foodfood & drink
Tom McNeeney from The Lancashire Hospitality Co shares a few of his favourite autumn recipes... When it comes to autumn those short days and cold nights hit real hard in Rochdale, it’s my favourite season for the crisp mornings and the golden afternoons but also because autumn brings with it the best food too, slow cooked wonders that hold up to the cold and windy evenings. Light the fire, draw the curtains and knock up one of these little beauties, it’s almost enough to make you excited for winter. Almost.
3 garlic cloves - sliced 4 white onions - sliced Pinch of brown sugar 175ml white wine Unhealthy amount of black pepper 1 heaped teaspoon Branston Pickle 1 tablespoon brown sauce 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar 2 bay leaf 1 litre beef stock 10 slices of french stick 120g grated gruyere
French onion soup
Start by putting a lug of olive oil into a big saucepan on a medium heat, pour in your onions, garlic and a pinch of brown sugar.
When those dark nights are incoming there really isn’t anything better than a french onion soup complete with it’s cheesy hat for fighting off the winter chills. 22 | Rochdale Style
The thing that separates a good French Onion soup from a bad one is nerve. It’s going against your instinct and getting those onions good and coloured before you do anything else to them.
Now this is the difficult bit, keep cooking those onions until they really start to caramelise, they’ll go translucent, then begin to brown, then finally start to go darker and stickier.
Move them very occasionally but let the heat and that sugar do all the work. Once your onions are good and brown pour in your wine and scrape, scrape, scrape. All that cooked on flavour on the bottom of the pan will come loose and you’ll be rewarded with a clean pan and the best tasting fried onions in the world. Turn the heat down after a few minutes and lob in the Branston, brown sauce, balsamic and give it a good twenty twists of a pepper grinder, I’d say even more but it’s probably a bit excessive. Cook it down for five more minutes until it’s dark brown and almost sticky. Then pour in your beef stock, lash in a bay leaf and turn down the heat. Cook down for an hour or so at least. Turn on the grill while you ladle your soup into bowls, top each bowl with slices of French stick and a generous helping of grated gruyere then grill till it’s a gooey, bubbling bowl of perfection.
