A warm October Sunday, appetite sharpened by cycling and some heavy duty gardening got me thinking about comfort food. My ultimate comfort food, the kind you crave when your world is irreparably bleak is cheese on toast dipped in Heinz tomato soup. I hold that in reserve for the really bad days. There's room for something more refined in happier times and it's got to be the foods you can't make when there is a timetable to be executed. Really slow food.
So last night I braised red cabbage with some freebie Bramley apples; aromatic with clove and cinnamon and at least three hours in the making. The oven must be low, you can't hurry the braise or the cabbage dries out instead of wilting into the sweet and sour juices. I had some duck breasts which seemed like a good match and I sliced potatoes ready to fry in the rendered duck fat a la Sarladaise. The milky opaque discs of potato seemed too pure to hurl into my blackened pan, and my arms ached too much to stand at the stove so I settled on Boulangère potatoes, a dish that would happily sit in the oven for an hour or two.
I love constructing the layers of finely sliced onion and potatoes, punctuating the pale palette with dark specks of pepper and nutmeg and then washing the flavours into the dish with a stream of milk and stock. Although nutmeg is not a traditional flavouring for Boulangère, the kitchen alchemy of spice that lifts your mood is irresistible and it's perfect with milk and potatoes. Comfort chemistry.
