Christina Hollis: International Cuisine, English Style...

I have dozens of cookery books, but after seeing a programme about Lebanese food on TV I couldn't resist buying one more. Saffron in the Souks by John Gregory-Smith is full of wonderful photos, and  its tactile cover makes it lovely to handle.  I read it straight through from cover to cover. Every recipe looked better than the last. I couldn't wait to try them all out, but that meant a frustrating wait. 

Our nearest "exotic" grocery shop is a forty-minute drive away, so I had to choose recipes which called for things from the garden, or that I could buy close to home. While we've got plenty of lemons and vine leaves here, it'll be weeks before our sour cherries and figs are ready to pick. 

Although that restricted my choice of recipe, I'm much luckier with my ingredients than my grandmother was. International cookery was a big challenge for her. Before her marriage, she was the cook in a real life, scaled-down version of Downton Abbey. In those days, women had to give up work when they married, so at the age of twenty-seven, she "retired". Her new husband was a career soldier. While he spent years on active service abroad, Gran stayed at home in Somerset, raising their family.

Feeding children is vital work, although it's often a thankless task. Gran missed her previous career, but Grampy came up with a solution. He sent home the recipes of his favourite local dishes so she could perfect them before he came home on leave.

Gran, with two of her four children

These days that would be—quite literally—a piece of cake. In rural England during the nineteen-thirties it was almost impossible. The local butcher couldn't get hold of goat meat, and citrus fruit was only available in winter. Gran grew the staple herbs of English cookery such as parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and mint, but brown dust sold in a box marked "curry powder" had to stand in for many of the ingredients. Cardamon, fresh ginger and even garlic bulbs were unknown to Gran's grocer. Coriander leaves had to be grown from seeds (when they were available). She had to adapt all the recipes using local ingredients and techniques.

At least I didn't suffer Gran's supply problems when trying out recipes from Saffron in the Souks. I've found it to be an almost perfect cookery book. Almost, because it recommends serving several of the dishes with flatbreads, but supplies no details. Luckily, one of Gran's Anglicised recipes came to my rescue. 

I mixed a cup of flour with a pinch of salt, a tablespoon of olive oil and enough warm water to make a soft dough. Kneading this well I then covered the bowl with a damp cloth and left it to stand for half an hour. After another good kneading, I divided the dough into twelve pieces and rolled each one out into a thin pancake. These cook in seconds in a dry frying pan. Like pancakes they are best eaten straight away, but the first ones can be stacked in a warm oven for a few minutes while you finish cooking the whole batch.

So this evening we'll be sitting down to shish taouk (chicken kebabs), served with genuine Somerset chapattis!

Christina Hollis's first non-fiction book, Struggle and Suffrage in Bristol is published by Pen and Sword Books. You can find out more about that here, catch up with her at https://christinahollisbooks.online, on Twitter, Facebook, and see a full list of her published books at christinahollis.com