How to Eat (55 page)

CHERRY PIE

My generation is, effectively, American-reared, so I suppose it’s not surprising if we British have a certain kitchen nostalgia for these foods we’ve never eaten, only seen in films or read in those exotically demotic stories and novels. And you don’t get much more evocatively down-home than a cherry pie. If you were serious about such matters you’d be stoning the fresh cherries yourself, but apart from a brief burst of enthusiasm when I got a friend to bring over a cherry stoner with her when she came to visit, I stick to good bottled ones. Morello cherries in glass jars are just dandy.

Serve à la mode or dollop on some far more grown-up crème fraîche instead.

FOR THE PASTRY

2 cups all-purpose flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

pinch salt

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, diced

2 egg yolks beaten with ¼ teaspoon pure vanilla extract, pinch of salt, and 2 tablespoons of ice water

FOR THE FILLING

1 tablespoon unsweetened butter, melted

½ cup plus 1–2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

1 24-ounce jar morello cherries in syrup, syrup drained and 2 tablespoons reserved

1–2 tablespoons superfine sugar

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Put in a baking sheet to heat up.

Using the pastry ingredients, make the pastry according to instructions on
page 38
and then divide it into two discs. Roll out one disc and use it to line an 8-inch shallowish pie plate. For the filling, make a paste with the melted butter, the sugar, flour, and the reserved cherry syrup. It will be stiff, not runny; the cherries will leak out more as they bake and you don’t want soggy pastry.

Roll out the other disc, and then add the cherries and the paste to the pie dish. Moisten the edges of the pastry and top with the remaining pastry. Cut off the overhang, crimp the edges, and, if you’re up to it, cut out some little cherries to decorate. Make a few slashes in the top with a sharp knife for the steam to escape and then put on the hot baking sheet in the preheated oven.

After 15 minutes, cover loosely with foil, turn down the oven to 350°F, and bake for another 18 minutes, or until the crust is golden and thick juices bubble through the slashes.

Remove, sprinkle with the superfine sugar, and let cool for about 40 minutes before eating.

I am aware that the culinary spirit of the age is not ferociously carnivorous and that my blood-oozing joints of well-hung beef and fat-girdled pork risk offending modern quasi-vegetarian sensibilities. But I have wanted to concentrate on this sort of meat cookery simply because it seems to hold such unnecessary terrors for people now. There’s enough written on pan-Asian stir-fries and Italo-Thai noodle dishes and you’re unlikely to need any more, at least for the time being.

Of course I don’t expect anyone to eat this sort of food every weekend without fail—no one’s telling you you can’t have pasta, for God’s sake—but the particular focus it offers is worth exploiting. For food like this, more than any other sort, is what cooking at home rather than eating in a restaurant is all about.

Dinner

I’m not sure I like the connotations
of the term
dinner party
, but I think we’re stuck with it. Kitchen suppers—which is perhaps what this chapter should be called—sounds altogether too quaint, even if it evokes more accurately the culinary environment most of us now inhabit. So let’s just call it dinner, which is what it is. The modern dinner party was, in Great Britain, the invention of the post-war, post–Elizabeth David brigade of socially aware operators, and in the United States was ushered in by the great Julia Child. In both cases, this dining was about Entertaining-with-a-capital-E. Not only was the food distinctly not home food, it wasn’t even restaurant food; what was evoked was the great ambassadorial dinner. But
autres temps, autres moeurs;
most of us don’t even have dining rooms any more. Yet people often still think they should be following the old culinary agenda; they feel it is incumbent on them not so much to cook as to slave, to strive, to sweat, to perform. Life doesn’t have to be like that. As far as I’m concerned, moreover, it shouldn’t be like that. I find formality constraining. I don’t like fancy, arranged napkins and I don’t like fancy, arranged foods.

That’s not to say that I feel everything should be artfully casual; the this-is-just-something-I’ve-thrown-together school of cookery can be just as pretentious. What I feel passionately is that home food is home food, even when you invite other people to eat it with you. It shouldn’t be laboriously executed, daintily arranged, individually portioned. It’s relaxed, expansive, authentic—it should reflect your personality, not your aspirations. Professional chefs have to innovate, to elaborate, to impress the paying customer. But the home cook is under no such constraints. (Indeed, you don’t have to cook much at all if you are prepared to shop well.) I once went to a dinner party a good friend of mine gave, and she was so anxious, she’d been up till three in the morning the night before making stocks. She said scarcely a word to any of us after opening the door, as she was in the middle of the first of about five courses. The food was spectacular, but she spent most of the evening ever more hysterical in the kitchen. At one point we could, as we stiltedly made conversation between ourselves, hear her crying. The fault wasn’t her competence, but her conception: she felt that her dinner party must be a showcase for her culinary talents and that we must all be judging her. Some cooks, indeed, seem to resent their guests for interrupting the cooking, rather as doctors and nurses resent patients for interrupting the nice, efficient running of their hospitals.

Restaurants need to be able to produce food in short order. But unless you want to stand in your kitchen handing hot plates out to your friends at the table, you need not and should not. Avoid small portions of tender-fleshed fish that have to be conjured up at the last minute and
à point,
and anything that will wilt, grow soggy, or lose character or hope as it sits, sideboard-bound and dished up. Don’t make life harder on yourself. I am working on banishing the starter from my dinner-partying life. (Truth to tell, I don’t have much of a dinner-partying life, but, in theory, I do invite friends for dinner.) This is not so much because cooking the starter is difficult—in fact it is the easiest course of any of them—but because clearing the table, timetabling the whole meal, keeping the main course warm, can all add to the general tension of the evening.

Besides, our lives are so different now. Because working hours are longer, we eat dinner later. And if dinner doesn’t start till nine or nine-thirty, then it is going to be a very late evening if you sit down to three courses. And you don’t want to miss out on the general hanging around with a drink beforehand. I am more of an eater than a drinker and tend to get unbearably anxious if the drinking goes on for hours with no sign of the eating to come, so I try to amalgamate the two. I am, in effect, not really banishing the starter, but relocating it, refashioning it. Now, I can’t pretend that serving bits with drinks is an original idea, but I suggest that you think of them as the starter. There is no dinner party I would give where I couldn’t just make a plate of crostini to eat as a first course.

Normally, I make a couple of different sorts. I don’t assemble the crostini in advance, but I often make the mixture with which they’re going to be spread days ahead and keep slices for toast, ready-carved from baguette or ficelle, bagged up in the freezer.

CROSTINI

I figure on getting about 40 usable slices from a ficelle and maybe 50 from a baguette, which seems to be longer as well as thicker. A baguette is commonly used for crostini, but I prefer the ficelle. I like its relative spindliness; the smaller rounds it makes mean you can eat crostini in one bite; and the string loaf seems to have a less tooth-resistant crust. But whichever loaf you’re using, cut in straight-knifed rounds rather than diagonally, as usually advised, because it’s easier to keep the slices compact and easy to eat that way.

To make the crusts for the crostini, cut the loaves into slices ¼–½ inch in width. Let your instinct guide you; you probably know yourself just how thick or thin you want them to be. The crostini are no more than slices of bread dabbed with oil and toasted in a hottish oven. Preheat the oven to 400°F and, using a pastry brush or just your fingers, dip in oil and lightly cover each side of each slice of bread. I find 40 slices use up about 8 tablespoons of oil. And, unless specified below, always assume that olive oil (extra virgin, the usual specifications) is indicated. Put the oil-brushed slices on a rack in the oven for 5–10 minutes. The length of time the bread takes to brown depends in part on how stale it was to start with (and stale is good here). Turn the bread over as it turns pale gold. Remove when cooked and leave the uncrowned crostini somewhere to get cool. You should toast them no more than 2 hours before you eat them. Don’t spread anything on them until wholly cold. And then you can put just about anything on top.

All the quantities below make enough for 20 crostini. I would make at least 5 per person, and probably two different kinds.

CHICKEN-LIVER CROSTINI

This is your basic crostini, really, the Tuscan version of chopped liver. (Speaking of which, if you want to be rakishly cross-cultural, I suppose you could, as the malapropism of a friend’s Yiddish-speaking uncle has it, throw kasha to the winds and smear this stuff on toasted bagels instead.)

Use whatever grapey alcohol you want: vin santo, Marsala, muscat, white wine, vermouth, or sherry. I’ve specified Marsala because it’s what I keep nearest to me by the stove; I suspect a Tuscan would stipulate vin santo. You could use some of this in the crostini and keep the rest for dinner; pour it into glasses and give people those almond-studded biscotti known as cantuccini to dunk.

½ pound chicken livers

milk, for covering the livers

1/3 celery stalk

1 garlic clove, peeled

1 shallot or 1 scallion (white and green parts), chopped coarsely

1 heaping tablespoon chopped parsley, plus more, for garnish

2 tablespoons olive oil

½ tablespoon tomato purée

4 tablespoons Marsala or other wine (see headnote)

salt and freshly milled black pepper

1 heaping teaspoon capers, rinsed, drained, and chopped

2 anchovy fillets, wiped and chopped

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Remove any bits of green or gristle you can see in the chicken livers, then put them in a dish and pour milk over to cover. Leave for about 10 minutes. Put the celery, garlic, shallot, and the tablespoon of parsley in the processor and chop finely. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan and add the vegetable mix. Cook at low to moderate heat, stirring regularly, for about 5 minutes, perhaps slightly longer, until soft but not colored. Drain the chicken livers, wipe them dry with a paper towel, and chop them using a knife or mezzaluna. Add them to the pan and cook, prodding, pushing, and stirring with your wooden spoon or spatula until that characteristic claret-stained rawness has disappeared; they should still, however, be pink and moussey within. Stir in the tomato purée and cook, stirring, for a minute or so, then add the Marsala. Let this bubble mostly away, then taste and add salt and a good few grindings of pepper as needed. Turn down the heat and let cook gently for another 10 minutes or so.

Then decant the contents of the pan into a food processor, add the capers and anchovies, and give the merest pulse; you want this chopped but not puréed. (You could always use a knife.) Pour back into the pan with the butter and cook for a few final minutes at gentle heat while you stir. Remove from the heat and let cool before spreading. Sprinkle some more parsley over, once spread.

DUCK LIVERS

If you want to use duck livers, forgo the capers and anchovies, but add instead, at the beginning with the celery mixture, the very finely chopped zest of ½–1 orange. And I use Grand Marnier, either in place of the Marsala, or half-and-half, with a spritz of the orange’s juice.

PEA AND GARLIC CROSTINI

I warm to the Day-Glo vibrancy of this concoction; just like the future, so bright you gotta wear shades. But it is seriously good: the sweet pungency of the roasted garlic gives resonance and depth; the Parmesan supplies edge and the butter unctuousness. And it’s a doddle to make. This amount will give enough for a few extra crostini.

1 head garlic

1 teaspoon olive oil

8 ounces frozen young peas

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan

salt and freshly milled black pepper

1 tablespoon chopped mint

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Lop the top off the head of garlic; you want to see the tops of the cloves just revealed in cross section. Cut a square of foil, large enough to make a baggy parcel around the garlic, sit the garlic in the middle of it, drizzle over the oil, and then make said parcel, twisting the ends slightly. Put in the oven for 50 minutes to an hour, until the garlic is soft.