Fennel

The thirty-year quest to reproduce the best fennel dish I ever made

I once cooked The.Best.Fennel recipe, but after nearly thirty years of trying I still haven’t been able to replicate it.

Having just split from my then husband I rented a flat in the heart of Nottinghill in London. This was before it became uber-trendy, but it had moved on a bit from the rough druggy neighbourhood I first moved into in the mid-1980’s as an art student.

The flat was minute - a first floor studio over an antique shop (a junk shop really, but the Italians who ran it had ideas of grandeur). The kitchen was the size of a cupboard and leading from it was a huge roof terrace overlooking Westbourne Grove. The terrace had a bigger square footage than the whole flat and I grew basic salad stuff and herbs out there - pots of tomatoes, salad greens, rocket. My morning ritual was to wander out in my PJ’s, water everything and listen to the world waking up while having a coffee sitting on my garden bench, before popping to the cafe downstairs for breakfast (yes, I did go pretty much every day - assuaging my guilt now and again by going to the gym across the road beforehand - and yes also run by the slightly dodgy Italian ‘antique’ dealers).

There were no barriers between the neighbours, so we would often wander along to each other’s terraces for an evening glass of wine and chat. Summer evenings on the terrace smelt of London, the Indian restaurant downstairs with the smell of pungent spices wafting up mixed with the traffic fumes, the sound of the musician across the way practicing for his next gig in Ibiza, the constant chatter of people passing by in the street, the occasional cherry tomato from my small crop - nothing ever tastes better than a home grown tomato that has been in the sun all day, even one grown in central London traffic fog.

And I cooked braised fennel for my dearest friend, the one who had supported me all through the painful end of my marriage. The fennel was perfect - buttery, oily, with a crunchy topping and bits stuck to the side of the blue Le Creuset dish (which I still have). The parmesan cheese topping was salty and crunchy and when it came out of the oven smelt almost burnt. The fennel was cooked to perfection - soft, unctuous, no stringy bits from either not being fresh enough or not cooked enough. I left it to cool down a little which made the parmesan topping go slightly chewy. We mopped the juices (ie the lashings of butter) with sour dough bread, had a salad of greens from the terrace with a tangy french mustardy dressing. A few glasses of something red made it the perfect evening of sitting with the one person in the world I can talk to about anything. The hours flew by - we chatted and kept scraping at the stuck on bits around the edge of the pan, those last tiny little delicious bits of umami.

I made that dish in 1997 and I’ve spent the last nearly thirty years trying to recreate it. As has my dearest friend. It’s become something of a competition. We always tell each other we’re making it, take photo’s and then review it and every single time the conclusion is “it’s not like the Westbourne Grove fennel”.

The fennel is too soft, not soft enough. It’s dry, or too wet and slippery. Should it be par-boiled? How should it be cut - into quarters or thin slices? I’ve tried adding breadcrumbs to the topping, and going totally off piste by even adding a light cheesy bechamel sauce, or treating it as a fennel version of gratin dauphinois. But nope - I’ve never come near it (although some of the dishes have been pretty bloody delicious!).

But then, maybe I shouldn’t try and recreate it. Maybe it was the perfect meal because it was with the perfect friend, in the perfect place, at a time in my life when I was coming back into the light after a few years of darkness. Maybe we will never discover the perfect fennel recipe again, but the journey we’ve been on together, and the memories we have of trying to rediscover it are worth so much more than a few mouthfuls of deliciousness.

It was a truly special moment with my bestest friend and for both of us, the fennel dish is a marker of that time and our amazingly long-lasting friendship.

I made this drawing of fennel during the dark days of covid, when I tested out several versions of the fennel dish, totally unsuccessfully of course. I felt isolated from my bestie and we couldn’t get together for kitchen adventures and experiments. So I gave her this drawing as a memory of that wonderful meal. It now has pride of place in her kitchen - a constant reminder of our quest and friendship of more than forty years.

For the moment all my posts are free, no paid subscriptions, so please do follow along for little snippets of memories triggered by food, usually with a drawing or two, and maybe even a recipe. Thanks for being here!