(for 6)
This is a recipe I came across about three years ago and cooked a lot at that time.
I had forgotton about it until last week when I remembered it and decided to try it again.
It was well worth trying, it is the best and most intense chocolate mousse recipe, the flavour of the dark chocolate not at all compromised by the oil as it would have been by the cream.
Go for a chocolate which has a high cocoa butter count and if you can come across one flavoured with orange it also works well.
Below is the recipe exactly as I wrote it three years ago, the only change I would make is not to necessarily rule out the cream at the end, a little unwhipped cream poured on at the end does make a nice contrast to the mousse.
No it doesn’t taste the least oily.
I first came across this in a book called
” What Einstein told his Cook” by Robert Wolke which is a book about the chemistry of cooking.
I didn’t have the courage to try it until I came across a similar recipe in Dennis Cotter’s (Of Cafe Paradiso in Cork) latest book.
It works beautifully and tastes much more intensely of chocolate than any other I’ve tried.
175g(6oz) Good Dark Chocolate
140 mls (5 fluid oz.) Olive oil
4 large Eggs
140 g (5 oz.) Light Brown Sugar
( A tablespoon of Orange Liqueur,Brandy or Whiskey are pleasant additions)
Put the chocolate with the olive oil into a jug and put it into a microwave at mediun for 3 to 5 mts until completely melted.
Separate the eggs and put them in separate bowls.
Put half the sugar in with the yolks.
Beat the yolks first with the sugar until they turn thick and creamy.
Wash the beaters then beat the whites until stiff. Add the remaining sugar a tablespoon at a time until they are stiff and shiney.
Stir the chocolate and oil mixture well together and then stir in the yolks.
(Add the alcohol at this stage if you are using it)
Fold in the whites carefully until all patches of white disappear ( but don’t over mix.)
Spoon this either into one serving bowl or four individual glasses.
Leave to set in the fridge for 3 to 4 hours.
No need for cream with this.
Writing last week about Grape Pud from Snaffles and the salamander we used to caramelise the top reminded me of that other signature dish of Snaffles ; the Snaffles Mousse.
Strangely a brief surf of the internet reveals that Grape Pud has faded from memory along with Snaffles ( which, for younger foodies I should explain was probably Irelands first “Gourmet” restaurant, sited in , a then respectable, Leeson Street in Dublin, and in which I had the privilage to work,for several years, in the sixties )
On the other hand Google reveals that there are several references to the eponymous mousse today and it seems to still be enjoying a certain success.
It was my job in Snaffles to make the mousse each morning.
It was incredibly easy to make and owed far more to convenience than to gourmet tradition, as you will see when I quote the recipe.
It was also my job to say to the many Americans who came to the kitchen door that, as it was a secret recipe we wern’t permitted to give it out.
The truth of the matter of course was that its ingredients were an embarrassment to us.
Here are the descriptions given of the guessed at ingredients of our mousse as quoted in various Food Guides of the time;
“A creamy froth of smoked fish”
“Soft, cold with liver and other flavours”
“Seafood, probably mainly lobster or crab, very light and airy, exquisite and unobtrusive”
“Like a savoury Guinness, smooth creamy and garlicy.”
(The last one in fact was the closest to what it tasted like)
The truth of the mousse was that it was a liquidized mixture of Philly Cheese and a can of Campbells consomme, flavoured with a pinch of curry powder and a crushed clove of garlic.
The truth is also that it tasted delicious and the flavours were strangely mixed resulting in an elusive flavour, difficult to pin down.
As Campbells Consomme no longer has the requisite gelatine to set this mousse I am going to give you the recipe as devised by Simon Hopkinson in the year 2000 in the English Independent.
He also substitutes curry paste for the powder which must be an improvement.
Snaffles Mousse
1 leaf of gelatine
1 can of Campbell’s condensed consomme
300g cream cheese
2 heaped tsp curry paste
1 clove garlic, crushed to a paste with a little salt
Immerse the gelatine leaf in cold water for several minutes, to soften. Put 2 tablespoons of the consomme into a small pan and gently heat. Once it is hot but not boiling, lift the gelatine leaf from its water, squeeze out any excess and add to the hot consomme. Swirl together to melt the leaf and set aside to cool to lukewarm. Pour the remaining consomme into a liquidiser (a food processor will not give as smooth a finish) and add the cheese, curry paste, garlic, and, finally, the small pan of consomme and gelatine. Whiz until very smooth indeed.
Pour this into individual ramekins or small glasses (it should make between six and eight) and put it into the fridge to set for at least 6 hours
Simon also says to serve with hot buttered toast, which we never did in Snaffles but sounds like a nice addition.
A great friend of mine, who is German and living in Ireland, recently wrote an article about the things the we do and say here that make us “Irish.”
One of the things she wrote was:
“You know you are in Ireland when a freshly retired friend sums up his plans for the future: “It’s great to have the time to be busy!”
It appealed to me because the person she was quoting was myself and I felt, as one does, there is a core of truth in what I had said.
Because people know I am freer than I was when fully employed with running a restaurant I get asked to do a great variety of different things which often have me running about in a “busy” fashion.
This wasn’t always my experience.
When working in the restaurant I was constrained in a kitchen for most of the day working, I like to think, in a more measured and methodical fashion.
This morning we decided was going to be a lazy one, lazier for me than Sile who got up and got the Sunday papers so that at 11.45 I was still lying happily in the bed, papers around me, when my mobile rang downstairs.
It was WLR, our local radio station, I had promised to be on “Sunday View” which is an hour long, live panel show about what had been on that morning’s papers.
I had totally forgotten.
It was going out on air at 12.00, 15 minutes time.
I bounded into clothes and out the door, broke several speed limits and arrived into the studio just thirty seconds before the show went on air.
All the way out I was very aware that, unlike the presenter and the other two panellists, I had missed the hour long briefing which happens before the show, I was going to go in with a huge disadvantage.
I kept telling myself that if I just kept quiet for the first 15 minutes I could squint
at the papers during the ad breaks and make some effort to get myself up to date.
I had just time to hear, and write down , the names of the other panellists before we went on air.
I won’t trivialise the subjects we were talking about by mentioning them here.
The first one was a great relief to me.
I had given a dinner party on Friday night and it was one of the subjects we had talked about at great length around the table. I was effectively briefed.
The first ad break came and I was reaching frantically for papers when I saw a spasm of terror pass over the presenters face, the ads had crashed, we were going to have to run the whole hour’s show without any breaks.
The terror passed on to me easily, I didn’t even know what the topics were going to be.
Unbelievably the whole hour passed in a flash, equally unbelievably most of the topics we discussed had been discussed on Friday night chez nous.
Having had no preparation I had to listen to what was said and, instead of having a prepared stance I had to make my mind up there and then what my position would be and then defend it.
It was exhilarating!
As I drove home from the studio I was thinking that sometimes there are advantages to the sort of spontaneity that can happen if you don’t have the time to prepare.
Anyone coming into the Dwyer household yesterday would have seen, with some wonder, the above scene.
Two ducks, tied on a broom handle inverted over an upside down chair being dried with a hair dryer.
I blame Jane Grigson.
I was having some friends to dinner last night and, as the brief Seville orange season is on us, I decided it was a perfect moment to cook the classic Canard Sauce Bigarade, that is Duck with Seville Orange Sauce.
It is the tartness of Sevilles that makes this dish so special, really cutting through the fattiness of the duck more effectively than sweet oranges do.
When I had the restaurant I used always buy a box of Sevilles and freeze them and then eke them out on duck dishes during the year.
I turned to Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book for the sauce and there I also found her method of cooking them.
Who could resist a statement like this: “The end result is a wonderfully crisp skin with a good flavour, I now always roast duck in this way”
I was hooked, here is a shortened version of the recipe.
I reckon that for four hungry adults you will need two ducks.(and for this recipe, copious amounts of time)
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
150 ml white wine
500 ml. Duck Giblet (or chicken) stock
3 Seville Oranges
1 tablespoon Honey
Salt and Pepper
A shot of Orange Liquour or Brandy.
Rub the ducks all over with the spirit and then rig up their gallows as I did in the picture.
For this you will need one chair over another, a broom handle and copious amounts of string.
Ideally one should have a fan heater with a cold setting, I didn’t so had to substitute my wife’s hair dryer set on its least warm.
You dry the ducks like this for an hour-I did it for longer because I had to keep altering the position of the dryer to point at each of the ducks.
Then you half fill a roasting tin with water and disolve the honey in it.
Bring this to the boil and while simmering put the ducks in, breast side down, for just thirty seconds each.
Then you bring them back to their gibbet and repeat the drying process as before and for the same time.
You will notice as they are dried that the skin is changing, becoming smooth and shiny.
After all that you just have to cook them.
To cook put the duck on a grill in a roasting tray and pour a little water into the tray underneath the duck.
Then put them into an oven set at 190C (Gas 5, 375F) for 35 minutes, then turned the oven down to 150C (Gas 2,300F) for another hour.
Meanwhile you can make the sauce.
Let the butter turn hazelnut brown in a pot and then stir in the flour to make a brown roux.
Add the stock and the wine and then boil hard until it is your desired thickness.
Peel the skin from the oranges with a potato peeler and slice them into thin slivers, (or use a little lemon zester to do the same job )add these and the juice of the oranges to the sauce and then season with salt, pepper and sweeten with a little honey.
To serve I just cut each of the duck in two and let the guests do the hard work of carving themselves (the next time I do this I will provide finger bowls and towels!)
Was it worth it?
I think so, the skin was superbly crisp, the flesh moist and tender, the sauce delicious.
I would do it again.
It isn’t often a book makes me laugh out loud but this latest offering of Alan Bennett’s does just that.
This is a kindly and gentle satire on what happens in Buckingham Palace when the queen gets bitten by the reading bug.
Bennett writes with such restrained irony that the whole exercise comes across with great plausibility. Underneath the joke Bennett’s great love for the written word and its potential power is evident. The shock and horror of her aides and ministers as they recoil from this “Madness of Queen Elizabeth” and the ruthlessness with which they try to eradicate it is wonderful.
It is very brief, just 120 pages, and I read it this morning in just two hours.
Two hours of complete enjoyment.
When my sister D was in UCC, in the fifties, one of her French professors was a bit of an amateur etymologist and used to provide light relief during lectures on Claudel by telling them the origins of some words.
I remember her coming home with the story that sincere was from the Latin Sine Cero; without wax, and derived from the sculpture trade when unscrupulous stone masons would repair accidental nicks in their marble with wax, but later, when the sun shone, all would be revealed.
Those scrupulous masons who never used wax were therefore deemed sincere.
It’s a great story but most likely totally invented.
Another word given origin by Le Prof was Marmalade.
Her charming story, which also explained the scottish connection, was that when Mary Queen of Scots was feeling ill nothing would do her but a Confiture of Seville Oranges, by association this then acquired the name Marie Malade, or Sick Mary.
It’s a great story but total rubbish.
Marmalada is a Portuguese Quince Jelly, made from the Marmello or Quince.
It was then stretched to mean any cooked fruit, the French still call stewed apple Marmalade des Pommes.
How the Scottish connection happened I am really not sure, there is a good story of a Spanish ship laden with Seville oranges getting wrecked off the Scottish coast there leading to a glut of Marmalade making from which the scots never recovered.
Seville Oranges make a fleeting visit to Ireland in January and Februry and they make the best Marmalade, they are sharp and really not suitable for much else, except, of course, making an incomparable Canard Sauce Bigarade.
There follows my recipe for Seville Orange Marmalade.
Note this uses Sureset sugar, which I happily use. Should you wish to make it with ordinary sugar you will have to boil it for much longer and test for setting in the usual way.
(Advice not followed by a reporter from the Irish Times last year who used my recipe, but not Sureset sugar, and then complained , in print, because it didn’t set.)
Put the whole Oranges into a large pot with the water and simmer together for about 90 mts.or until the skin is tender .
Take the oranges out of the water with a slotted spoon and cool, leave the water in the pot.
When they cool halve the oranges and remove the pips. Either discard these or put them in a little square of muslin tied at the edges to boil with the marmalade.
Now cut the halves of orange as finely or thickly as you like.
(If you don’t care too much about the appearance you can chop them up roughly in batches in a food processor)
Put these back into the orange water and add in the sureset sugar.
Bring gradually back to the boil (with the little bag of pips if you are using them) stirring to dissolve the sugar.Let it boil well for 5 mts. test for setting on a cool saucer.It should take no longer than 10 mts. boiling altogether.
Take out and discard the bag of pips, and pot in the usual way.
If you like the flavour of ginger with orange (and I do) you can add two peeled thumbs of root ginger to the oranges as they boil and then chop these finely with the peel and add to the marmalade.
About two years ago a young cousin of mine, Andrew Legge, managed to do what Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall couldn’t, and filmed some footage inside a real battery farm.
It is a brilliant film and deserves a wider audience.
Time I think to adopt the mantle of grumpy old word nerd.
In Shaws, almost literate, in Waterford last week, in the furniture department there was a long chair for sale.
It was (and probably still is) decorated with a laminated sign declaring it to be a Chaise Lounge and stating the price.
There is of course no such thing as a chaise lounge, despite the fact thst the phrase is so consistently misused to have almost become part of folk etymology.
The chair in question is a quite simple Chaise Longue, modern French for long chair.
There is no doubt that its erronious name is due to what one would do if seated on it.
When I worked in Snaffles Restaurant in Dublin in the early seventies we had a dessert which was a speciality of the house known as “Grape Pud”.
It was embarrassingly easy to put together, some de-pipped grapes were put in the bottom of a ramekin, sprinkled, if one was in the mood, with a little brandy, topped with whipped cream, this cream in turn sprinkled with dark brown sugar which one then caramelised with a salamander.
A salamander in myth and legend was a lizard which could withstand fire so its name was borrowed, in cookery, for a hot grill.
This grill would have originally been an iron which was heated on the flame and then passed over the dish to brown the top without heating the insides.
In time it too came to mean a grilling plate or oven.
The salamander in Snaffles was one of the former type, a small iron disc on a long handle, which one placed on the gas until red hot then, briefly kissed the top of Grape Pud with this thereby caramelising the sugar without heating and melting the whipped cream.
It deserved its popularity.
The contrast between the crisp caramel top, the cream and the grapes was very good indeed.
When I came to work in Ballinakill House in Waterford, some years later, the proprietor; George Gossip, was determined to make Grape Pud there as he had himself enjoyed it in Snaffles.
We lacked the requisite, and extremely old fashioned, salamander.
For a couple of years (this was pre internet times, the late seventies) we searched without success. Both George and I even searched in France on our holidays there (I once thought I spotted one at a Foire des Brocantes only to discover that it was a, similar in style and function but extremely expensive, iron for pressing the collars of gentlemen’s shirts)
About two years after our search I went to stay with some friends in Limerick during January.
While we were there Todds of Limerick, that historic institution on O Connell street was having its annual sale.
There in the window, at £5 each, with the other sale paraphernalia, I spotted to my amazement two salamanders.
I shot in the door and told the surprised sales lady I would buy both.
“Can you hold on a minute” she said, “The manager would like to talk to you”.
He arrived shortly.
“I see” said he “you are buying those things, would you ever tell me what in the name of God they are!”
It seems they had found them in a store room and had put them on the window hoping someone like myself would come and enlighten them.
Nowadays of course the job of the salamander has been overtaken by the kitchen blow torch which does much the same job but, I personally feel, in a much less efficient fashion.
I kept my salamander (I gave the other one to the Gossips) and found it a great tool. With the high popularity of Crème Brulee in the nineties I felt it did a far better job than either grill or blow torch.
Just before I wrote this piece I went searching Google to see if I could find one and of course, without trouble found one in a London catering supplier.
Oh the blessings of the internet.
My birthday is on 13th March, this year for the first time that I remember, it will fall just before the Easter holidays, I never remember it being so early in my youth. This led me to look up the dates of Easter over the years, I found a chart which gave all the Easter dates between 1875 and 2124.
This year Easter Sunday falls on the 23rd of March, apparently it is technically possible that it could fall on the 22nd, the earliest possible date, but this hasn’t happened during this period.
It will fall (or has fallen) on the 23rd just twice, this year and 1913, the year before the start of the great war!
Mind you, it has only fallen once on 24th of March , in 1940, certainly a day for watching out for flying pigs and a night for checking the sky for a blue moon.
But be vigilant, this year’s occurrence is sufficiently rare for us all to keep a watch for these two phenomena on this Easter Sunday.
