Instant Whip

I have been making stinging aiolis for more than twenty years so I’ve got the hang of it.

Yesterday I experimented and made an anchovy aioli. I used anchovy paste out of a tube (best before 2009) and garlic paste (best before 2022). If you cannot find vintage anchovy paste some of the depth of flavour may be lost. You can compensate by using bottled vintage lemon juice concentrate – mine is more than a year past its sell by date. There is one ingredient that simply must be fresh: an egg yolk. Making aioli is a dog whistle for a real G&T so I succumbed, twice – I’d had a zero alcohol one for lunch. I associate making aioli with sailing holidays in the Aegean, Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas; how Byronic. In the South China Sea and Caribbean there was no scope for whisking. In the former there was staff and in the latter I was on a small day boat.

Waitrose roast chicken served cold – £7.89 for four breast fillets – is a good accompaniment with salad and cold Maris Peer new potatoes from Suffolk. A Maris Peer is not to be confused with a Maris Piper first grown in Ireland by one John Clarke in 1963. Maris Piper potatoes are best suited for chipping, roasting, mashing, or baking, whereas Maris Peer go well in salads. So there you go.

I listened to Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms while whisking the aioli into something so creamy, supple and unctuous it reminded me of a Butterscotch Instant Whip – a childhood favourite. Chichester Psalms was on R3 Record Review recently; it’d “make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window” (Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler) as would the anchovy aioli.