Food writer Nicola Miller, of Bury St Edmunds, explores the recuperative properties of food and gives us her recipe for creamed leeks with risotto rice
In 1873, Godey’s Lady's Book, a Philadelphia-based periodical, published Invalid Cooking: Means of Restoring Famished Persons. It is my favourite culinary headline and, centuries later, much of its advice still holds. ‘Let everything look as tempting as possible’; keep the invalid’s tray, utensils and food ‘delicately and scrupulously clean’, it counsels. Variety is important as are smaller portions and meals made in readiness: ‘If obliged to wait a long time the patient loses the desire to eat and often turns against the food when brought to him or her,’ which sounds like what we now refer to as being ‘hangry’. Carers are cautioned to toast bread to a ‘nice brown’ and never ‘blackness’ and ensure egg whites are soft-set lest they disagree with their patient’s delicate constitution. ‘Remember that sick cookery should do half the work of your poor patient’s digestion’ it adds in a cautious account of a Venetian nobleman from the Conaro family ‘in whom a fever was excited’ when a mere two ounces of food was prematurely added to his wine whey.
To this day in Italy, if you are feeling unwell and - in particular - your malady is digestion related, you might ‘Mangiare in bianco’ (eat white food) consuming plain, less highly-seasoned meals such as steamed white fish and white chicken meat, simple broth, almond milk puddings, and plain white rice until your stomach is once again settled. It’s an old tradition. There is evidence that hospitals in Vercelli served bowls of milky gently boiled rice and almonds to patients hundreds of years ago. Today, more than 100 varieties of rice are grown in this part of northern Italy and Italians worldwide still eat plain white rice with a small amount of salt and/or butter when they are unwell.
It’s not just Italians either. In China, one of rice’s ancestral lands, many home cooks take pride in their version of congee (jūk in Cantonese or zhōu in Mandarin), a kind of savoury porridge made by boiling rice in large amounts of water or stock until the grain breaks down. Soft shreds of egg, meat, fish or vegetables, and herbs and spices might be added for flavour. Variations on the dishes theme are made and eaten all over Southeast and East Asia. In Thailand, it’s called Khao Tom, it’s Hsan Pyok in Burma, and in Vietnam, they eat Cháo. ‘Congee’ is an Anglicised word for Kanji, the Tamil word for ‘boilings’ which the Portuguese corrupted to ‘Kanje’. Canja de Galinha, a chicken rice soup traditionally made from a young hen and served with her unlaid eggs, remains a traditional dish in Portugal for those who have recently given birth or are unwell. In Tamil Nadu, Kanji is sweetened with jaggery or made savoury with the addition of buttermilk and salt and served to convalescents or eaten for breakfast, whilst in the Konkan region of Maharashtra in India, rice cooked with jaggery and fenugreek is known as Pez and fed to nursing mothers.
The French have a brilliant term for the digestive and neurological distress caused by overindulgence. You are suffering from La Crise du Foie (‘liver crisis’) if you have indigestion, a sense of fullness, headache and nausea, diarrhoea, bilious pain (gallbladder grumbles), and dizziness after eating and/or drinking too much. French pharmacists and fellow customers are all too willing to discuss, in-depth, this very serious affliction which does not exist as a named phenomenon anywhere else. The pharmacy shelves will be filled with remedies and their bookstands devoted to the health priorities of the French, namely rebuilding one’s intestinal flora, liver detoxification, the treatment of ‘heavy legs’ (another uniquely French ailment) and haemorrhoids (Les Hémorroïdes: C’est Fini!’ announced one cheerful title). The Crise du Foie is taken so seriously that Abraracourcix, the chef from the Asterix comic books, was sent to a spa and placed on a plain and restrictive diet after being diagnosed with the affliction. Yet oddly enough an 1898 study by Leon Le Grand on mediaeval hospital regimes in France noted a general policy based on giving the sick everything they asked for unless it was harmful to their health or not easily available. Patients enjoyed crayfish, dairy products, apples, cherries, medlars, figs and grapes, spices, figs, beer and wine, white bread, mutton and fish. In one hospital it was stipulated that on the first and second of each month, the sickest patients were to be given food that brought them ‘the greatest pleasure’. I started to see why the Crise du Foie might be a problem.
I’d been thinking about restorative/recuperative food during a recent train holiday around the French and Spanish Pyrenees. As you can imagine, the food is good and plentiful in this mountainous region where historically the traditional diet had to see its populace through long, cold winters but three days of menus rich in pastries, bread made with pork lard, bull meat stew, blood-enriched civets, thick coins of goat cheese, honey-soaked figs, duck breasts, and rice-stuffed chiretas (offal) made me yearn for something simple before my gallbladder exploded. Enter La Maisonnée, a small tapas restaurant in Nimes at the end of a narrow torchlit alley where a few outdoor tables had been left in the hope that an Indian Summer might bring a surge in customers. The walls were built from the same rock used to construct the town’s ancient arena and it felt like a rosily-lit cave but I no longer knew what I wanted to eat - nor was I hungry. I felt like a goose at the end of the foie gras feeding season. I’ll just have a drink and a taste of everything, I told the server. “J’ai un Crise du Foie.” He was sympathetic. Everyone else was hungry; they ordered the entire small-plate menu.
The table and serving trolley overflowed with beautiful slabs of pork terrine encased in laminated puff pastry, earthenware bowls of whiskery crevettes with saffron aioli, salads thick with eggs, sausage and bacon or scattered with walnuts and shards of blue cheese, dishes of roasted potatoes dressed in mustard and buttermilk and baskets of rough-hewn bread, yet more pork and six tiny skewered duck hearts basted in pomegranate, platters of green beans in oil, rillettes of sardine, little cups filled with gazpacho, and a panna cotta made with garlic, goats cheese, oil and tomato. But I didn’t want any of it. And then came a tall, deep bowl above whose rim I could see a tangle of julienned leeks cooked until soft then scattered with a modest amount of pomegranate seeds and a small bright green rhombus of uncooked leek and, underneath, a heap of long-grain rice swollen with milk and stock, cooked using the risotto method with the leeks creamed separately and added before serving, according to the restaurant owner. It was singularly the best thing I ate on this holiday and one of the best things I have ever eaten anywhere - and will probably never again get to enjoy in situ - but here’s my recipe which honours its lowkey, simple-but-luxurious spirit and ability to reawaken even the most jaded of appetites.
CREAMED LEEKS WITH RISOTTO RICE (Serves 4)
To make the rice:
700ml chicken or vegetable stock
300ml whole milk
20g salted butter
300g Carnaroli rice
Salt and white pepper to taste
Garnish (optional)
A few pomegranate seeds
A few strips cut from the discarded green parts of the leeks
Method:
1. Add the stock and milk to a saucepan, stir together and keep warm over a very low heat, covering with a lid to stop evaporation. You are going to be adding this bit by bit to your rice as it cooks so you need to keep it warm.
2. Take a heavy-based pan and add the butter. Turn the heat to low-medium and when the butter is melted swirl it around the base of your pan and pour in the rice. Stir to ensure every grain is coated in butter and cook, stirring, until the rice is translucent. This should take no more than a couple of minutes.
3. Now add a ladleful of stock and stir until it has been absorbed. Pour in another ladleful and stir until absorbed, then repeat this process until all the stock is absorbed and your rice is creamy and soft but with a slight bite at the centre of each grain (what Italians call ‘al dente’). You don’t want this to be a soupy risotto so make sure you start testing the rice for doneness around 15 minutes in. The whole process usually takes around 20 to 25 minutes and you will need to keep your risotto company as it cooks, stirring frequently to help the rice release the starch that gives risotto its creaminess. If it feels undercooked but you’ve run out of stock, make up some more and add it very slowly until the rice is al dente. Taste and season with salt and pepper if necessary.
To make the creamed leeks:
2 teaspoons olive oil
25g salted butter
3 leeks, well washed and very thinly sliced, using white parts only
50ml milk
150ml double cream
One sprig of thyme
One tablespoon of finely grated Parmesan
Salt to taste
Method:
1. I would start these when the risotto is cooking. Take a large heavy-based frying pan, add the oil and butter and heat over a low flame. When the butter has melted, stir it into the oil to make an emulsion then add the leeks and very gently simmer. You want them completely soft but not browned and to look pale and delicate.
2. Stir in the milk and cream, add the sprig of thyme, reduce the heat and simmer gently for another 6 minutes stirring frequently. Stir in the Parmesan until melted.
3. Take off the heat, remove the thyme sprig, and cover until your rice is ready.
4. To serve, pile the rice into a large bowl and top with creamed leeks. If you’re going to add pomegranate seeds and slices of green leek, now’s the time to do it.
Follow Nicola on Twitter: @Nicmillerstale
Winner of the Guild of Food Writers Online Food Writer Award 2020
Fortnum & Mason Cookery Writer of the Year 2022
