Recipes are, by necessity, sorted into two broad categories: things I have the time, energy or inclination to cook on a weeknight, and things that I don’t. That latter category then has to overcome another obstacle: would that much time on a weekend not be better spent outside the kitchen?
So, I came to Delia’s braised lamb shanks with cannellini beans, which takes the best part of 4½ hours from fridge to table, with a mind that was not so much open as highly suspicious. The recipe did have a few merits: the presence of both lamb and pulses, two of my favourite foods; and I could do it all in one pot, thus cutting down on the washing up. So I figured it was worth a go.
Delia’s recipe calls for you to skin the tomatoes. Now, this is probably evidence of my unrefined palate, but I have yet to encounter a recipe where this step cannot be skipped – having tried it both ways, I can confirm that this recipe is no exception.
Once your tomatoes are skinned, or not, you start browning the lamb in a casserole dish. You then put the lamb aside, and add the celery, onions and carrots, browning them as well, before adding the garlic and cannellini (or flageolet or borlotti) beans and stirring well. Then you add the tomatoes, red wine, bay leaf, and rosemary before putting the lamb back in. Heat until it simmers then cover with the lid and put in the oven to cook very slowly for a further 3 hours.
It’s all fairly straightforward, though it takes the best part of an afternoon. As we sit down to eat, I can’t fight the idea that it’s a very fussy way to make a delicious meal, and some of its components – particularly the celery – lose much of their distinctive flavour, though they retain their pleasing crunch.
My feeling is that all that extra faff is only worthwhile if you are the kind of person who has to use their meals as a sort of Trojan Horse to get their required amounts of fruit and veg into their diet. And my suspicion is that if Delia were asked to account for this recipe, she would admit to seeing it as just that – a Trojan Horse for pulses. Why do I think that? Because Delia’s recipe for braised lamb shanks is contained not, as you’d be forgiven for assuming, under the meats section, but way out in Chapter 23: How to Cook Pulses, which kicks off with the following heretical remark: “Pulses,” Delia writes, “have somehow managed to re-invent themselves.”
Stop right there. That’s like saying “Thierry Henry has somehow become Arsenal’s all-time top goalscorer” or “the Earth has somehow become a spherical ball of rock”. It’s as if the renaissance of pulses owed itself to a good PR company or the desperate need to feed vegetarians.
The mystery isn’t that pulses came into vogue in the late 1990s, when How to Cook was written, but that they ever went out of fashion in the first place. When my partner is out, and I can’t be bothered to cook for myself, I invariably turn to pulses, pasta, tomatoes and a little olive oil, which I could eat every day if need be. Pulses aren’t quite up there with the humble mushroom, which I would happily marry, but they’re close.
Delia, however, disagrees. It’s not so much “How to Cook Pulses” but “How To Sneak Pulses Past Your Tastebuds”. And the resulting recipes, from scallops with lentil sauce and Mexican chicken chilli to spiced lamb curry are delicious, but they just don’t give pulses the spotlight they deserve.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @deliaonline. Stephen Bush is a writer and columnist for the New Statesman.@stephenkb
