A long time ago, Tom – now my business partner – invited me to his house. We were working at Hix Oyster and Chophouse. I got the impression that he, being quite a private person, didn’t invite people from work over that often, so I jumped at the chance, hoping to get a glimpse of his larder and to see how he cooked at home.
It was an unusually warm spring day and lunch was outside in his peaceful walled garden in Stoke Newington, which boasted herbs and quite an impressive urban attempt at growing vegetables. His paraphernalia and slightly eccentric efforts to keep the snails and slugs from his “Italian vegetable garden” awakened me to the fact that Tom wasn’t so much a chef as just someone who loved to cook, and did so intuitively.
Lunch was a tomato salad, the crunchy early spring tomatoes cut randomly into odd-shaped chunks that jostled around the plate at different angles along with whole leaves of picked flat-leaf parsley, red onion and sumac – the addition of which added an extra citrus note to this modest medley. It was a few simple, but perfectly paired, ingredients assembled intuitively that gave the dish such depth. It wasn’t complicated cooking wrapped up in time and technique, it was wisdom.
It’s this straightforwardness that I love about how we cook now that we have restaurants. We’ve thought about this over the years, about how to describe the way we often do things, and I suppose it comes down to this idea of intuitive assembly – it’s not necessarily cooking, as there is sometimes only a little of this. It’s just an understanding of how a handful of key ingredients or a simple cooking method can bring out a multitude of taste experiences.
We don’t see cooking at our restaurants as “restaurant cooking”, which might sound a little funny, but, for us, most of what we cook is inspired by what we’re in the mood to eat. This usually chimes with the ingredients we’re using at home. For us, cooking means keeping it simple. Like much cooking done today, we follow the seasons; when it comes to easy and enjoyable cooking, then this really is the best way to achieve it. (If you’re only using ingredients at their best, then flavour is plentiful.) These basic principles, along with a few clever ideas up your sleeve to help bring out those tastes further, is all you really need.
Spring is the perfect time to put this kind of cooking into action. When the ground stirs and begins sprouting its tender offerings, the promise of new life, fresh and zingy young flavours are bountiful. With such vibrancy buzzing around it’s hard to go wrong. The taste of spring appears earlier and earlier each year – milder winters and southern parts of the country with their own microclimates mean that we get to see ingredients much sooner than we might ordinarily. This year we saw Asparagus as early as mid February from Wye.
Cooking with seasons doesn’t mean having to wait until the summer for a good tomato, we like to buy from France, Spain and Italy – countries which benefit from sunnier blue skies months before we do – which means we can enjoy delicious tomatoes such as the camone or marinda (grown on the islands of Sardinia and Sicily) and raf from Catalonia and the south of Spain. These tomatoes are at their peak during winter when the sun is less harsh and are often more green than red – kind of red and green zebra style. They’re young, and their texture is crunchy – you might think they were underipe until you tasted their sweetness. We love to pair this kind of tomato with a fresh herb such as oregano and perhaps some salty cheese.
In the dishes that follow, there is barely any cooking – they demonstrate the idea of intuitive assembly perfectly. Spring is about awakening the senses, after months of roots and bulbs and earthy flavours, our tastebuds are screaming to be tickled. When Tom and I talk about our menu after winter, we catch ourselves using the same words over and over. Words like “joy” and “sunshine”, so as well as keeping it simple, be sure to impart some of these feelings into your cooking.
Raf tomatoes, smoked mackerel, shallots and dill
These salty and crunchy winter tomatoes from southern Spain go so well with this subtly smoked mackerel – we use tinned here, because it’s much better quality than the vacuum-packed smoked variety you buy in supermarkets. It’s also a very convenient way to enjoy good mackerel.
Serves 4
500g raf tomatoes
2 x 100g tins smoked mackerel fillets in olive oil
1 large banana shallot, peeled
A handful of fresh dill
Juice of ½ lemon
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and black pepper
1 Cut the tomatoes into 5mm discs and roughly arrange on a large serving plate. Scatter the mackerel fillets over the tomatoes with a little of their oil.
2 Slice the shallots into thin rings, break them up and scatter over the tomatoes.
3 Tear up the dill and sprinkle over everything, then dress with the lemon juice, a few good glugs of extra virgin olive oil and season well.
Cime di rapa, preserved lemon and chermoula (main picture)
Wilted, the cime di rapa, a slightly bitter Italian winter green better known as turnip tops, is softened here by the mellow, round citrus notes of the preserved lemon and liveliness of the herby chermoula.
Serves 4
600g cime di rapa
2 small preserved lemons (or 1 large lemon), pith removed and cut into strips
Extra virgin olive oil
A handful of almond flakes, toasted
For the chermoula
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tbsp paprika
½ small red onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 green chilli, finely chopped with seeds
A handful of coriander
A handful of mint
1 lemon
Extra virgin olive oil
1 First, make the chermoula by toasting the seeds in a dry frying pan for a minute or so until they are slightly toasted. Then crush in a pestle and mortar with the paprika.
2 Combine the finely chopped onion, garlic and chilli and add to the seeds mixture.
3 Roughly chop the herbs and combine with the spice mix, lemon and around 80ml of extra virgin olive oil.
4 Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and blanch the cime di rapa. Refresh under cold running water and then squeeze out any excess water. In another pan, heat some olive oil and gently warm through the preserved lemon for about a minute, before adding the cime di rapa. Stir through and warm the two together for a couple of minutes then fold in the chermoula.
5 Use a pair of tongs to pull everything through the cime di rapa ensuring it gets fully coated in the lemon and chermoula. Add a little more salt if needed, but remember the preserved lemons will be quite salty, so be sure to taste. Finally, sprinkle with almonds and a squeeze of lemon juice. Serve.
Charred onions, ricotta and lemon (main picture)
We love this time of year, when all the new onions come into season. They don’t need much cooking as you want to keep their tender crunch and spring sweetness. Here, their taste is enhanced and given a longer mouth feel with the fresh ricotta and lemon.
Serves 4
4 whole new seasons’ onions
200g ricotta
50-100ml whole milk
Zest of 1 lemon
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and black pepper
1 Cut the green onion tops from the onion, leaving about 10cm attached to the bulb. Set to one side, then quarter each bulb, keeping them attached at the root. Keep the tops for later.
2 Heat a chargrill pan until hot and smoking, oil and season the onions, then chargrill on all sides. You want them to be just cooked through, while retaining their sweet bite.
3 Once all your onions are charred (you may need to do this in batches), place on a serving platter.
4 In a mixing bowl, whisk together the ricotta and milk. This loosens the ricotta into a more creamy dressing. Spoon this over the onions.
5 To finish, grate over the zest of the lemon, finely slice some of the green onion tops and scatter over the dish, dress with the olive oil and season with more salt and pepper.
- Ducksoup, a seasonally-led restaurant in London’s Soho, is run by Clare Lattin, Tom Hill and Rory McCoy. Ducksoup Cookbook: The Wisdom of Simple Cooking is out on 28 April (Square Peg)
