gordon whom we have to thank for, it's now considered cool for a man to cook up scallops with a cauliflower foam on a casual night in. It’s de rigeur these days to know your rose from your white veal, your snail porridge from your black cod in miso and your scampi from your langoustine (spot the trick question there). The cultural heights of the Westfield London Shopping Centre alone reveal a Benetton-like variety of eats, including Vietnamese, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Lebanese, Greek, Thai, Japanese, Indian and British. Our stomachs may be steadily expanding, but at least we’re letting them have some fun in the process.

And if you needed any more proof that what we eat now is a hell of a lot more exciting than what it was 30 years ago, cast your eye over this restaurant menu from 1981 (click on the picture and zoom to see it up close). 

 

The Beaujolais in Manchester was one of the city's finest restaurants, serving what was considered top nosh at the time, with top nosh prices to go with it. The images are taken from a total treasure of a book, a compilation of menus from contemporary '80s restaurants called Adventures in Dining: The Gourmet’s Guide to Greater Manchester and North Cheshire. I may have only scanned in one menu to show you, but rest assured, each page reads like a gastronomic Groundhog Day. In 1981 it seems every restaurant – and I mean every single one, whether pricey like The Beaujolais or a cheap little bistro – served the exact same blend of bastardised French fare. To paraphrase:

Starter: Prawn cocktail, avocado, melon, egg mayonnaise, pâté, onion soup. 

Main Course: Steak in cream, chicken in cream, pork in cream, sole poached in cream. Pudding: Crêpe Suzette, baked Alaska, crème caramel.

No sushi, no houmous, no nothing. So when your weekly trip to Wagamama starts to seem a little humdrum, just cast your mind back to a time when noodles were considered nouvelle cuisine and slurp up that bowl of ramen with a smile on your face. 

But returning to the pudding quickly - did Heston deserve the hype? Chock-full of fruit and doused in orange-scented syrup, it tasted delicious, if a little dense. Given it's high-profile past, I’m predicting a pre-emptive August rush on this year’s delivery. Elbows at the ready foodies...

Kitchen Confidential

Watching Nigella Lawson’s new BBC series is like foreplay for your inner fatty. Who doesn't enjoy seeing her tiptoe down to the fridge in the middle of the night, chow down a slice of peanut-butter cheesecake and then slink back upstairs to sleep, all whilst alluringly wrapped in a silk dressing gown and looking like a 1950s screen siren? Her ability to be at once both greedy and glamorous is undeniably engaging. 

What appeals about Nigella is not her food, although it always does look very delicious, but the delight she takes in cooking and eating it. The orgasmic eye rolls, the button-bursting voluptuousness of those cashmere twinsets and her fondness for tasting sauces with a saucily dipped finger are all so satisfying to behold. And beyond this wonderful watchability it’s her language, the pre-prandial pillow talk, which really seals the deal.

Tune into an episode of Nigella Kitchen and listen, just LISTEN to how she wallows in words! Such smut! Every utterance is rolled rapturously around the tongue, sounding as plentiful as her plate. Not for Nigella the straight and narrow of the metric system: she measures in dollops, drops, handfuls and heaped spoonfuls, conjures up golden, glistening and silky sauces and feasts gleefully upon self-named recipes such as “Slut’s Spaghetti” (yes, really).

Such prose aims deeper than Jamie Oliver’s pukka proclamations – Nigella really seems to feel the flavours, and rather poetically too. Her black squid ink risotto for example, a recipe taken from a favourite Oscar Wilde novel, reminds her of a “primeval soup” that “smells of the sea, like some deep experience long ago”. Half of the pleasure she finds in food is through describing it, and it’s this delayed gratification, the lingering love letter she writes to each dish before devouring it that makes living - well, eating - vicariously through her so effortlessly enjoyable. 

How was it for you?