Crowd Pleasers James Martin: Home Comforts

If there's one thing I look forward to at the end of a busy day,

it's the thought of getting back to MY kitchen at home.

For me, nothing beats cooking some simple, heart-warming food.

Oh, oh, oh. It is so good.

The kind of no-nonsense grub

that brings people together.

Cheers, everyone.

The dishes I turn to

when I want to put a big smile on everyone's face.

These are MY home comforts.

For me, food and entertaining at home go hand in hand.

One of my greatest pleasures in life

is cooking dishes with a wow factor.

When I have friends around for dinner, I'm always turning

to a few tried and tested recipes that taste great

and are stunning to look at.

These are crowd-pleasing dishes that will keep everyone

coming back for more.

I'm going to cook a dish that's a guaranteed dinner-party hit.

If there's really a true test of a good meal,

it's got to be that, hasn't it, really.

Make a spectacular cake that involves...

a bit of dancing.

If people are just tuning in like this, I haven't been drinking, honest!

But it never fails to impress.

And food historian Ivan Day

keeps the party swinging with some explosive

18th-century drinks.

After a glass of this stuff and one of these,

I'd probably be seeing horses floating off across the Thames, too.

I'm starting off with a crowd-pleasing dish

that always wows in my house,

and it's well worth the effort when you fancy pushing the boat out.

It's beef Wellington with a wild mushroom Madeira sauce.

Now, it's really a combination of classic flavours,

there's really a perfect marriage.

Traditionally this would be just roasted and cooked inside the puff pastry,

but I actually prefer to cook the beef fully beforehand

and it means that the pastry is nice and cooked and less soggy in the centre.

Now, this is a whole centre cut of fillet.

Now this is normally where you get these lovely fillet steaks from, if you cut through,

so the first thing I'm going to do is get

a little bit of oil, just a small amount of oil,

cos I'm going to seal off this beef.

It only takes a couple of minutes to do this,

giving me time to lay out some clingfilm for cooking the meat in.

Unusual, I know, but it really works.

Just check on the packaging to make sure

it's suitable for this type of cooking.

Then as soon as the beef is sealed,

lift it off and place it on your clingfilm,

and then you wrap it up nice and tight.

We're going to cook it long and slow.

Now the great thing about cooking it this way,

it doesn't shrink.

I always kind of bring it down to putting your backside in a hot bath.

It kind of clenches.

Now if you leave it for ten minutes in a low heat bath,

it's kind of nice really. The same thing with this.

Place into an oven that's 100 degrees centigrade for an hour.

After that, place it in the fridge to cool down.

Now it's time to get on with preparing the fillings

and I'm going to start with the duxelle,

a kind of mushroom paste.

You've just got some field mushrooms here.

You can just use button mushrooms if you want,

but the main thing with this is, do not wash them,

whatever you do, because they absorb moisture like a sponge

and it's going to make this duxelle quite liquid.

Once they're very finely chopped, fry them off on a hot pan

for a couple of minutes and leave it to cool.

So allow that just to chill down nicely.

Next up is the spinach, cooked with a small knob of butter.

This will add a lovely bit of colour to the Wellington.

With spinach, you kind of just show it the heat, really.

Just as soon as it hits the heat of the pan, take it off

and continue to cook it off the stove

and it kind of wilts down nicely, cos you want all that colour

and that can go on the tray next to the mushrooms.

After that comes the pancakes.

They will help stop the pastry from getting soggy.

I'm using a standard batter of 200ml of milk,

two whole eggs, 60g of flour

and a pinch of salt.

And these are quite crucial because it's going to absorb

any bits of juices that come out of the beef,

which is really important to stop the pastry from going soggy.

Cos this is one of the dishes that I kind of think people have tried

when they've had dinner parties at home in the late '80s,

something like that. Certainly, may have been the '70s.

My mother probably is one of them. She's tried it, it's gone wrong

and never touched it since.

And this is kind of one of those dishes

that's really a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

Make sure they're nice and thin.

After the pancakes are cooked,

leave them to cool along with the other ingredients.

Now it's just an assembly job.

It all starts with some shop-bought puff pastry

that I'm rolling out large enough to wrap around the beef.

The first thing I'm going to do is put the pancakes on.

This is quite crucial when it comes to cooking,

because the pancakes are going to absorb all the liquid that comes out of the beef

and prevent the pastry, of course, from being soggy.

When you're laying these on, you're almost building a patchwork quilt,

filling in any gaps.

They taste so good.

And I've got some pate here. It's entirely up to you

what pate you use, really,

but chicken liver, duck liver pate is pretty good for this,

but the most important thing is that it's smooth.

You don't want anything too coarse,

in terms of pate, cos it's just going to rip

when you put the filling in.

After a thin layer of the pate comes the spinach,

followed by the duxelle.

It's kind of like a privilege to

sort of make this at home because it's a classic dish

that requires respect.

It's not a dish that you can rush, but hopefully in the end,

you get rewarded for the amount of time that you've put in it,

when it comes out of the oven.

And then black pepper

and salt.

Pop your beef on and then, before we start to roll up,

we just need some egg wash.

I always find it easier to trim it down afterwards,

so if you've got the egg wash on the top

and then you're ready to roll it up.

You start at one end, flip it over and roll this over

and when you get to this end, then

you can trim it up.

So many times you actually trim this up first

and end up with not enough pastry, really.

Roll it over like that.

Keep these ends on and just tuck them in,

so it keeps in all the juices,

but you can trim this off after it's cooked.

And then in one movement, up and on.

A bit more egg wash.

I like to use egg yolk for this.

I like to do a nice little pattern and you can use

a knife, fork, anything you want

and you just create these nice little patterns.

It's a cheffy thing.

It goes into the oven at 230 degrees centigrade

and the beef is already cooked

so it only takes 25 minutes, leaving enough time

to make the mushroom Madeira sauce.

After cleaning 150g of wild mushrooms, put them into a hot pan.

And they don't take very long to cook.

As soon as they're wilted down you can throw in some Madeira,

which is a classic flavour in beef Wellington.

Flame it.

This is just to get rid of the alcohol,

and then just a touch of beef stock to finish it off.

Bring this to the boil,

reduce it down about a third,

add a little touch of butter, seasoning

and that's your finished sauce.

The 25 minutes is up and the Wellington is ready.

It's pretty good.

Looking good.

It's one of these dishes that so impresses people

when you take it to the table.

You can slide this on to a big board,

take it to the centre of the table,

with a smile on your face.

So often, with beef Wellington, when you slice it,

all the liquid just comes straight out.

But by cooking it beforehand,

it really eliminates all that.

See the whole thing about this is waiting to see what it looks like in the middle.

Look at that.

Just perfect.

Fantastic!

You've got a wonderful rich Madeira and mushroom sauce

to go with it.

And no matter how many times I taste beef Wellington,

when it's made properly,

I think, to be honest, it's one of the best dishes

you'll ever taste.

For me, beef Wellington is one of the greatest crowd-pleasing foods,

because it gives people something exciting

and different from the norm.

Another of my all-time favourites,

and something that always goes down a storm in my house,

is lobster.

Staithes is only half an hour away from where I grew up,

on the north-east coast of Yorkshire.

This is where Drew Baxter and his uncle Shaun

are part of only a handful of fishermen who catch lobsters here.

I've lived in the village all my life.

I love it, still do, and always just keep doing it.

We try to make the fishery sustainable.

Lobsters, if you fished and fished and fished them,

they would disappear. You've got to look after this for the future.

Normally Drew's lobsters are for restaurants in the UK and Europe,

but today he's on a special mission.

His uncle Shaun is planning a seafood barbecue

for friends and family.

Only the freshest lobster he can get his hands on will do.

It's one of the greatest seafoods there is.

It's so succulent and it has also an image, an aura about it,

of being a luxury seafood,

which is quite rightly so.

It's a fantastic product, it really is.

Lobsters spend most of their time in shelters

and only ever really come out at night.

Their hard shells are great at protecting them against predators,

but don't allow them to grow,

so the only way they can get bigger is to moult.

July and August is the best time to catch the lobsters.

They've just come out of casting,

which is basically shedding their shells,

go into a hole, hide,

they'll stay hidden for two or three weeks,

to try and harden the shell up

and emerge a bigger lobster.

But they're so hungry, they come out of their hiding place

and the most food around is in the lobster pots,

so it's a really good time to catch the lobsters.

Drew and Shaun are heading out into the North Sea,

to check on the lobster pots that were baited yesterday.

What we'll do is, we'll go out,

grab hold of one of the flags on it, one end.

You'll haul yourself along, picking up the pots as you go.

That is the first lobster pot.

You're always excited to see what comes up in the pots

because you've made them lobster pots by hand.

There you go, that's it. That's a really good example.

There's two lobsters, a pouting,

which is really good bait.

Two beautiful-sized lobsters, by the look of it.

At Drew's level, it's probably one of the smallest commercial levels there is.

It's a family-size, family-run business.

It's a very sustainable and enjoyable way to make a living.

Not everything that's caught can be kept, though.

Under a certain size, which is 87mm,

we can't keep the lobsters,

they're too small.

So what we have to do is throw them back until they get

to the right size and then we'll catch them

a few years down the line.

What we do is just check the measure,

put the measure on the back there

and if it goes over that part there, it's not sized.

Luckily this one is. So we get to keep this one today.

There's something every day that's different about the sea.

That's the bit that gets me up and gets me going every time.

Having caught the main ingredient for the seafood feast,

expert forager Shaun is getting a few things to go with it

and seaweed is on the list.

Here we have a very good bladderwrack area,

so I think we'll harvest some of the bladderwrack from here.

Shaun's plan is to steam the lobsters in this,

adding a subtle taste of the sea.

We'll need quite a lot of this to wrap our lobster in

for this afternoon.

But Shaun knows of another seaweed that's anything but subtle,

the intensely spicy red pepper dulse.

This is one of the main ones we're going to use in the marinade,

but we have to be very, very...

very, very careful, as it's very strong.

It's a really, really nice-tasting seaweed.

Back at the harbour, Shaun's wife is helping out.

Two whole lobsters are wrapped in bladderwrack

and put on to the barbecue for 20 minutes.

The other lobsters are cut in half and cooked in their shell,

which allows flavours to be added

directly on to the meat.

Patricia's made some lovely marinade from the seaweed

that we collected earlier

and then we'll use the shell to actually boil the lobster in.

The marinade is a mixture of cayenne pepper, mace

and the pepper dulse,

that's blended into some unsalted butter.

First they're cooked for ten minutes shell side down,

then turned over for another five.

There are many ways to cook lobster, but sometimes

it's hard to beat one freshly grilled, straight from the sea.

Well, if you just want to get stuck in, there's meat there.

I've only ever had barbecued lobsters once before

and they were very dry. This isn't.

That was absolutely wonderful.

Lobster has to be one of my favourite foods,

so I've invited Drew into my kitchen

and he's brought some of his catch with him.

Now, this is one seriously impressive lobster.

Yeah, he's a really good lobster, he is. He's well over size.

How old would that be?

I'd say he was about 15, maybe 20 years old.

I'm fascinated by fishermen, to do it for a living,

because it's not the easiest job in the world.

It's very giving. It gives you a lot.

I made all my lobster pots by hand.

Every single one of them pots I know.

Technically I've made that and I've caught that lobster, all on my own.

Is there just you fishing lobsters there?

Or how many boats are in that neck of the woods fishing for the same stuff?

Out of Staithes there's four of us,

-each of us have got nearly 300 lobster pots.

-Right.

So there's quite a good little fishery coming out of Staithes, at the moment.

One of Drew's lobsters will be the centrepiece for a decadent dish

that isn't cheap.

But it's definitely worth it for a special occasion.

It's a celebration of all that's great about the seafood

around the UK.

This is my fruits de mer with homemade rye bread.

So first thing I want to do is get the rye flour mixing.

Add 25g of dark brown muscovado sugar

to 500g of rye flour,

followed by a large pinch of salt.

Then pour 10g of instant yeast,

mixed with 350ml of warm water, into the mix.

It really is a classic combination, this.

The texture of it lends itself so well together with the crab and the lobster.

Now how would you eat lobsters?

You like actually lobsters, cos whenever I meet a fisherman,

-they don't actually like what they catch.

-Not really, no.

I don't eat lobsters myself. I'm more of a crab man.

When everything is completely mixed together,

roll it out into a long log.

Just press this down

and then grab yourself a rolling pin

and just pin it out a little bit

and then just roll it up.

Now this is unlike most bread really,

where it'll actually prove within an hour.

This one, you need to leave it to prove kind of overnight, really,

and it's a long, slow prove. So let's cover it over and leave it.

I've already got some that's been left overnight.

Before baking I'm going to score some lines along the top

and dust it with a little bit more rye flour.

Then stick it in a preheated oven,

220 degrees centigrade for 30 minutes,

and while that's cooking I can prepare Drew's lobster and crab,

that have already been boiling in water for eight minutes,

cooking them perfectly.

-I'm assuming you know how to prepare one of these.

-That's your job. We catch them.

All right. Well, nature's been kind to us, really.

It's created a nice little line on the top of the head

and the easiest way to do this is actually remove the legs off first.

So remove them off

and then, holding it flat on to the board

and using a sharp knife,

you follow that line.

First of all you crack it in there, right the way through

and then turn it the other way,

open up the tail and basically follow that line, all the way through it.

Open this out, remove the head part.

Everything else you kind of eat, really.

To remove the claw meat from these shells,

all you do is use the back of a knife, just a quick crack like that,

and it'll just crack open

and the claw meat just comes straight out like this.

Are you the fourth generation fisherman, then?

Yes, I am, yeah.

So how has fishing changed over the years?

It used to be cod fishing all the way,

but before that, it was herring fishing.

The next couple of years it could be crabs, could be langoustines,

it could be anything. We don't know.

So you'd never know what you'll be doing one year to the next?

Not really, no. But I'd never change it for the world, you know.

Cos when you speak to most fishermen, it's not a livelihood where, you know,

not a glamorous livelihood, where you can earn absolute fortunes,

unless you've got massive trawlers and stuff like that.

That's it, it is a way of life, and you work as hard as you want.

If you work really hard, you can make a lot of money.

If you want to spend time with your family, you can,

but you don't earn as much money.

So there you have your prepared lobster.

Crab is prepared in a similar way.

Pull off the legs and crack the claws.

Well, the easiest way to take the crab shell out, really,

is to use the back of a spoon, I always find,

and just whack it in.

Crack it open like that and

then this comes out.

Just want to remove these little dead man's fingers.

They aren't actually poisonous, I don't know where that came from,

but they're just kind of unpleasant to eat.

So just remove this.

Take the head off and then put all the meat back into the shell.

Everything can now start to be built up.

You need a platter full of ice

and then basically you just chuck everything on it.

You can serve this with whatever you fancy,

but I'm going to use the fantastic array of seafood

that's been caught all around the UK,

including oysters, langoustines and

steamed razor clams.

The rye bread is now ready to take out the oven and slice up.

All of this is served with whipped butter

and some lemon mayonnaise.

I don't know where we start with this.

One end and then work our way through then, I suppose, do we?

-I'd say so, yeah.

-Now, obviously I've done enough for us two.

Well, be enough to do me, maybe.

Yeah, a couple of Yorkshire folk and all that.

What do you reckon?

-Yeah, that's nice.

-It's good, this, isn't it?

-Yeah, I like that.

-You've got to get excited about food like this because

it's just everything that's brilliant about the food caught around the UK.

And it's not until you taste

seafood this fresh,

you'll appreciate all the hard work

that these guys go into catching it.

To me, there's no other dish that epitomises

what's brilliant about the seafood around this country.

This is it.

Fruits de mer is a spectacular treat that's well worth the expense

and never fails to impress.

Crowd-pleasing food doesn't have to be in the eating.

The cooking itself can be the real event

and, for me, barbecues epitomise this.

That used to mean bangers and burgers,

but there's a growing band of people

proving that it can be much more exotic than that.

From his home in south London, 23-year-old Gianluca Ivaldi

has been mastering the art of Southern style barbecue,

inspired by tasting it on a trip to Atlanta, Georgia.

What struck me was the combination of this really, really tender meat

and the really obvious and strong flavour of the hickory wood smoke

that they use over there

and that to me, I hadn't tasted anything like it,

and I wanted to just recreate it, over here in the UK.

It started with me having one smoker in my back garden.

After about two months or three months of trading

at local, smaller markets, I moved my smoker down to this unit

and bought a few more, and now I've got three smokers

sitting in the back garden

and they're running almost every day, all day, all night.

Southern style barbecuing might be melt-in-the-mouth tender,

but it doesn't start that way.

It's the slow-cooking that turns tough cuts like pork shoulder

or beef brisket into something irresistible.

Most barbecue joints in the States actually started out

as high-end butcher's shops, where,

to try and promote the sales of these kind of tough or undesirable cuts,

they would actually smoke the meat,

so that when the customers would arrive,

they'd buy it in a cooked form, rather than in its raw state.

The butchers who invented Southern style barbecue,

ended up creating a food that's become one of the defining flavours

of the Deep South.

This is my signature rub.

There are about nine or so, mostly secret ingredients.

One of them is brown sugar and I use that

because it creates a lovely crust on the meat once it's been smoked.

And also, at the low temperatures that I smoke at,

it actually caramelises, to produce a wonderful flavour,

once the meat's cooked.

Obviously with beef, I have a lot of pepper and salt in this rub,

just to bring out the flavour

and because beef, you know, being a heavier,

kind of more robust meat, it can stand up to a lot of pepper.

Gianluca's barbecue has proved

such a crowd-pleaser at food markets all over London,

he's now smoking up to 70 kilos a day.

Southern barbecue is all about cooking your meat low and slow,

over a wood fire.

This chunk of brisket will cook for 12 or more hours,

based on how thick it is,

and when it comes out, all this oak smoke will have penetrated it,

it will seal in the rub.

If it's a piece of beef, say, you'll get, you know, the nice hit of the beef

and the fat and then underneath you'll get, if it's oak,

a really earthy flavour and, you know, if it's something more fruity,

like cherry, you can actually taste the notes of the fruit wood

behind the meat. Something that's, you know, very special.

I take great pride in, you know,

making the meat taste smoky and getting the authentic flavour

because, to me, it's something that's really lacking

in the UK and I think it's something that people really enjoy

and sort of get hooked on.

They taste the meat

and they can't place a finger on why they like it so much,

but I think it's that real depth of smoke, along with, you know,

the seasonings and the barbecue sauce that kind of complete

the traditional barbecue experience.

After cooking the meat overnight, it's ready to eat,

and today Gianluca is taking it to King's Cross Food Market.

Visually it's very impressive.

When you are either pulling a pork shoulder apart

or slicing into a really thick brisket,

people can't...even just passers-by, they can't help but stop and stare. That's fantastic.

And as soon as they see it and see their friends eating it, they want some themselves.

So they'll get in the queue and it just builds from there.

Queuing up for ages, so salivating while I was waiting,

finally come to it, pulled pork...

That hits the spot.

Pretty good.

With business going so well, Gianluca's mum and sister

have both given up their time to help on the stall.

And if you're going to please a crowd this big,

then there's no way you can skimp on your portions.

There are no smalls.

Everything is either a medium or a large.

We just like being generous.

I had the beef brisket bun

and it just tastes like

smoky barbecued goodness.

Yeah, it's pretty stunning.

There's no doubt that most people love a good barbecue,

almost as much as a crowd-pleasing dessert.

There's one I often make at home,

which is a delicious mix of orange liqueur cream,

fruit and choux pastry.

It's my gateau St Honore.

Now this is one dessert that's guaranteed to wow people.

It's named after the patron saint of pastry cooks

and it's actually a really simple recipe, when you break it down.

I'm starting off by making the choux pastry,

which will form the base and the buns around the edge of this gateau.

First up, warm 125ml

of both whole milk and water.

Then add 100g of diced unsalted butter.

The idea is that it should melt first,

before it comes to the boil.

Now, a lot of recipes will tell you to put a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar.

I like just a pinch of sugar in this.

Now it's time to throw in 175g of plain flour.

Keep on stirring until it just starts to become thick.

It will actually start to come together and almost you can hear this pop

and it's the gluten in the flour as it starts to sort of hit the heat.

And then, when it's at that stage, you can take the entire lot

and place it in the blender.

Beating the mixture will start to cool it down.

It's quite an important bit, this.

If we add the eggs while our mixture's too hot,

it becomes very difficult to work with,

but also sometimes the eggs can cook and curdle it.

When the mixture has completely cooled,

slowly start adding four eggs, one by one,

always keeping a close eye on the texture.

You want it like that, just so it falls off.

If you add too many eggs it becomes too liquid

and almost impossible to work with.

If it's too solid, literally it just ends up being too solid

and just sits in the piping bag.

Now the first thing we need to do is create a base

for our gateau St Honore.

Now, the only way you're going to do that

is actually move your hips.

So the idea is you pipe... It may sound a bit weird...

If there's people just tuning in like this, I haven't been drinking, honest.

But you hold the piping bag and you rotate your hips.

See, what you want is a bit of James Brown.

And as you do it, it creates this spiral.

Start in the middle, it's like a big Catherine Wheel.

JAMES BROWN: # Paid the cost to be the boss

# Paid the cost to be the boss... #

Then, what you do is, you make your choux buns,

and for that you need a larger hole in the piping bag.

You pipe this slightly differently.

You pipe it from above, not from the side,

but you pipe it from the top

and then almost stop and then lift it up.

Pipe, stop, lift it up.

But then what you want, really, is you want a flat top to the choux

and the way you do that is just to grab a little bit of water,

dip your fingers in and press the tops, just a touch.

Before starting to bake them, here's a trick I always use.

Put a little bit of water into the bottom of the oven.

This will create steam and help the choux pastry rise.

Take the entire lot, stick it in the oven,

200 degrees centigrade,

and it wants to cook now for about 25 to 30 minutes.

After that, take them out and let them cool,

which gives me time to make the lovely light and soft filling

for my gateau.

Mix together 300ml of cream

and 200ml of shop-bought custard

and start whipping.

Now really you can flavour this cream with whatever you want,

but a little bit of orange liqueur, I think,

works brilliantly with this.

That's perfect.

And what you end up with is this lovely, light cream.

Taste the vanilla,

because the vanilla custard.

It's delicious.

Really simple little cream.

The choux buns have cooled down and

I'm making a hole in the bottom of each one

to pipe in the filling.

I'm also starting to melt 100g of caster sugar,

because I want to coat them with caramel afterwards.

Press the piping bag right inside the choux

and hold it like that

and they'll just fill up nicely.

The basis of this is used for so many different French desserts,

including the most famous one, which is a croquembouche.

You build the choux pastry all around this mould

and then pop it out of the mould.

Hold it up, it's massive, it can get to six foot high.

I've done one at home where I borrowed a traffic cone.

I did put it back.

These croquembouche moulds are 200 quid.

The sugar has melted

and I'm going to dip the top of each bun in the caramel.

Now you dip in the choux buns, not your fingers -

you'll only do that once,

cos this sugar is really hot.

Now it's time to bring everything together.

Start with the base I made earlier.

On top of this I'm putting scoops of the cream mixture.

Once that's done, the choux buns can be placed around the edge.

You've always got one for the cook.

Decorate with some fresh fruit and one final flourish on the top.

I've got some twisted willow.

We used to use this in France

and you can do this with sugar work normally,

but that's far too much faffing around.

It may seem tricky, but it's worth making the effort

and it actually isn't that hard to make.

When you break it down, it's so simple.

You've got the choux buns and the cream,

but yet it looks so elaborate and you can see the reason

why it's named after the patron saint of pastry cooks.

And it's doable at home,

and above all else,

it tastes fantastic, too.

Mm.

That flavoured cream, the crunchiness of the caramel

and the choux buns.

What more do you want?

Satisfaction is guaranteed by creating a spectacular crowd-pleaser

like this in your own kitchen.

It's one thing keeping friends happy at home,

but it's entirely different

when you've got a huge group of strangers to please.

Food historian Ivan Day is discovering what was being peddled

to keep the masses happy in London,

hundreds of years ago.

As London expanded during the late 17th and early 18th century,

people needed places to go and enjoy themselves in open spaces

and a number of entrepreneurs

opened up what were called pleasure gardens.

The most famous of these was on the South Bank at Vauxhall.

It was first known as Spring Gardens and then became known to everybody

as Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

There were many, many complaints

about the infamous high prices of Vauxhall food.

But there were items that were really good to eat and drink,

which were true crowd-pleasers,

and I'm going to have a go at making two of those.

My first recipe is one that's right up my street.

It's for something called arrack punch,

which is a very early form of punch.

Vauxhall was the place where people misbehaved in all sorts of ways,

but the most popular way was to drink a lot of alcohol.

The first ingredient in this punch

is the one that gives it its name, is arrack.

Now, arrack was a very popular ardent spirit

that came from southern India and Ceylon.

It was distilled from a kind of beer

and it was brought back to England in the 17th century by sailors,

who would make punch with it.

This pleasure garden favourite was made by adding lime juice

and hot water to the arrack.

In the winter, the punch was drunk piping hot.

Followed by a little bit of nutmeg and finally a large amount of sugar.

A lot of the arrack that was sold at Vauxhall was a rip-off

cos it wasn't really arrack, which was quite expensive.

It was made from rum.

One popular way of flavouring punch

was to flame it with orange zest.

You would first warm it gently over a candle,

to get the oil in the skin to rupture out of its little glands

and then squeeze it

and you get a rather dramatic squirt of the oil,

which ignites. It should go over the top of the candle

and the oil would go into the drink.

Let me have a swig of it.

Mm, it's really potent.

On the surface,

Vauxhall Gardens was a pretty respectable place,

with opera and all sorts of theatrical performance,

but often in the wings and in the bushes,

there were all sorts of other things going on.

It wasn't only notorious for the high prices of the food and drink,

but also for the lewd and unseemly behaviour

that was probably caused by over-drinking.

My second crowd-pleasing recipe is a very special biscuit

which is called a Shrewsbury cake.

We dunk biscuits in tea nowadays, but in the past

people dunked their biscuits in wine, alcohol, or even punch.

I'm going to use a recipe from the 17th century,

from the time when Vauxhall Gardens were first founded.

These biscuits are a spicy version of one of our national favourites,

shortbread.

They were made by rubbing butter into flour and sugar,

before a generous amount of ginger was thrown in.

The Shrewsbury biscuit is actually the very first sweet biscuit

that we would recognise as being something really nice to eat.

Once the dry ingredients were mixed, an egg yolk was added.

My final ingredient is some rose-water.

Rose-water and orange flower-water

were very popular flavours.

I'm going to put in enough to make it into a pliable paste.

There's my dough.

A glass was used to cut out the biscuits

and their distinctive lines were created in a really novel way.

We need a surprising piece of culinary equipment,

which was something that you might have in your back pocket,

and that is...

a comb.

Now, that's not all, because

we also have to make

a little hole in the centre

of each diamond.

Those holes have a purpose.

They're to stop the biscuit from blistering and rising.

So my Shrewsbury cakes are ready

and, if I crack them across the perforations,

they are then absolutely perfect for fitting into a small,

but generous

glass of arrack punch.

These are really good.

So you can imagine the scene.

Everyone's dunking their Shrewsbury cakes into their arrack,

but all around, an incredible range of entertainment.

There's even a record of a hot-air balloon which,

instead of carrying a basket, had a horse with its rider,

which just sort of floated off into south London from the gardens.

I think, after a glass of this stuff and one of these,

I'd probably be seeing horses floating off across the Thames, too.

My last dish certainly doesn't involve

any floating horses or alcohol.

It's a one-pot wonder that I'm making for a crowd

coming over to my house this evening.

It's my slightly crazy twist on a pea and ham soup

that everyone always loves.

It's my spelt bread crusted baked ham.

One of the dishes that I love to cook at home is a pea and ham soup

and you wouldn't think of that as a crowd-pleaser,

but done this way, it's very unique and very different.

So I'm going to start off with a whole ham

and cook this first of all.

So straight into cold water

and then the aromats that I'm going to add are some onion,

bay leaf and carrot,

and you want to cut these up into sort of decent chunks.

You can impart so much flavour into this and utilise the stock

to which you cook it in as well, to turn it into a wonderful soup.

With the seasoning, only use peppercorns,

as the ham is salty enough.

Then cover and simmer for three or four hours,

leaving plenty of time to make the rather unusual bread lid.

The whole point about this is to have the ham sat with all the veg,

like a ham and pea soup, where you've got all the different veg

to go with it, but then the bread is like the crust on the top.

So the whole thing is then baked in the oven.

To make the dough, I'm putting a couple of tablespoons

of both caster sugar and salt into a kilo of spelt flour.

To this I'm adding 14g of instant yeast

mixed with a little warm water.

Now, I've actually been cooking with spelt flour quite a lot at home

and I sort of class it as sort of old-fashioned bread.

Some of my friends that come over say that it tastes like beer.

It's quite an unusual sort of taste with it,

but one that works really well together with this, particularly as a crust.

I'm adding 700ml of water.

It'll have a slightly soft, sticky feel.

Then place in a bowl to prove.

When the ham is cooked, take it off the heat

and let it cool down in the stock.

Now it's time to prepare the main body of the soup in another pan.

Anything can be used at this point,

but I'm going for a classic.

I love potatoes and peas with ham,

it's this classic combination.

It's kind of like a wholesome dish, really.

Now the potatoes, you want to chop these

into sort of decent-sized chunks.

You don't want these to mush down.

A little bit of spring onions.

You cut these into big chunks,

literally whole pieces, like that.

Same thing with runner beans, really.

In half and throw these in.

And even peas in the pod, if you've got them, you can throw those in

and I'm using fresh garden peas for these

cos they're going to hold up nicely when they're cooked.

If you use the frozen ones, they kind of break down a bit too much.

And then lashings of parsley,

just ripped up and some mint

thrown in as well.

The smell from that is just fantastic.

Fresh mint, lovely.

And then taking your ham out.

Now this is why it needs to be cooled for this,

cos you can pull the bone out.

You can tell when it's cooked, when this bone will lift out like that.

Throw that away

and then you need to get your hand in and just peel the skin away.

You can do this with a knife,

but it kind of cuts through some of the meat, as well.

It's much easier to do this by hand.

This is no good, get rid of that.

I'm certainly not giving that to the dog, he's fat enough as it is.

And then just remove any excess bits of fat, really.

Cooked ham is just a delight.

I remember having this when I was a young kid,

and being on a pig farm, we had masses of this sort of stuff, we used to live on it.

Hence I'm six foot three. Didn't eat little portions, this sort of stuff.

That, where I come from, is a canape.

Season and pour around one and a quarter litres of stock over the veg.

Then place the ham over the top

and now it's time to put the lid on this one-pot wonder.

You can almost just pull the bread, really.

You don't need to roll it out.

And then, just with a little beaten egg,

just egg wash around the edge

and then in one movement, you just lift this up

and put it on the top.

Then put everything in a preheated oven at 180 degrees centigrade

for an hour.

Well, here it is.

It's pretty impressive,

you've got basically a whole meal in a pot

and you don't need to serve anything else.

There's a big crowd waiting.

Cooking show-stopping dishes like this at home

has given me so much pleasure over the years

and when you've got a crowd round,

they'll never fail to be impressed.

You can find all the recipes from the series on: