Supermarkets This article is more than 18 years oldAny samphire?
This article is more than 18 years oldFinding the ingredients for some cookbooks can be harder than cooking the recipes. So Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray showed Laura Barton how she could rustle up dishes from their latest book - serialised in the Guardian from Saturday - from the shelves of her local Sainsbury'sThe ground that lies between me and the celebrity cook is strewn with caperberries and disappointment. While celebrity chefs are forever fondling stilton, waxing lyrical about Borough market, and extolling the virtues of wet walnuts, whatever the heck they are, my mantra remains firm: what they don't stock in Lidl, I don't want to know about. It's all very well cooking gulls' eggs in wood-burning ovens - but can a normal person ever really hope to replicate the recipes? Can anything approximating these ingredients be bought in an ordinary supermarket?
We decided to put it to the test, more specifically, to challenge Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, chefs at the River Cafe restaurant in London and authors of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks, to cook their recipes based only on the ingredients available in my local supermarket, Sainsbury's in Dalston, east London. They have sportingly agreed to trawl the aisles with me in search of the ingredients for two of the dishes from their new cookbook: smoked eel with samphire, and spaghetti with raw tomato and rocket. Should we find that the necessary ingredients are not available, we shall select alternatives. Then we shall rustle up said dishes using my slightly underequipped kitchen.
Bathed in the fluorescent glow of the supermarket aisle, Rogers and Gray look somewhat disoriented. They seek solace in the familiar territory of the recipe. "Look for eel sold with the skin intact as it will be fatter and juicier," advises the book. "The belly should be yellow and the back brown. Fat eel is definitely good eel and the skin will peel easily." Unfortunately, we become stuck on the first part of the task: looking for eel. "Let's find the fish counter," rallies Gray, striding boldly off into deepest Sainsbury's. Alas, there is no fish counter.
"Do you sell eel?" Rogers asks the woman behind the deli counter. "Eel? That's fish?" says the assistant, glancing at her array of pork pies and onion bhajis. She directs us towards two chiller cabinets further along the aisle, laden with crabsticks and violently pink salmon. "What's over here?" Rogers strides over to another cabinet only to find it stocked with prepacked shepherd's pies on special offer.
"Smoked salmon, smoked trout ..." Gray is rummaging disappointedly through the fish selection. The best we can muster is a packet of shrink-wrapped smoked mackerel fillets. "The thing about eel," Gray explains mournfully, "is it's very fatty and that sweet fattiness contrasts with the samphire."
Ah, the samphire. "Samphire becomes available around the end of April," explains the book. "It grows on the tide and is hand-picked, mostly in Norfolk, Suffolk and the Brittany coast. Samphire has fleshy stems and a fresh, salty taste. It is mostly sold through fishmongers." And herein lies the problem - although we are blessedly in the full swing of samphire season, there are few tides in the land-locked borough of Hackney, and certainly none at all in Kingsland Road shopping centre.
What shall we use instead? Rogers and Gray survey the vegetable selection grimly, their gaze skimming over cabbage, asparagus and spring greens before finally alighting on a bag of spinach. Here, we also pick up plum tomatoes, rocket and garlic. Gray turns to Rogers with dismay: "Did you feel the garlic?"
One of the recipes also calls for freshly grated horseradish. "Who's in charge of the vegetables?" asks Rogers. She flags down a passing assistant, who guides us over to a woman engaged in restocking the cress section. "We're looking for fresh horseradish. Fresh," Rogers reiterates for extra emphasis. "We've had it in, but we've none in at the moment," the woman assures her, not entirely convincingly. Her colleague tells us they have it growing wild nearby - and then leads us to the store's solitary jar of grated horseradish.
Next, olive oil. "Hmm. They don't have River Cafe olive oil," notes Gray. There follows a short discussion over which is likely to be the most palatable oil. "Compare the colours," says Gray. "Look at the prices," says Rogers. "With olive oil, the younger the better," explains Gray, "and it should come from only one estate. This," she says, brandishing a bottle of pale green oil, "must be fairly recent and it comes from one single place." Jars of olives we find, naturally enough, hiding out on top of the freezer cabinets. In brine is better than in olive oil, explains Gray, as it preserves the taste of the olives. Rogers, meanwhile, is in search of whole chillies. "Chilli powder ... ground chillies ... Whole chillies!" she announces gleefully. "It's like a treasure hunt."
At the checkout, Rogers strikes up a conversation with a lady in the adjacent queue about a packet of chocolate wafers she is buying. "You get such a mix of people here," she tells me. "It's so lively, isn't it? Waitrose in Belgravia isn't the same."
Our checkout assistant is the amiable Bridget. "Put as much in the bag as possible," Rogers instructs her. "Do you have paper bags?" "Ridley Road market, you could get paper bags," says Bridget. "But paper bags aren't very strong."
"No, but they are better for the environment."
"There's a lot of things better for the environment," says Bridget, "but no one takes any notice."
Back at Chteau Barton, we discuss our shopping expedition. "When we did our first book in 1995, people always asked where they could get the ingredients," says Rogers, "but one of the most exciting things about doing a cookbook every two years is that those questions come less and less. It is changing - you can get things now."
Were they impressed by Sainsbury's in Dalston? "It didn't impress me, it depressed me," says Gray. "I found it daunting, and everything was in plastic bags." "There was nothing you can smell or touch," adds Rogers, "and you have to pass television sets before you get to olives, and you've just been in tomatoes." But they were pleasantly surprised that we were able to find crème fraîche, plum tomatoes and capers, and frankly astonished that there was orecchiette in the pasta aisle. "The best thing is that there are two different kinds of rocket," says Gray, as she urges me to compare the organic wild rocket (rather peppery) with the Joe Bloggs variety (not quite so peppery, and bigger). It is unquestionably the most bourgeois moment of my life.
We make the spaghetti dish easily enough, let down only by my technical incompetence and the quality of the olives. "See, that tastes good," says Rogers after gingerly sampling a mouthful. However, we come a cropper on the smoked eel with samphire, which has now become the slightly less tantalising smoked mackerel with spinach. We wilt the spinach, lugging in some oil and seasoning, cobble together the inferior horseradish sauce, and slice the mackerel. "Oh there's bones," cries Gray. "Do you have any pincers?" Alas, I do not. We arrange the dish on the plate, where it sits, looking cold and grey and miserable. "Are you going to try it?" Rogers asks sweetly. This particular variation, we agree, is unlikely to make it into the next River Cafe book. Gray smiles. "The lesson we have learned today," she concludes kindly, "is this: if you can't get smoked eel, don't bother doing this recipe."
· River Cafe Too Easy is published on May 23 by Ebury at £20
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