A Red Pepper Sauce To Cheer

One of the surprises of grief is that your conversations with the dead person don’t end. Sometimes, they even get louder.

This week, I also found myself talking to a dead friend and my conversation with her led me to a deeply comforting red pepper sauce made from burned peppers blistered under the grill - see above. You can eat this sauce any which way: with pasta, of course, but also as a bed or a blanket for a piece of crispy white fish (see here for my easy release, super crispy way to cook a fish fillet) or for some sautéed chicken. Or with lamb chops. Or you could mix it with white beans from a jar for a very quick bean stew.

I sometimes find it odd that we make so many sauces from tomatoes and so few from peppers. A red pepper sauce can be such a consoling thing to eat: so sweet and velvety but with a faint edge of something bitter to keep things interesting. Yes, it may be a tiny bit fiddly to peel the skins off the burned peppers but it’s a soothing job once you get started. I think the essential thing is to deseed and halve the peppers before you grill them because the seeds are so much less sticky to remove when raw than when cooked.

The sauce is inspired by a recipe by my friend Marlena Spieler, a prolific food writer who died three years ago. I wrote her obituary here. Marlena once wrote that the red pepper sauce - which she called sweet red pepper pureé and served with chicken- was something to enjoy on a warm late summer evening ‘when peppers are ripe and the air is fragrant with the scent of summer’s end’. I can certainly feel summer’s end here in Cambridge, though I don’t think our evenings are quite like the sun-kissed Californian ones that Marlena enjoyed when she wrote her original recipe in the 1980s.

Making a big batch of this sauce would be a good gift to yourself. There is something cheering about having a whole tub of delicious sauce in your fridge or freezer which you can eat in a number of different ways, depending on what you feel like eating. It made me so happy that so many of you have told me that you liked the ‘universal sauces’ in my book THE SECRET OF COOKING - a red curry sauce, a green coriander/cilantro chutney sauce, a lemon-yellow laksa and a bouillabaisse-flavoured sauce (but I usually eat it with roasted celeriac and beans rather than fish). Those sauces are ones I use as a medium for cooking whatever I have in the house, from chicken to tofu to prawns to vegetables or beans. I think of this red pepper sauce as a slightly different ‘universal sauce’ in that it’s not something I’d cook ingredients in (though you probably could) but rather serve it with different things, from pasta or gnocchi to chicken to fish.

My veg box this week contained two pleasingly misshapen organic peppers. And as it happened, I’d already bought a lot of red peppers from the supermarket a week ago intending and failing to roast them and they now needed urgent attention. And suddenly I remembered Marlena and I knew exactly what to do with the peppers.

Marlena - whom I met on a press trip to Parma 23 years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter - was very much a seize-the-day and seize-the-season kind of person. She adored fresh produce and I had a strong sense that she wanted me to turn those peppers into a Californian-tasting sauce with a bit of chilli heat as a way to mark summer’s end. If you want to understand more about the sheer exuberance of Marlena’s passion for vegetables, here she is as a young woman with some of her beloved globe artichokes.

photo by permission of Leah Spieler

Marlena’s version of the pepper sauce - ‘Sauteéd Chicken Breasts with Sweet Red Pepper Pureé’ - came in a lovely little book called Hot and Spicy, first published in 1985, which deserves rediscovery. She recommends serving the dish preceded by plates of little salads: ‘fresh fennel dressed in olive oil and lemon and studded with wrinkly black olives, lightly cooked spinach leaves and tender white beans at room temperature’.

In the second edition, in 1991, she tells a charming story about the dish which was what drew me to cook it in the first place.

This dish gave me one of the most delightful experiences. I was eating in a little restaurant in California and ordered chicken breasts in red pepper sauce. When the dish came to the table I gasped; it was like seeing an old friend. I called to the chef and asked about it; he thanked me and went into the kitchen. He emerged bearing a dog-eared copy of the first edition of Hot and Spicy. ‘It’s from this book’, he happily proclaimed, not knowing it was mine.

The first time I made Marlena’s recipe, for me and my younger son a year or so ago, we ate it exactly as written, with pounded flattened sauteéd chicken breasts (cooked in butter), and it tasted deliciously retro. But this time, I felt like eating it with tagliatelle (it would be great with any fresh pasta or egg pasta). I also tweaked the recipe quite a lot, much as I love the original. I took out the chicken broth and flour from Marlena’s recipe, boosted the peppers and reduced the amount of cream and added a few dried chillis as well as fresh to give it a bit more of a kick. But I think that the subtly spicy sauce with a hint of white wine is still very true to Marlena’s spirit. It’s still slightly rich from the cream, which picks up a certain suaveness in the texture of the peppers. And it’s a bit addictive. We kept adding more and more to our pasta. I do hope you’ll like it too. xx

Serves 4

vegetarian with vegan possibilities