Bert Greene and his grandmother

"A cookbook of fibre-rich, complex carbohydrate foods that taste delicious. My grandmother would have been proud!" Bert Greene

This was Bert Greene's last cookbook. He died before it was published - huge loss to the cookery world as all the mini obituaries from luminaries such as Julia Child, Jacques Pépin and M.F.K Fisher, at the front of the book, attest. It was said to be his favourite book even though he began it with 'decided misgivings.'

"For though I remembered how deliciously grains could be prepared by good old-fashioned cooks, I also knew how they tasted at many a modern health food restaurant: Boring!"

Which is when he turned to memories of his grandmother's cooking and her homespun philosophy - as he so often does in his cookbooks.

"Things that are supposed to be good for you, should keep the secret of their good intentions strictly to themselves." Bert Green's grandmother

She is said to have proclaimed, and so he set out to write a book on these super healthy foods and in the process make them delicious.

So here we are with a first recipe - from The Grains Cookbook - the next on my bookshelf. However, I am going to cheat a little by ignoring the first recipe, which simply tells you how to steam pearl barley, and will move on to the second - his grandmother's barley soup which he calls, Barlied beef grandmotherly style. It's actually more of a stew than a soup - he even says that if you left it a day you would need to eat it with a knife and fork because the barley thickened the pottage, as he calls it, overnight.

I only have two of Bert Greene's cookbooks. I wish I had more, for although, as with all my cookbooks, I have only actually made a few of his dishes, the few I have made have become family favourites. Like Robert Carrier I have never had a failure with a recipe of his. The two books that I have are filled with personal anecdotes, factual information, legends and dedications to the various people who have, at least in part, contributed recipes. His grandmother features frequently and was obviously a great influence although she sometimes does come across a somewhat stereotypical Jewish grandmother.

As he so rightly points out, most of us know barley mostly as an ingredient in soup, and to be honest many of his recipes are for soup - or stew. But there are others too - stuffings for meat and vegetables, a sort of risotto, and a cake, eve a stir fry and a sort of soufflé. He is marginally dismissive of the flour in that you cannot make bread from barley alone - far too chewy, but he does recommend adding half the amount of barley flour to your bread flour for extra depth of flavour. And he does give a couple of rather tempting flatbread recipes that I might even try one day.

But back to Barlied beef grandmotherly style and his grandmother. He has based his recipe on his grandmother's which she:

"prepared with alacrity whenever I looked peaked or sneezed twice in a row. No matter the state of my health, I never objected to her pharmacopeia, for it was literally the most comforting food I'd ever tasted."

"The important thing was keeping the world at large vital and vertical, and to this end she made soup - three quarters of every calendar year."

Of course there is no recipe or picture on the net, so here it is, together with the sole illustration for the Barley chapter.

BARLIED BEEF GRANDMOTHERLY STYLE

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 - 21/2 pounds beef brisket

2 cloves garlic

7 cups water

1/2 ounce dried mushrooms, sliced

1/2 cup water, boiling

1 small onion, chopped

2 medium carrots, peeled and chopped

2 medium parsnips, peeled and chopped

3 medium turnips, peeled and chopped

1 rib celery, finely chopped

5 large fresh mushrooms, coarsely chopped

1 can (14 oz) plum tomatoes with their juice

3 cups homemade chicken stock, or canned broth

3 cups homemade beef stock, or canned broth

1/3 cup pearl barley

Pinch of dried thyme

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Heat the oil in a large heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add the meat and sauté until well browned all over. Remove the brisket to a plate. Add the garlic and 1 cup of the water to the pot, scraping the sides and bottom with a wooden spoon. Return the meat to the pot, and add the remaining 6 cups of water. Heat to boiling. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, skimming the surface occasionally to remove excess fat, 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the dried mushrooms in a medium-size mixing bowl. Cover them with the boiling water, and let stand 30 minutes. Drain.

Discard the garlic from the pot and skim the surface of any remaining fat. Add the onion, carrots, parsnips, turnips, celery, both mushrooms, tomatoes, chicken and beef stock, barley and thyme. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, partially covered, until the meat is very tender, about 1 1/2 hours.

To serve. Remove the meat from the pot and cut it into pieces. Return the pieces to the stew. Season with salt and pepper. Serves 6

As you can see it's a pretty basic, almost boring sounding recipe. As a first recipe are you tempted to make it? After all there is no picture of a warming bowl of soup to tempt you. I haven't made it myself, but I'm willing to bet that it does taste delicious - and comforting - though I might not discard the mushroom soaking liquid but would add it with the stock.

I grew up with cookbooks that didn't have pictures. In fact I'm not even sure that the newspaper columns and women's magazines had many illustrations either. The Beverley Sutherland Smith ones that I wrote about recently certainly didn't. And so I was used to reading the recipe and deciding from that whether I wanted to make it or not. I had to use my imagination. I would also not have been upset by my efforts not looking like the professionally styled ones that one would see in a modern cookbook. this one would probably have sounded like the stews that my mother used to make so I very probably would not have bothered to follow it because I knew how to do this sort of thing.

This is also one of those cookbooks that is arranged alphabetically by ingredient - and barley happens to be the first grain he talks about. Amaranth is included in a chapter on Ancient grains, the other two being Quinoa and Triticale, although he didn't seem to know about Freekeh, But see - a man well ahead of his time.

Barley of course is now everywhere. I noticed just yesterday that in the Coles deli section they have a prepared barley and pesto salad. And there is certainly a whole lot of other things that today's chefs and cooks are doing with barley - but I talked about that before in a post about pearl barley, so I won't repeat myself.

For now I will just regret the passing of Bert Greene and the fact that I don't have more of his recipes. Yes his books are very folksy American which can be a bit irritating, but somehow in his case, isn't. The mini obituaries all talked of him in very loving tones. A man who loved his grandmother can't be bad surely?