Recipe Review - Grilled Gammon & Baked Onions

From Tender Volume 1 by Nigel Slater
Grilled Gammon, Baked Onions (p 362)

Serves 2, with second helpings of onions

Ingredients:

• Medium onions - 6
• Butter – a thick slice (about 30g, if you are weiging)
• Plain flour – a heaped tablespoon
• Light stock – 250ml, hot
• Milk – 250ml, hot
• Bay leaves – 3
• Nutmeg
• Grain mustard – 2 teaspoons
• Parsley leaves – a small handful
• A little oil
• Gammon steaks – 2, about 150-175g each
• Dried oregano

Set the oven at 180°c/gas 4. Bring a deep pan of water to the boil. Peel the onions, add them to the pan, then turn down the heat and let them simmer until they are tender enough to take the point of a kitchen knife. This will only be a matter of twenty to twenty-five minutes or so. Drain them and discard the water (don’t try using it in the sauce, the flavour can be too strong.)

Put the pan back on the stove, melt the butter in it and stir in the flour, keeping the heat low to moderate. Let the flour and butter cook for a couple of minutes, stirring often so the mixture doesn’t burn, then turn up the heat, pour in the stock and milk and whisk together for a minute until there are no lumps.

Season the sauce with salt and black pepper, the bay leaves, a gentle grating of nutmeg and the mustard. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of these seasonings: they add depth and savour to the sauce and make the whole dish ‘work’. Let the sauce simmer gently for a good ten minutes or more, stirring regularly so that it does not catch on the bottom.

Cut the onions in half from stem to tip – take care, they are slippery – and place them flat-side down in a shallow baking dish. I use an oval enamelled gratin dish. Chop the parsley, but not too finely, and stir it into the sauce, then scoop the lot over the onions. Their caps will probably be poking out, but no matter, just bake for forty to forty-five minutes till the sauce is bubbling.

Turn off the heat, but leave the onions in the oven whilst you cook the gammon. If your grill is, like mine, in the oven, then move the onions to the bottom and put the grill pan two-thirds of the way up, so that it blocks the onions from the grill (if you prefer you can cook the gammon on a hob top grill).

Oil the steaks lightly and season them with pepper, a very little salt and a light sprinkling of oregano. Now grill them for three or four minutes on each side, till golden. Serve the grilled gammon with the baked onions and their sauce.

I made this for me and my boyfriend for a nice late night weekend dinner and found as I had most of the ingredients already, it was very cheap to make. The recipe was easy to follow with no tricky steps and the timings given were accurate. The intensely salty gammon complimented the sweet, creamy onions perfectly and I could have eaten the onions on their own with some fresh crusty bread. The generous amount of mustard in the white sauce worked really well, adding a necessary tang and the slight crunch of the grainy mustard was a pleasant texture against the softness of the vegetables. We had sautéed potatoes alongside, which tasted lovely as a meal, but it would have been filling enough without them. We both enjoyed our dinner, but I do wonder if cheese could have been added to the sauce to give an even richer finish, although the saltiness of cheese may have made the whole dish too pungent and salty. I am going to have to try the onions again but try adding cheese – I will let you know how that goes! The two of us who dined rated this dish 18/20. Well done Nige.