"Vegetables are savagely beautiful things." Jill Dupleix
This is a quickie - something simple to end my day of hard labour over those peaches. The jam is boiling away as I type. and it will take a while because I stupidly cooked the peaches in a lot of water, thinking they would take longer than has turned out to soften. So now I have to wait for all that water to boil away.
So I turned to my current lucky dip and this recipe from Jill Dupleix - Potatoes with thyme and tomatoes. The recipe is not online, because it's now rather old, even though it comes from her book called New Food. A brave title in a way because, of course, nothing new stays new for very long. Time marches on and what was new back in 1994 when Jill Dupleix wrote this book is no longer new.
It's a pretty simple recipe - a kind of potato gratin in which the potatoes are layered with peeled, seeded and sliced tomatoes, thyme and some bay leaves. Pour in boiling water and cook until crisp and brown on top. Scatter with crispy bacon if you like.
New Food had a wonderful cover, and Jill Dupleix was a favourite food writer whom I had followed in her columns in The Age and delicious., so I bought the book and used it quite a lot back then.
I think I particularly liked it for her philosophy which is expressed in what she calls the credo and which begins the book. It's a series of brief dictums in which "Have fun" appears several times. I try to adhere to that, but I confess that at times it all becomes a bit tedious - as today, peeling those peaches - several kilos of them - and then cutting off haphazard chunks from the stones. The advantage of a hard peach is that you can at least peel them like a potato with a vegetable peeler. But I confess that at the end it was not fun. Then I made the mistake of adding lots of water, because I thought it would take forever for the peaches to soften. So now I can wrote a post whilst it bubbles away to setting point.
But back to her 'credo'. It begins with "Buy only what is fresh and in season". Well I didn't even have to buy the peaches, but this morning I did buy two very cheap bunches of skinny asparagus - the end of the season thing I believe, and am trying to think how to use them for Sunday's feast. So here are a few more of her little sayings:
"Question all cook books, including this one.
Make every meal an event, in some small but meaningful way. - that one is probably worth a blog post some time.
Remind yourself constantly that mistakes can be delicious.
Remember that some of the best recipes come from old people.
Never apologise for your food
Remember that it is only food.
Make your favourite recipe your own.
When we all learn to taste, there will be less fast food, more slow conversations, less war, more peace, fewer broken homes, more families sitting around tables, fewer morally loathsome films and TV soaps, and more honest work and creativity."
The last of which is probably somewhat unrealistic.
'Make your favourite recipe your own' however is interesting in the context of the recipe above, because later on - much later on in 2022 on her website she published the recipe for this dish - Potato and tomato bake, which is almost the same but not quite.
The tomatoes are not peeled or seeded - they are simply sliced. Moreover they are 'winter tomatoes' and this is a good way to use them because:
"it’s a great way of turning bland winter tomatoes into something more complex and interesting. The slow cooking (first baking under foil to steam the potatoes until tender, then uncovered, for browning) seems to bring out all the sweetness and acidity that we miss from our summer tomatoes and that goes right through the inner, melting heart of potato."
The layering is the same but this time there is a thinly sliced red onion in the mix, garlic and dried oregano, and on the top layer of potato there is rosemary as well. No thyme. Boiling water again however. And oil not butter on top and around the dish. Also no bacon. Subtle changes I know, but somehow more modern. Perhaps we are not as fussy about peeling and seeding tomatoes these days.
In her credo and also elsewhere throughout the New Food book she stresses eating healthily, but she doesn't go overboard, saying at the end of the above recipe:
"I’m not claiming it’s healthy, but I am claiming it’s not unhealthy."
So she's still out there writing about food on her Substack newsletter website Jill Dupleix Eats. You will have to subscribe to dip into it. But it's free I think. And she pops up here and there in the foodie world, writing columns, judging things, opening things ...
So a brief post so that I can put a tick in a box, and also relax for a few moments before dealing with hot peach jam. At least I am only heating up leftover gnocchi for dinner.
YEARS GONE BY
January 31 - the first month of a new year suddenly gone
2024 - Flakes
2023 - Nothing
2022 - Salad days - not my thing and here I am pondering on what salads to make for Sunday's feast
2021 - Coincidences, postscripts and lucky dips - well a coincidence in that this was a day for a lucky dip too.
2019 - Tapenade
2017 - On fish
Only left over Gnocci .... "never apologise for yur food" says JD I am looking forward to it.