From Gina’s library

DIARY: Channelling Nigel Slater, Gina Mallet and distant ancestors.

RECIPE: Chicken and leek pie.

I’ve been browsing through Nigel Slater’s original The Kitchen Diaries (2005),  a posthumous gift from that other great foodie and writer Gina Mallet. It’s a whimsical book, which one can pick up and put down at will, returning again and again for ideas or just a fun read. In The Kitchen Diaries II I recently found a great recipe for chicken and leek pie, when I was researching chicken pot pie recipes, and vowed to cook it soon. Leeks abound in the grocery stores at the moment and I’m growing to like them more and more. They’re much more than  just an historic symbol of Wales.

Stuffed with the excesses of Christmas feasting, this chicken and leek dish seems like an excellent light pie to compensate for all the richness we’ve imposed on our stomachs.

So here we are at the greengrocers on the day before Christmas Eve, looking at vegetables in all their variety for the days of feasting to come: the mandatory Brussels sprouts,  bright red beets, brilliant orange carrots, and lots of earthy potatoes for roast and mash, and there are the leeks, just waiting for the opportunity to jump into the basket with all the rest. In the organic section I pick out a bunch, white and fresh at one end, long stems blending into tender green and finally the deeper green tough leaves that will get discarded.

Leeks, washed and sand free

Farmers get the leeks to grow white by heaping the sand or dirt around them as they grow, somewhat like asparagus, so keeping them chlorophyll free and tender. The downside is that the dirt sticks to everything and the leaves have to be washed very carefully. I do this by first cutting off most of the root, then deciding how much of the tough green leaves I will keep, usually not much. Really I chop off most of them, just keeping the area where the leaves turn from tender green to dark. Then I slice each stem right down the middle and soak it in a basin of ice cold water for a good half hour. Next, I peel back each half leaf and scrub all the dirt out diligently. Sometimes the outermost leaf will be too dirt stained to rescue and it has to be reluctantly discarded. Another good rinse in cold water and the leeks are ready for cooking.

Chicken and leek pie awaits the ancestral spoon

Sometimes I julienne them, cutting the stalks into long, thin slices, but today’s recipe calls for them to be cut into little semi-circles and that’s how you will find them in my version of Nigel Slater’s chicken and leek pie. My apologies to Nigel for “improving” his recipe. In England he would be untouchable, but 3,559 miles away, I hope he won’t retaliate. Getting the table ready for the photography is another fun task, not always enjoyed by the diners who are waiting to eat the food, not look at it. Today the dining table is stripped of its usual covering of heat mats and table cloth and the flamed grain in the light mahogany of this lovely piece of furniture is revealed. Of course, I put out a cork mat for the pie dish, and placemats for the diners’ plates, but the table needs another prop that will suit the dish.

Crust broken, heavenly aromas emerge

In the silver drawer I find a wonderful long-handled spoon that will do just the job, and will serve equally well for punching through the golden crust of flaky pastry and spooning out heaping helpings of succulent chicken and silky-smooth leeks. The spoon is engraved: “1st Prize for Dairy Cows, Frome, Dec 12th, 1847,” and was awarded to a farmer ancestor who held the manor in nearby Kilmington, which at the time was, like the county town of Frome, also in Somerset, but is now in Wiltshire. I don’t know much about the gentleman, except that he was my great-great grandfather, but I have been to Kilmington, a very small village, with just an 11th century church and a graveyard with literally dozens of headstones with various ancestors names. My great-grandfather moved the family to London, and although I believe he lived as a gentleman off the revenue from the estates for the rest of his life, he was no longer a country farmer. Across the lane from the family’s old Elizabethan manor house, in fact far too close for comfort on a hot summer day, is a fully functioning dairy farm, where the distant descendants of my ancestor’s prize winning herd are happily munching away. Perhaps the scent of a lot of cow pats are what drove him into town.