Yeah... no.

Aubergine Dengaku

You know when you have an idea for a project, and it’s all bright and shiny and the commitment is solid and you feel great as you finish your first assignment? Then you have to follow through with the next assignment. Tumbleweed…

Ennui had set in because the recipes had not fired me up at all.

The book randomly pulled from the shelf was, as mentioned previously, the Modern Pantry Cookbook by Anna Hansen. I saw Anna doing a demo at the Narberth Food Festival in either 2011 or 12. I was with my soon to be, or possibly already, husband, and we were full of the joys of newness and all that. Anna was a great and she cooked a bit of steak, skirt or something like it, and some polenta chips. Can’t remember too much but it was tasty and newly weds need new cook books don’t they? It’s a lovely book but I realised as I took it from the shelf last week that I had never cooked anything from it.

Anna is a chef who was trained by Margot and Fergus Henderson at the French House Dining Room and Peter Gordon of Sugar Club back in the the London of yore, or mine too. Well, I went to the French House Dining Room once. I went to the bar below many times. I never made it to the Sugar Club but heard many good things. London was a heady place in those days with restaurants popping up and surprising people all over the place. My alma mater, so to speak and in a small way, was the River Cafe, out there on its own by the river in Hammersmith. The design of the place was understated, clean, white and airy, as befitted the canteen for Richard Rogers Architects. The food was like nothing I had ever tasted, and at those prices never would outside of working there, but I learned why after a while - the best ingredients, the well paid staff (me included), the attention to detail, Rose Grey and Ruthie Rogers, the matriarchs who played good cop bad cop and gave me permission to love country music. One of my leaving gifts was a Patsy Kline album - happy days. I learned so much, about cooking, hospitality, design, how not to fall apart when star struck… all you need to get by in life really. Anyway, I digress.

Anna clearly came after my time in the metropolis and made her mark with her own place called, unsurprisingly, The Modern Pantry. It doesn’t seem to be open anymore sadly, perhaps a covid casualty, I’m not sure. The book is a lovely thing, beautifully designed with some mouth watering photos and recipes. Most have tons of ingredients which is why, ‘fessing up here, I chose the aubergine one. It has five.

Anna’s style is definitely not mine. The ingredients lists are specific and exotic and I live in Cardigan, far from the sources of such things. Even if I still lived in Bristol I might still struggle to get some of them. Or perhaps I just don’t want to enough. Anyway. I admire the book, the style and frankly anyone who not only sets up her own restaurant but writes a cookbook too. But I didn’t like the aubergine dish.

I think the main reason I didn’t like it was because the aubergine skin didn’t cook properly - it became leathery and unpleasant, and the flesh was watery. I am sure it’s not meant to be like that and wasn’t when Anna cooked it. Also, and it’s a big also, I didn’t use den miso. I actually only realised now that the miso in ingredients list isn’t ordinary miso, and that there is in fact a recipe to make den miso in the book, it says it, right there, on the page. Says all you need to know about my desire to cook this dish.

Den miso sounds delicious actually, and a condiment I would probably use a lot. But there we are. What I did use however (fanfare please) was miso I made at the Fermentation Festival here in west Wales last year. It was finally ready, its flavour deep, salty, umami-ing all over the place, and, being unprocessed, the yellow split peas it was partly made from had retained their bite, just. Absolutely delicious but definitely not den miso. It did work very well with the tahini which mellowed the umaminess a little bit.

Another confession here is that I didn’t actually make the dish at all. My son did. He is staying for a few days, breathing deep of the Welsh air before returning the frenetic hum and fumes of London. He’s a very good cook and enthusiastic about exotic ingredients so I thought, who better? He was a bit over liberal with the miso however so my stash that took a year to ferment is now halved in size.

If I ever made this again I would cut up the aubergine and toss the cubes in the (correct) miso tahini mix and roast quickly. I suspect it would work very well then.

So there you have it. My second assignment, not made by me, not made with correct ingredients and not especially nice.