Chicory, Walnut and Stilton Salad

So as you know, my temporary Monaco kitchen is somewhat limited, to say the least. After a quick flick through the pages of Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food, I began to realise just how few of the recipes it was possible to cook without things such as an oven or a grill or a basic food blender. It’s not that Ramsay’s is a particularly technical cookbook, it’s just that you really do need a few kitchen basics (and fair enough – who buys a cookbook before they buy an oven!). Anyway, perhaps more about “pub food at home” required equipment is a post for another day.

Luckily, there are a few recipes in the pub food cookbook that I have the tools for here in Monaco. And so what better way to welcome The Lawyer home from her first week at her new job than with a nice plate of chicory, walnut and stilton canapés and cold bottle of rosé?

However, in addition to the ridiculous non-kitchen here in Monaco, there was one other problem that I hadn’t considered – being abroad and still managing to source some of the peculiarly English ingredients for Gordon’s recipes. This is something which I guess is going to be an ongoing issue now that I am moving to Madrid. Still, I was blissfully unaware of any of this as I headed off to the local Carrefour supermarket to pick up the ingredients of chicory (a.k.a. endive), stilton cheese, walnuts, runny honey, English mustard, walnut and olive oils.

Coming from a home in central London, where grocery stores cram their stock into the smallest of spaces, to me the Carrefour seemed impossibly huge. After trawling the isles for what felt like forever, I had managed to pick up most of the ingredients. Even the English mustard had proven no problem. The only thing still eluding me was the Stilton cheese. I took a few laps up and down the long cheese aisle, but I was greeted with a wall of French cheeses. Now, I knew the French were a little precious about their cheeses, but surely a hypermarket of this size would carry at least one line of stilton, which is, after all, a world renowned cheese?

Perhaps I would have more luck at the deli counter, where the finer cheeses were cut and sold by weight.  Judging by the French deli-man’s reaction to my request for “une petite tranche du fromage stilton Anglais”, you would think that, rather than a simple appeal for a non-French (worse still, English) cheese, I had instead asked him to cough up the contact details of his Nazi collaborating grandmother. A definite “Non” there then. In the end, I had to make do with blue d’Auvergne, which is a blue cheese, not dissimilar to stilton (perhaps a touch softer and creamier), but one that I felt would do the job well. You can see the French interloper alongside the other ingredients below.

To start with, I prepared the canapé toppings. First of all, I cut a nice slice of the cheese and then roughly crumbled it into a small bowl.

Next came the walnuts. First, I tossed them into a dry pan, on a hot heat, and toasted them for just a few minutes.

I then needed to lightly crush the nuts, something I would normally do using a pestle and mortar. Of course, my temporary, under-equipped apartment has no such luxuries, so I had to make do with the wrong end of the kitchen’s oyster shuck (yes, unbelievably, it does have an oyster shuck – but then I suppose this is Monaco, darling).

I was careful not to crush the walnuts too much. I wanted a nice mixture of textures, from almost whole nuts down to some more finely ground bits.

For the final topping, I mixed up the honey mustard dressing. To 1 parts honey and English mustard I added 2 parts walnut and olive oils before seasoning with sea salt and black pepper.

Using a whisk (yes, I have a whisk!), I quickly blitzed the dressing until the mixture came together as one. Its consistency was slightly sticky and gloopy, and the taste was sweet but with a kick of heat from the mustard. Yum!

With the toppings ready, I got on with prepping the chicory. First of all, I trimmed off the base of the heads before peeling off the larger, outer leaves ( I saved the smaller leaves and chopped them through a mixed salad for the next day’s lunch).

Finally, to prepare the canapés, I arranged the chicory in a nice flower-petal shape and then scattered over the crumbled blue cheese and the crushed walnuts, trying my best to distribute them evenly among the leaves.

To finish, I drizzled the dressing lightly over the topped chicory and served with a cold bottle of local rosé. Perfect!

The flavours were each individually powerful, but all worked together rather well. I could really taste the distinctive bitterness of the chicory alongside the strong blue cheese and the sweet but hot dressing.  The texture of walnuts gave each mouthful a satisfying crunch. The spoon shape of the chicory leaves also made them natural finger food. The strong tastes mean that it is probably not something you would want to eat too much off at once, but they did make the perfect pre-dinner aperitif. I’m not sure how much the recipe really has to do with good, honest pub food, but its definitely one to consider the next time you have friends over for dinner. So much more fun than the usual smoked salmon blinis!