How to Eat (18 page)

I had decided anyway—on the evidence produced by my first stab—to swap around cooking times—that’s to say, poach the birds for the half-hour and roast them for 1 hour. The ducks weren’t exactly the same size, but I didn’t alter the poaching times to suit—I merely took the lighter one out of its water first. And it is very much easier taking the ducks out when they are flat rather than upright. Use wooden paddle-spoons or rubber spatulas to make sure you don’t rip the flesh. It would be even easier to steam the birds breast up, and frankly I doubt it matters which way up they are. I noticed some slight scalding on both ducks where the breast had come into contact with the hot base of the pan, but this didn’t seem to make any difference either.

Boiling ducks produces a rather gamey fog that can linger in the kitchen, so open a window—but I was going away for the weekend and had promised to cook something. I knew I wouldn’t have time to poach the birds on the Friday so did them on Thursday at about six in the evening, let them cool on a baking pan with a wire-mesh grill set over it, and then put them in the fridge before going to bed.

For traveling on Friday evening, I just put them in a plastic bag and put that plastic bag in a picnic bag with frozen gel packs. On arrival, I put the ducks, uncovered, on a large plate in my friends’ fridge. When I got around to cooking them—which turned out to be Sunday lunch—it transpired that the stove had died. I put the birds, anyway, into the supposedly hot oven, which turned out to be a rapidly cooling sooty box, and left them there for a hopeless 20 minutes. The ducks just got greasy, not even hot, and I got more teary and mutinous by the minute. But someone living in a neighboring farm set her oven to high for me (she was doubtful about having ducks at top heat so we compromised on 450°F); the ducks were driven over to her, roasted for 45 minutes, and came back, after the brief car journey, bronze and crisp and perfect.

I don’t think it is possible to try out a recipe more conclusively than that.

I love having someone in the kitchen just to talk to as I chop, measure, and stir, and generally get things ready. I love cooking with other people, too. I do it rarely, though used to often with my sister Thomasina. There’s something about that industrious intimacy that is both cushioning and comforting, but also hugely confidence building. I love that sense of companionable bustle, of linked activity and joint enterprise. It makes it easier to attempt food that normally you would shrink from, not because you rely on another’s superior capabilities or experience necessarily, but because you aren’t isolated in the attempt. Everything doesn’t feel geared toward the end product because it is a shared activity—and that itself is pleasurable. You feel a sense of satisfaction about the process. It isn’t drudgery.

Claudia Roden, recounting her memories of childhood in Egypt, recollected kitchenfuls of women kneading and pummeling pastries, stuffing them, wrapping them, baking them together. But I suppose those Middle Eastern delicacies, meticulous confections with their elaborate farces, could have sprung only from a culture in which the cooking was carried out by posses, by armies, of sisters and female relatives. It doesn’t do to get too lyrical about this culinary companionship, though; which of us now would want our lives to be spent in such service, companionable though it might have been?

Still, it’s a pity to lose all of it, never to become immersed in that female kitchen bustle. For me, so much of cooking in advance is tied up with that image, that idea; that’s when cooking feels like the making of provisions, the bolstering up of a life. I don’t see it as a form of subjection (unless the position is a forced one) and I don’t see it as a secondary role, either. Some people hate domesticity, I know. I’m glad I don’t; I love the absorbing satisfactions of the kitchen. For me, the pleasure to be got from cooking, from food—in the shop, on the chopping board, on the plate, or in the pan—is aesthetic. I think it’s that I find food beautiful, intensely so.

Not that I need to be tackling hideously complicated recipes. I feel just as caught up with the domestic spirit when I’m making a very basic stew. I love the reminder that good food is simple food. It’s as if there’s a sort of alchemy about a stew; what do you put in it? Onions, carrots, meat, wine or beer, stock or water. And you don’t even do anything to it; it just cooks, slowly, and turns, untouched, into something restorative, comforting, toothsome and wonderful.

STEWS

I love oxtail stew. Oxtail has to be cooked at least a day ahead because you’ll need to let the stew get cold so that you can degrease it properly. To tell the truth, I’m happy with the fat left in; I love the artery-thickening deep and unctuous sauce it provides. But oxtail always makes for a good gravy, always gratifyingly thickens the liquid in which it cooks. What I don’t like is oxtail that has been boned, chopped, piled into darioles or ramekins, and then unmolded artistically on the plate, surrounded by its sauce-soaked vegetables. In a restaurant, that’s fine. In the home, I like food to be less messed around with. Sprinkling with parsley is one thing, sculpture is quite another. My grandfather—and mother after him—used to speak disparagingly about landscape cookery.

I have a rather wonderful book, published by W. H. Allen in 1960 at the cost of 25 shillings, that I picked up in a secondhand bookshop. It is Rupert Croft-Cooke’s deliciously camp, charmingly authoritative
English Cooking: A New Approach,
dedicated to Noël Coward—who, one hopes, appreciated it. Regarding oxtail, Mr Croft-Cooke advises, “If you like producing meat moulds with subtle decorations, an oxtail is a splendid thing to work on for the stock from it will set hard and firm. You boil till you can remove the meat from the bones and putting this aside with fresh seasoning, herbs and spices, you boil the bones for another hour or two then mix the stock and meat and pour into a mould. It looks,” he concludes devastatingly, “what cook used to call ‘a picture.’ ”

Oxtail can be cooked in any beer or wine. I like to use Sam Smith’s Imperial Stout, which has a smoky licoriceness, or Young’s Oatmeal Stout, both of which are increasingly available in America. Of course you can use red wine if you prefer, in which case just substitute it for the stout, below.

OXTAIL WITH STOUT AND MARJORAM

I buy oxtail only from a butcher, in which case you can get him to disjoint it for you. What you want are rounds of oxtail that are nice and chunky (not little and scrawny, though these you can profitably use for soup) and as near to the same size as is possible. As for the stock: if you can, use any homemade you may have stowed away in the freezer or else use the best-quality commercial beef stock available. Otherwise, to be frank, you could use water.

1/3 cup vegetable oil

4 medium onions, sliced finely

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon dried marjoram

1 tablespoon chopped parsley, plus more, for serving

½ cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon mustard powder

½ teaspoon powdered mace

½ teaspoon ground cloves

salt and freshly milled black pepper

5½ pounds oxtail, disjointed

4 medium carrots, peeled and cut into slim sticks about 1½ inches long

1 small can (14.5 ounces) plum tomatoes, drained, juice reserved to use, if needed

2 celery stalks

2 bay leaves

1 2/3 cups stout (see above)

1¼ cups beef stock or water

Preheat the oven to 300°F.

Heat half the oil in a large casserole (I use a big cast-iron rectangular one measuring 14½ by 10 inches, which goes across 2 burners and in the oven) and fry the onions over a gentle heat until they are translucent (not brown), about 15 minutes. About 2 minutes before you think they’re done, add the garlic, marjoram, and 1 tablespoon of the parsley. Remove to a plate.

Spread the flour on a large plate or, better still, a chopping board and mix in the mustard powder, mace and cloves, and some salt and pepper. Dredge the oxtail in this, heat the remaining oil in the casserole, and brown the meat well on both sides. Top with the already softened, garlicky, and marjoram-flecked onions, then pile on the carrots, the canned tomatoes, the celery, and the bay leaves. Pour over the stout and stock and bring to the boil. If the liquid looks too sparse—you want to have a decent amount covering the oxtail—throw in the reserved juice from the tomatoes. Put the lid on the casserole and transfer to the oven.

Cook for 3–4 hours or until unctuous and tender. Remove the celery and cool before putting in the fridge. The next day, remove the fat that has risen to the surface. And when you want to eat it, taste for seasoning (you may well need to add a pinch or so of salt) and then reheat, either over gentle heat on the stove for about 1 hour or in the oven at 350°F for about 3⁄4 hour. Before serving, sprinkle with chopped parsley. And I think the parsley necessary, not an effete optional extra; without the bright, jewel-vivid flecks of green, the meat can look rather sludgy. This final touch somehow brings it to life, seems to give it the gloss of a seventeenth-century Dutch painting.

Mashed potatoes are traditional with oxtail stew, and I wouldn’t offer a dissenting voice. But rice (I like basmati) works as well.

The rediscovery in Britain of traditional cooking over the past few years has tended to overlook the Welsh contribution. Part of this is, perhaps, due to the fact that for the non-Welsh British person, the experience of Welsh food will probably be limited to pubs or restaurants. In other words, the food will be poor—and probably little of it will be specifically Welsh. I had much the same experience in Spain. After a week of eating indifferent food in public places, I had to be stopped from ringing the doorbells of private houses and begging, pleading, to be allowed to go in for supper and to eat some real Spanish food cooked at home.

Good peasant cooking needs a rural society, and it is true that Wales is not quite that any more. Good bourgeois cooking needs a large and successful middle class, and Wales doesn’t seem to have that either. But I feel affectionately drawn toward Welsh food. I first had the stew known as cawl (pronounced “cowl”) when I was staying with my sister Thomasina, who lived in Wales. Her neighbor, Dai, would make it and bring pots of it over.

There is no one set of rules for making cawl any more than there is for pot au feu or any of those other soupy stews—cockaleekie, Scotch broth, Irish stew—that change from region to region, from household to household. Cawl just means stew, and it is made with beef just as often as with lamb. That’s in theory—in practice it has always been lamb, as is the one that follows.

CAWL

Obviously the quantities are variable, but the amounts given will be enough for about 6 people. It’s not necessary to finish it all at one sitting. Traditionally in Wales cawl was always eaten over a couple of days; the broth and vegetables on the first day, the meat the next, and both with a great deal of bread and butter. Now people eat it all together, but it is still important to have lots of bread and butter.

1 2/3 pounds lamb neck pieces

2 large onions, sliced

6 medium or 3 large potatoes, chunked

2 parsnips, chunked

1 rutabaga, chunked

3 large carrots, peeled and chunked

2 leeks, sliced

2–3 tablespoons parsley, chopped

Put the lamb in a large saucepan and fill with cold water to cover. Bring to the boil, add salt, and then cook gently for about 1½ hours. Remove from the heat, let it get cold, and leave somewhere cool overnight.

The next day, or when you want to eat, skim the fat off. Put it back on the heat, bring it back to the boil, and then throw in the onions, potatoes, parsnips, rutabaga, and carrots. Cook for about ½ hour or until the vegetables are nearly tender. I would test the carrots, as they seem to take the longest, but check the potatoes, too; obviously, the relative size of the vegetables will determine how long they take to cook, so use your judgment. About 10 minutes before you think everything’s ready, add the leeks. Sprinkle the parsley on top when you serve the cawl.

Giving actual recipes for stews always sounds inappropriately bossy. All you ever need to do is fry some onions and carrots, brown (or not) the meat, and add seasoning, wine, or other liquid, and that’s it. Once you get in the habit of making stews, you won’t even think of measuring this or that. You’ll be comfortable building around what you’ve got in the kitchen, accommodating the odd bottle of wine left without a cork or half-empty can of anchovies. But even so, a recipe can be a prompt to action, a reminder of possibilities.

One of the advantages of cooking lamb stews in advance is that you can use shoulder rather than leg and just remove the fat when it’s cold. I love the oozy, sticky juice you get from shoulder, and the extra fat keeps the meat tender.

GREEK LAMB STEW

Meats such as lamb and venison you’d presume would be best stewed with red wine. I love them cooked with white. When you cook this Greek lamb stew, please don’t do what I did and use retsina. It wasn’t a good idea. Failing homemade stock, you can use a good commercial beef stock—even water is fine—and you can always ask the butcher for the shoulder bone, chopped, and throw it in while the stew’s cooking.