Summertime, and the eating is easy

The onion tart that changed everything and the delicious joy of paring back. Plus an easy weekend menu.

Onion tart of dreams.

I was a teenager in County Durham when I first got hold of my first Elizabeth David, or rather when she first got hold of me. My mother, who famously doesn’t cook but loves a great book, gave me a copy of Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. I guess she thought that would keep me quiet for a few decades.

Until then, my imaginary cooking mother, as I taught myself to make cakes and pastry, stews and soups, jams and marmalade, had been Marguerite Patten. I’d also cooked my way through a substantial part of The Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook (over 2 million copies sold).  Its fidget pie, pears with cream cheese balls, bacon stuffed courgettes, tomato prawn cups, Scandinavian apple charlotte and oranges in liqueur had all been in heavy rotation at my parents’ 1970s dinner parties where I was the tyro caterer. Garnish, finish, were big with The All Colour Cookbook. Piping bags, glacé cherries, melon ballers, were essential. In those days, barely a sole went un-Véroniqu’d, coleslaw was two words and gammon went with pineapple as surely as Abbott went with Costello in the Saturday television my brother and I loved.

But then along came ED and French Provincial Cooking and the piping bag went out of the window, along with so much else. In their place came green lentils, game pâté, aïoli and cassoulet. In the paragraphs on the Languedoc, she describes a visit to Nénette’s restaurant in Sète, the sparkling port I see every morning across the lagoon when I walk the dogs. Today I live a life I never could have imagined then.

My book, bearing its battle scars.

The first recipe I cooked from that book is the one I am sharing with you today, tarte à l’oignon, onion tart, probably because, unlike frogs legs, snails, wild boar or saddle of hare, its ingredients were easy to find in a small market town in County Durham. Just pastry and onions and a slug of cream, all easily available from Fine Fayre supermarket. It required no complicated techniques. I could make pastry (thank you, Marguerite). I could fry onions.

But making this tart, a simple, plain, lightly golden thing, changed the way I cooked forever. Of course, my family devoured it. (We cooks know that our rewards are not just nourishment, but approbation, admiration, love.) It was the greatest demonstration of culinary alchemy. A handful of ingredients could be transformed into something spectacular if you just paid attention to the recipe, to the spell, no garnish necessary.

So often, great cooking isn’t about adding things but paring back, just as great writing is in the editing. Years ago, I interviewed the late Antonio Carluccio and he described his guiding principle, MOFMOF - Minimum of fuss, maximum of flavour. It takes confidence, it takes skill, and it takes trusting your own palate. Often it is borne out of necessity. Certainly, Carluccio’s  cooking was informed by his modest childhood, the fifth of six children of a stationmaster in Campania who used to go foraging for mushrooms and rocket in the hedgerows and forests with his father.

Of course, some recipes require a great many ingredients to make them sing, but many don’t. As often as I ask myself what I might put into a dish, I ask myself what I might take out. Things can taste complex without necessarily being complex. And therein, lies the magic.

I love these big, white, sweet onions from our greengrocers.

Tarte à l’Oignon or Zewlwaï

Onion and cream tart

This simple, plain, lightly golden tart of my heart.

This tart from Alsace is so addictively delicious, I make it all summer long. It makes a great lunch with a salad, or you can serve thin slices with drinks. I always have the ingredients in my pantry, it’s inexpensive, and yet is one of the finest things you can eat. The pastry is thin, crisp and buttery, just enough to barely contain the tangle of slow-cooked onions. It includes no cheese, but somehow the cream or crème fraiche has a distinctly cheesy tang. So few ingredients, such rich, deep flavours. The dream.

I have written the recipe out just as Elizabeth David wrote it. My alterations or additions are in italics.