Vincisgrassi and Saint-Aubin

I love a collaborative cooking project so when I stayed with my friend food writer Fiona Sims at the weekend we embarked on a vincisgrassi, an elaborate mushroom lasagne from Rachel Roddy’s fantastic book, an A-Z of Pasta. It was made famous by Franco Taruschio of the Walnut Tree but you can find Rachel’s version here. (Note the fabulous crisp edges!)

It’s an incredibly rich dish with parma ham, parmesan, porcini and cream which needs a wine with both texture and a fresh acidity to set it off.

We didn’t have anything suitable from Italy but I’d brought along a bottle of 2018 Saint-Aubin 1er Cru Les Charmes from Domaine Paul Pillot which proved absolutely perfect even though we could have easily waited another year or two to drink it. Obviously we could have substituted another white burgundy like a Puligny Montrachet or other cool climate chardonnay.

See also The Best Food Pairings with White Burgundy

Chocolate and muscadel

There hasn’t been much food and wine pairing going on in the Beckett household this week as I lost my sense of taste with Covid - fortunately for only four days - but I tasted a wine yesterday that I know would make the perfect match with chocolate.

It’s a South African sweet red wine called Muscadel aka muscat and it’s not widely available in the UK but you can buy it as part of the Banks Brothers range.

What I particularly like about it is that it’s bottled young and at a lower ABV than port which gives it a really lovely fresh berry fruit flavour that would be great with chocolate.

At £19.50 for three 250ml cans it’s not cheap but it would make a perfect Easter treat to give someone along with their Easter egg. You can also buy it by the bottle. Frontier Fine Wines sells the Rustenberg for £10.50 a half bottle. It would be good to see more of it here.

Photo ©Jessica Loaiza on Unsplash

Shrimp and soft shell crab burger with vintage champagne

One of the (many) charms of champagne is how well it goes with comfort food like a shrimp burger as I discovered at London’s famous seafood restaurant J Sheekey last week

The occasion was a dinner to launch their new champagne and oyster bar and terrace which they’ve set up in partnership with Moët et Chandon. We also had oysters - obviously - dressed crab and langoustines with a dollop of gloriously glossy mayonnaise but it was the burgers which were paired with the 2013 vintage of Moët which were the standout pairing

The thing is if you have champagne this mature it can take practically anything in its stride including the slightly pokey spiced Korean mayo which was served alongside and into which I gaily dunked my chips. (This was fortunately before I went down with COVID a couple of days later when I wouldn’t have been able to taste a thing)

The burger is actually a comparatively reasonable - for the West End - £22.50 though chips would add another fiver onto that and a glass of vintage Moët no doubt another £20, assuming you could stop at one. But if you had an indulgent elderly relative who wanted to treat you - or wanted to treat your beloved to a romantic night out (it is still a wonderfully romantic restaurant) If would be perfect.

I ate at J Sheekey as a guest of the restaurant.

Beef carpaccio and chardonnay

Beef and chardonnay doesn’t sound like an obvious combo at first glance but it depends, as always, how the beef is cooked.

This was in the form of a carpaccio at a Californian Wines tasting and lunch at Smith & Wollensky just off the Strand but the key was not so much the meat as the parmesan, truffle and truffle oil which anointed it all of which are immensely chardonnay-friendly

I tried a couple of different wines with it but particularly liked the Staglin Family’s 2019 Salus estate chardonnay which had a lovely freshness about it that counterbalanced its richness and weight. Sadly at £50 a bottle (at The Champagne Company) or £58 at Oddbins it isn’t cheap - Californian chardonnay, especially from the Napa Valley ,doesn’t tend to be - but you could pull the same trick with a full-bodied chardonnay from elsewhere - and even truffle oil rather than the real thing.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of California Wines