Recipes: Christmas diner starters

OVER the next three Sundays, we'll show you how to make a magnificent Cook School Christmas dinner. The menu for this modern four-course festive feast is as follows: rillette of smoked, poached and hot-smoked salmon; white bean, bacon and chorizo soup; roast partridge with caramelised apples, chestnuts and cider; Helston pudding and Cook School custard.

The only thing you really need to order is a couple of partridges from your butcher – the rest of the ingredients are all widely available. Partridges are also fairly easy to get hold of, but it's better to be safe than sorry at Christmas. We've used estate-reared red-legged partridges. The wild birds are grey-legged and just as good, but are more difficult to find.

We begin this week with the two starters. Each would work perfectly well alone, but why not do both? It is Christmas, after all. First off is the rillette of smoked, poached and hot-smoked salmon. Rillette is a bit like pâté, but much lighter. For this, almost everything can be done in advance, with just a quick mix at the last minute.

The rillette offers a wonderful combination of salmon flavours and textures – from the softness of gently poached fish, to the rich, smoky flavours of the hot-smoked salmon and the silky texture of the traditional smoked variety, with the added bonus of the aromatic flavours of fresh herbs and lemon. You can serve it with crackers or slices of toasted baguette, but our delicious thyme-flavoured crostini will really make this a dish to remember.

RILLETTE OF SMOKED, POACHED AND HOT-SMOKED SALMON

Serves four to six

For the dressing

1 tsp dill, finely chopped
1 tsp miniature salted capers, drained and rinsed
1 tsp gherkins, finely chopped
100ml olive oil
black pepper
lemon juice, to taste

For the thyme crostini

stale white bread
olive oil
sprig of thyme

For the rillette

245g fresh salmon, to poach
175g hot-smoked salmon, flaked
100g smoked salmon, finely shredded
1 banana shallot, finely chopped
1/4 cucumber, deseeded and finely diced
2 tsp fresh dill, chopped
zest of 1 lemon
crème fraîche
mayonnaise
salad cress, to garnish

First, make the dressing. Mix all the dressing ingredients together in a small jug. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary, then leave to infuse.

Next make the crostini. Preheat the oven to 170°C/gas 3. Sprinkle olive oil, salt, pepper and thyme on to some thinly sliced stale white bread and bake in the oven until crisp. Set aside until you are ready to serve.

To poach the fresh salmon, bring a pan of water to the boil with a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon (there should be enough water to just cover your fish). When it's boiling, gently drop in the salmon, skin still on, and leave for two minutes. Remove from the heat and leave until cooled. The fish should be opaque but not overcooked. Remove from the pan, peel off the skin, scrape off the brown muscle and flake into largish pieces.

Place the poached salmon and both types of smoked salmon in a bowl, along with the shallots, cucumber, dill, zest and some black pepper. Mix gently but don't overdo it – you want to keep the fish in as large pieces as possible.

Next, add just enough crème fraîche and mayonnaise to bind and hold the mixture together. You can always add more if you need to – if it's too sloppy, the rillette will be difficult to mould and won't hold its shape.

Place small metal moulding rings on to cold plates and spoon the salmon mix into them. Leave for a minute to settle, then remove the moulds. Pour the dressing round and sprinkle your greens around the plate. Serve with the thyme crostini.

Critical points

The crucial thing to remember when you add the mayonnaise and crème fraîche to the fish is not to add too much. You can always add more to bind, but removing it is tricky. Make it too sloppy and your rillette may collapse.

You can mix all the dry ingredients in advance and keep refrigerated until the last minute, when you add the wet ingredients before you mould and serve.

We use sawn-off lengths of plastic drainpipe for our moulds. You can buy small metal rings from cooking shops, but often these are a bit short (and expensive).

Next on the list for today is the white bean, bacon and chorizo soup, perfect for anyone who says you can't have Christmas dinner without sausages. This is a lovely warming starter, with striking festive colours. It's not too heavy either. Yes, this is a hearty soup, but there's plenty of room for that partridge yet.

WHITE BEAN, BACON AND CHORIZO SOUP

Serves four to six

21/2 sticks celery
4 sprigs parsley
2 sprigs thyme
5 tbsp olive oil
225g onion (roughly 21/2), peeled and finely chopped
1/2 red chilli, deseeded and chopped
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
380g tinned white haricot beans, drained
1 litre white chicken stock
1 bay leaf
60g lardons dry-cure smoked streaky bacon

To finish

120g chorizo sausage, cut into 1cm cubes
60g tinned white haricot beans, drained
3 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Maldon sea salt and milled black pepper

Cut one of the celery sticks in half, setting one piece aside, then slice all the remaining celery. Take the reserved section of celery and cut it in half once more. Remove the leaves from the parsley and set aside for later. Sandwich the parsley stems and thyme between the two sections of celery and tie the bundle together with string to make a bouquet garni.

Pour the oil into a thick-based pan and add the onion, garlic, chilli and sliced celery. Cook over a low heat for about ten minutes, or until soft.

Rinse the drained beans under running water and add to the pan with the chicken stock, bouquet garni, bay leaf and bacon. Bring the pan to a simmer and cook until the beans are beginning to break up – about half an hour. Remove the bouquet garni and bay leaf with a slotted spoon and pour the soup into a blender. Purée the soup and push through a fine sieve to remove the tough skins of the beans.

You now have two choices to finish off the soup. The first method is to add the diced chorizo and simmer the soup for ten minutes. The colour and taste of the sausage will seep into the soup and be a major part of the flavour. Method two is to fry the diced chorizo in a little olive oil until lightly coloured and crisp, then remove and sprinkle on top of the soup, reserving the oil. This will make the sausage more of a garnish than part of the soup. The choice is yours. Seasoning the soup should be left until this choice has been made, as the sausage can make quite a difference to the flavour.

Finally, for both methods, add in the chopped parsley and the other can of beans, some salt and pepper if needed, and top with a swirl of olive oil or the red chorizo oil from the pan if you have chosen to fry the sausage.

Next week The main course: roast partridge with caramelised apples, chestnuts and cider

Critical points

It's so much tastier to make your own bouquet garni than buying stale little bags of old herbs. They are very simple to make – just remember when securing your herbs between the sticks of celery to use plain white string, not dyed – you don't want blue soup. This bundle will impart subtle herb flavours as the soup cooks.

If you choose to finish the soup with fried chorizo, as shown in the main picture, the cooking sausage will produce a delicious red oil, which looks fantastic drizzled on to the soup when you serve it. I think this is the most festive presentation, but if you are a chorizo-lover then adding it while the soup is simmering will give you a more concentrated spiced sausage flavour.