Autumn recipes: peperonata and green tomato chutney

One wonders what happens to all the peppers sold in food markets and supermarkets. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a pepper in a French restaurant or at a dinner party. Maybe they might crop up raw in a salad or optionally in a ratatouille, a dish invented by poor Provençal farmers in the 18th Century to use leftover veggies and save them from going to waste.

By the way, its name is taken from two related words: tatouiller and ratouiller, both meaning to stir, mix or disturb, and ultimately linked to touiller, meaning to stir or mix.

But back to peppers. In the cooler autumn months, they’re good the Italian way: spiced up with a few warming chilli flakes of peperoncino.

A favourite Piedmont recipe is for peperonata, a perfect starter.

Method:

1. Cut red, orange and yellow peppers in half lengthwise, take out the core, trim off the fluffy white bits, shake out the seeds, and slice them into ½-inch-wide strips.

2. Slice red onions into thin strips. Heat olive oil in a casserole, gently fry some chopped garlic, then add the onions.  Once they’ve begun to mellow, add the peppers and give it all a good stir.

3. Add a little sherry vinegar, a generous glass of red wine, a little black pepper and sea salt, and a quarter teaspoon of peperoncino. 

4. Cook for about 20-30 minutes, stirring and prodding occasionally with a fork to check when it’s done, by which time the wine should have reduced. You don’t want it too slimy or too raw. Just a hint of bite and texture.

5. Once cool, put it in jars or lidded bowls and store in the fridge.

In a pickle?

From time to time, we invite our French friends to supper, sometimes taking the opportunity to introduce them to a quirky Anglo-Saxon treat. One such is piccalilli, a peculiarly English traditional pickle, first mentioned in 1769 in Mrs Raffald’s cookbook The Experienced English Housekeeper.

Now is a good time to make your own using an array of end-of-season home-grown vegetables. Or you could opt for a simpler green tomato chutney.

Every year, come October, on my potager, there are green tomatoes left sadly on the plants. With the cooler, shorter days, they won’t ripen. The answer is to pick and pickle them the way my grandmother used to, back in rural Suffolk.

Method:

1. Cut 1kg of the green tomatoes into bite-size chunks.

2. Cut 1kg of red onions into chunks of the same size.

3. Simmer together for at least an hour with three cloves of garlic, diced, 150g of chopped raisins, 500g of brown sugar, a litre of malt or sherry vinegar, sea salt and black pepper.

4. Once cooked, ladle into sterilised jars.

5. Keep it for a couple of months before trying it, as otherwise it can be a bit too vinegary. Better than Branston and mouth-wateringly good with leftover cold pork or a wedge of mature cantal if you can’t find cheddar.