Sauce #61

Some good things on toast & Kitty Coles' flourless chocolate cake

Some students supplement their student loans/Central Parental Bank allowance with bar work. Others babysit. Some run club nights, promote bands, gamble. Occasionally they deal drugs.

I cooked for octogenarians.

In fairness that wasn’t the only demographic I cooked for. There wasn’t, in Yorkshire in the mid-noughties - or at least not to my knowledge - a pervy underbelly of kinky pensioners with a penchant for paunchy twenty-somethings in an apron. Culinary gigolos are not a thing, alas.

But the gig - such as it was - that stands out, was the annual dinner I cooked for the volunteers at a local 14th-century moated manor house. It was the kind of place that regularly put my non-belief in ghosts to the test, its nooks and crannies and battlements and private chapel full of unsettling whispers and creaking floors and the inexplicable slamming of doors.

All of which might have just been the volunteers, who would lend a hand when the house was open to the public.

And each summer the house’s owner, an indescribably chic, striking, quietly intimidating seventy-something woman, would give them dinner which, for several years, I cooked.

Nothing fancy. Lady D did not want fancy. She liked my approximation of a lamb tagine, and she adored the somewhat unseasonal and, to my palate, pretty repulsive butternut squash tagine I made the first year around as a vegetarian option. These remained staple.

As did the lemon polenta cake from the River Café book (or, as a dopey friend of my brother who waited tables one year called it, to audible gasps, ‘lemon placenta cake’), which would be served with fresh strawberries and elderflower. See, nothing fancy.

Nothing fancy was on the agenda this past Sunday, as I cooked a lunch for a Yorkshire neighbour’s 70th birthday down in the Clock Barn. The suggested polenta cake - that thing is timeless - was nixed by the client, which was all to the good as I subbed it out for Kitty Coles’ sensational flourless chocolate cake, but the event did nonetheless bring a sense of…something. Was it déjà vu? Was it Groundhog Day? Was it an existential crisis?

The guests were, to my complete surprise and mild horror, more-or-less an exhaustive roll-call of the parents of kids I’d been to school with thirty years ago. And they were all completely delightful, but between hearing about Henry’s career in commodities in Switzerland and Sarah’s high-powered job in Westminster I fielded questions about what I was doing.

“How are the restaurants going?” was how most conversations began - and ended.

Which is fine, but it’s easier to hold your head high and say ‘we closed them for practical reasons and I’m busy with lots of other things now’ when you don’t follow that with ‘so, beef or salmon?’

I always hated catering. This is in part why I stopped doing the volunteers’ dinner. Churning out a buffet for 60 people was just not what got me into cooking. Also the chicks were a bit old for my taste.

Sunday at least felt like real cooking, buffet aside. I knocked out a load of good things to eat on toast while the guests milled about in the garden with a glass of something, roasted a good sirloin of beef and an absolutely enormous salmon, flicked some salads about, went long on sauces (though not long enough on the salsa verde - another peril of buffets), and let them eat cake.

Does this sound like fun?

If it does, guess what? You can now book the Clock Barn for private events. That’s right. Up to 14 guests are welcome to come and get some tagine and lemon placenta cake - or, preferably, a much more interesting menu - in our converted cow byre. Cooked by me.

If I’m sounding flippant forgive me. Serious face on.

We’re moving the Clock Barn from a monthly supper club to a quarterly affair. Three lunches, three dinners. Plenty of time in between to cook for birthdays and baby showers and whatnot. Tickets for September are now on sale. Come eat some food soon, either way.

In the meantime, here are some good things on toast that I served on Sunday, along with Kitty Coles’ unimpeachable chocolate cake.