How to Eat (2 page)

SOME USEFUL WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

garlic: 1 minced medium clove = 1 teaspoon

onion: 1 average onion = ¼ pound

citrus fruits: Using a zester and an electric juicer, you should find, give or take, that you get the following amounts:

1 lime
    1 teaspoon zest
    2 tablespoons juice

1 lemon
    2 teaspoons zest
    8 tablespoons juice

1 orange
    1 tablespoon zest
    10 tablespoons juice

nuts: Figure on nuts weighing twice as much in their shells as shelled, and adapt shopping lists accordingly.

peas and beans: Peas in the pod weigh about 3 times as much as they do shelled; the weight of shelled fava beans is about a third of the weight in the pod. Again, adapt shopping lists accordingly.

shellfish
    8 small clams (about 2 inches across) = about 1 pound
    24 mussels = about 1 pound

rhubarb: There are a lot of rhubarb recipes in this book, so it may be useful to know that when cooked in the oven with sugar, as on
page 107
, but with no liquid added, about 2 pounds untrimmed rhubarb = about 1 pound trimmed = about ½ pound or 1 2⁄3 cups puréed (i.e., cooked and drained of excess juice)—producing, on average, 1 cup juice.

Throughout this book:

• All eggs are large (and see below).

• Olive oil is usually extra virgin; if “olive oil” is called for, you may use a lesser type, provided it’s high quality.

• When “a drop of oil” or “oil” is called for, use any vegetable oil or ordinary olive oil, if the dish is Western. The drop of oil is usually mixed with butter to help prevent its burning.

• Flour is often Italian 00 (
farina dopia zero
; see
page 458
); all-purpose flour can easily be used in its place. All flour is measured by spooning it gently into a measuring cup, then leveling the top with the back of a knife or spatula.

• Brown sugar, light and dark, is often muscovado sugar (see
page 460
).

•All parsley is flat-leaf.

• A bouquet garni is an herb bunch that consists of 4–5 parsley sprigs, 2–3 thyme sprigs, and a bay leaf tied together or enclosed in a small cheesecloth or muslin bag. Used to flavor soups and stews, from which it’s easily removable, it can also be bought in ready-prepared, dried form, in little bags.

I always use organic eggs from hens that are checked regularly for salmonella. I thus have no anxieties about raw eggs, but you should know that because of possible infection from salmonella, the old, the ill, the vulnerable, the pregnant, babies, and children are advised not to eat anything with uncooked egg in it.

see
page 249
for a fuller discussion of beef, but as with the eggs, so with any foodstuff. Buy from shops where the produce is traceable; that’s to say, you can find out where it comes from and what’s happened to it along the way.

Basics, etc.

The Great Culinary Renaissance
we have heard so much about has done many things—given us extra virgin olive oil, better restaurants, and gastroporn—but it hasn’t taught us how to cook.

Of course, standards have improved. Better ingredients are available to us now, and more people know about them. Food and cooking have become more than respectable—they are fashionable. But the cooking renaissance, so relentlessly talked up in the 1980s, started in restaurants and newspapers and filtered its way into the home. This is the wrong way round. Cooking is best learned at your own stove; you learn by watching and by doing.

Chefs themselves know this. The great chefs of France and Italy learn about food at home; what they do later, in the restaurants that make them famous, is use what they have learned. They build on it, they start elaborating. They take home cooking to the restaurant, not the restaurant school of cooking to the home. Inverting the process is like learning a vocabulary without any grammar. The analogy is pertinent. In years as a restaurant critic, I couldn’t help noticing that however fine the menu, some chefs, for all that they seem to have mastered the idiom, have no authentic language of their own. We are at risk, here, of becoming not cooks but culinary mimics. There are some things you just cannot learn from a professional chef. I am not talking of home economics—the rules that govern what food does when you apply heat or introduce air or whatever—but of home cooking, and of how experience builds organically. For there is more to cooking than being able to put on a good show. Of course, there are advantages in an increased awareness of and enthusiasm for food, but the danger is that it excites an appetite for new recipes, new ingredients: follow a recipe once and then—on to the next. Cooking isn’t like that. The point about real-life cooking is that your proficiency grows exponentially. You cook something once, then again, and again. Each time you add something different (leftovers from the fridge, whatever might be in the kitchen or in season) and what you end up with differs also.

You can learn how to cook fancy food from the glossy magazines, but you need the basics. And anyway, it is better to be able to roast a chicken than to be a dab hand with focaccia. I would be exhausted if the cooking I did every day was recipe-index food. I don’t want to cook like that all the time, and I certainly don’t want to eat like that.

Nor do I want to go back to some notional golden age of nursery food. I wasn’t brought up on shepherd’s pie and bread pudding and I’m not going to start living on them now. It is interesting, though, that these homey foods were not revived in our homes so much as they were rediscovered by restaurants. And, even if I don’t wish to eat this sort of thing all the time, isn’t it more appropriate to learn how to cook it at home than to have to go to a restaurant to eat it?

By invoking the basics, I certainly don’t mean to evoke a grim, puritanical self-sufficiency, with austere recipes for homemade bread and stern admonishments against buying any form of food already cooked. I have no wish to go on a crusade. I doubt I will ever become someone who habitually bakes her own bread—after all, shopping for good food is just as much of a pleasure as cooking it can be. But there is something between grinding your own flour and cooking only for special occasions. Cooking has become too much of a device by which to impress people rather than simply to feed them pleasurably.

In literature, teachers talk about key texts; they exist, too, in cooking. That’s what I mean by basics.

Everyone’s list of basics is, of course, different. Your idea of home cooking, your whole experience of eating, colors your sense of what foods should be included in the culinary canon. Cooking, indeed, is not so very different from literature; what you have read previously shapes how you read now. And so we eat; and so we cook.

If I don’t include your nostalgic favorite in this chapter, you may find a recipe for it elsewhere in the book (see
Index
). And it is impossible to write a list without being painfully aware of what has been left out; cooking is not an exclusive art, whatever its grander exponents might lead you to think. Being familiar with making certain dishes—so familiar that you don’t need to look in a book to make them (and much of this chapter should eventually make itself redundant)—doesn’t preclude your cooking other things.

So what are basic dishes? Everyone has to know how to roast chicken and other birds, pork, beef, and lamb, and what to do with slabs of meat (turn to the roasting chart on
page xviii
). This is not abstruse knowledge, but general information so basic that many books don’t bother to mention it. I am often telephoned by friends at whose houses I have eaten something more elaborate than I would ever cook, to be asked how long their leg of lamb needs to be in the oven, and at what temperature.

The key texts constitute the framework of your repertoire—stews, roasts, white sauce, mayonnaise, stocks, soups. You might also think of tackling pastry.

Lacking a firmly based culinary tradition with the range and variation of, say, regional French cooking, we in Britain and America tend to lack an enduring respect for particular dishes. It’s not so much that we hunger to eat whatever is fashionable as that we drop anything that is no longer of the moment. The tendency is not exclusively Anglo-American—if you were to go to a grand dinner party in France or Italy, you might be served whatever was considered the culinary
dernier cri—
but what makes our behavior more emphatic, more ultimately sterile, is that, when we cook for company, we are inclined to try to reproduce style-conscious menu-fodder—dinner-party food with a vengeance.

I think it is true, too, that we are quick to despise what once we looked at so breathlessly in magazines and gourmet food shops. Just because a food is no longer flavor-of-the-month, it shouldn’t follow that it is evermore to be spoken of as a shameful aberration. It is important always to judge honestly and independently. This can be harder than it sounds. Fashion has a curious but compelling urgency. Even those of us who feel we are free of fashion’s diktats are, despite ourselves, influenced by them. As what is seemingly desirable changes, so our eye changes. It doesn’t have to be wholesale conversion for this effect to take place; we just begin to look at things differently.

Of course, fashion may lead us to excesses. It is easy to ascribe the one-time popularity of nouvelle cuisine—which fashion decrees we must now treat as hootingly risible—to just such an excess. And to some extent that would be correct. But what some people forget is that the most ludicrous excesses of nouvelle cuisine were not follies committed by its most talented exponents but by the second and third rank. It is important to distinguish between what is fashionable and good and what is fashionable and bad.

With food, it should be easier to maintain your integrity; you must, after all, always know whether you enjoy the taste of something or not. And in cooking, as in eating, you just have to let your real likes and desires guide you.

My list of basics—and the recipes that constitute it—are dotted throughout this book. The list is eclectic. And in this chapter I have tried, in the main, to stay with the sort of food most of us anyway presume we can cook; it’s only when we get started that we realize we need to look something up, check times, remind ourselves of the quantities. I want to satisfy those very basic demands without in any way wishing to make you feel as if there were some actual list of recipes you needed to master before acquiring some notional and wholly goal-oriented culinary expertise. My aim is not to promote notions of uniformity or consistency—or even to imply that either might be desirable—but to suggest a way of cooking that isn’t simply notching up recipes. In short, cooking in context.

First, you have to know how to do certain things, things that years ago it was taken for granted would be learned at home. These are ordinary kitchen skills, such as how to make pastry or a white sauce.

I learned some of these things with my mother in the kitchen when I was a child, but not all of them. So I understand the fearfulness that grips you just as you anticipate rolling out some pastry dough, say. We ate no desserts at home; my mother didn’t bake, nor did my grandmothers. I didn’t acquire early in life that lazy confidence, that instinct. When I cook a stew I have a sense, automatically, of whether I want to use red or white wine, of what will happen if I add thyme or bacon lardons. But when I bake, I feel I lack that instinct, though I hope I am beginning to acquire it.

And of course I have faltered, made mistakes, cooked disasters. I know what it’s like to panic in the kitchen, to feel flustered by a recipe that lists too many ingredients or takes for granted too much expertise or dexterity.

I don’t think the answer, though, is to avoid anything that seems, on first view, complicated or involves elaborate procedures. That just makes you feel more fearful. But what is extraordinarily liberating is trying something—say, pastry—and finding out that, left quietly to your own devices, you can actually do it. What once seemed an arcane skill becomes second nature. It does happen.

And how it happens is by repetition. If you haven’t made pastry before, follow the recipe for pastry dough on
page 37
. Make a tart. Don’t wait too long to make another one. Or a pie or a savory tart. The point is to get used gradually to cooking something in the ordinary run of things. I concede that it might mean having to make more of a conscious effort in the beginning, but the time and concentration needed will recede naturally and the effort will soon cease altogether to be conscious. It will just become part of what you do.

You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to?

BASIC ROAST CHICKEN

When I was a child, we had roast chicken at Saturday lunch and probably one evening a week, too. Even when there were only a few of us, my mother never roasted just one chicken; she cooked two, one to keep in the fridge, cold and whole, for picking at during the week. It’s partly for that reason that a roast chicken, to me, smells of home, of family, of food that carries some important, extra-culinary weight.

My basic roast chicken is the same as my mother’s: I stick half a lemon up its bottom, smear some oil or butter on its breast, sprinkle it with a little salt, and put it in a 400°F oven for about 15 minutes per pound plus 10 minutes.