How to Eat (59 page)

To make the dressing, use a fork to whisk the vinegar, mustard, salt, and crème fraîche together in a little bowl and, whisking still, very slowly pour in the olive oil so that you have a smooth, thick, emulsified dressing. I like this with punch. You may prefer a different balance. Divide the leaves among 6 plates and pour over the dressing.

PEA ORZOTTO

You can very well use crème fraîche for this instead of the heavy cream specified, as you need crème fraîche anyway for the dessert, below, and the salad dressing, above. Though in which case, use a little bit more cheese. If you have no homemade stock, use best-quality commercial stock or bouillon cubes.

about 2 quarts chicken or vegetable stock

6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter

drop oil

1 medium onion, minced

1¼ cups pearl barley

½ cup white wine or vermouth

1 10-ounce package frozen young peas, thawed

salt

¼–½ cup heavy cream or crème fraîche, plus more, if desired

2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan

Heat the stock in a saucepan and keep it just simmering.

Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter, with the drop of oil to stop it burning, in a large, heavy pan. Put in the onion and fry for 5–7 minutes or until it is soft but not brown. Then add the pearl barley and stir well, for about 1 minute, until the grains are coated and glossy with fat. Pour in the wine and let it bubble and reduce, and become absorbed into the onion and barley mixture.

Add a ladleful of the hot stock and, stirring, wait for it to be absorbed. Then add another ladleful, and so on until the stock is all absorbed and the barley cooked al dente. After the first 10 minutes or so you can add a couple of ladlefuls at a time and you needn’t be quite as diligent as earlier about stirring, but don’t walk away from the pan. This process will take 35–45 minutes. You can leave it now and come back and finish the dish off
à la minute.
If you are leaving the orzotto for only an hour or so, then leave it in its pan, adding just a film of stock or hot water so that it doesn’t dry out. If you are leaving it for longer (and I have successfully made it a couple of days in advance), you must decant it into a wide dish so that it will cool quickly and not carry on cooking. Cover and put to one side.

Now for the final touch; sauté 1 cup of the peas in 2 tablespoons of the butter for 2 minutes or until just cooked but still sweet, firm, and pea-like. Put aside and sprinkle with a little salt. Sauté the remaining peas in the remaining butter, this time for 4–5 minutes. Add a ladleful of stock, let it reduce, and then purée the peas in a blender. Just before serving, heat up the orzotto and stir in the whole peas, the puréed peas, the cream to taste, and the Parmesan. (If you were eating this without the ham, you should probably triple the amount of cheese.) Let stand, loosely covered, for 5–10 minutes (you could eat the starter while it’s resting), as this somehow lets the textures and flavors more exuberantly and exquisitely cohere.

If you want to create your own orzotti, use this recipe as a guide or follow any risotto recipe, remembering that barley takes longer to cook, requires more stock, and has to have cream for the final stirring or
mantecatura.
(I particularly recommend making a saffron orzotto in place of the usual risotto Milanese to accompany osso buco.)

ROAST LEEKS

As for the leeks: preheat the oven to 450°F and pour some good olive oil into a couple of roasting pans. I figure on 1 medium, fairly trim leek, well cleaned and dried, per person, based on the supposition that each one gives you 3–4 segments. Roll the leeks in the oil, sprinkle with coarse salt, and bake them about 25 minutes all told, turning them once. Obviously, if they’re those huge fat ones, add about 10 minutes. When done, they should be bronze and glistening, and burnt in places. Remove to a plate and sprinkle with a little more coarse salt. They’ll keep the heat well, so if it makes it easier to take them out of the oven when you eat the salad, do so.

POACHED PISTACHIO-SPRINKLED APRICOTS STUFFED WITH CRÈME FRAÎCHE

This recipe comes via
The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean
by Paula Wolfert (she of the food of southwest France and Morocco). This is another dish you need to start preparing in advance, but as the very fact of a dinner party suggests planning (unless you’re calling friends at the last minute, in which case we’re talking about a slightly different thing), this is an advantage, surely.

Paula Wolfert suggests a mix of mascarpone and heavy cream as the best imitation of kaymak, the thick Turkish buffalo-milk cream properly used to stuff the apricots, but I prefer crème fraîche, which is lighter and less cloying. You could also use full-fat yogurt.

10 ounces good dried apricots, preferably Turkish

1/3 cup sugar

seeds from 6 crushed cardamom pods

2 scant teaspoons lemon juice

1 cup crème fraîche

4 ounces shelled pistachios, chopped very finely or ground using a pestle and mortar

Soak the apricots in 2½ cups of water overnight.

Next day, preheat the oven to 300°F and put in it a nonreactive ovenproof baking dish large enough to hold the apricots later. Pour the apricot-soaking liquid into a saucepan and add the sugar, cardamom seeds, and lemon juice and bring to the boil. Add the apricots and then pour them and their liquid into the heated baking dish. Cover with foil and cook for 1½ hours. Remove from the oven and let the apricots cool in the syrup. Chill well.

Before you want to serve them (and I have done this a good half-day before to no deleterious effect), lift out the apricots to drain. Carefully open each one and stuff with 1 teaspoon crème fraîche. Place on a flat plate or serving dish, spoon over some syrup, and dust with the pistachios. It is this final touch that makes all the difference, so don’t be tempted to leave it out. And don’t, either, serve this straight from the fridge; too-cold food kills the taste and the whole pleasure of it.

This is one of those desserts that is so simple that it almost cannot help but become an instantly reassuring part of your kitchen repertoire.

A Barbera from a great Italian grower, such as Angelo Gaja, will be ideal with the mustard, the ham, and the peas.

EARLY AUTUMN DINNER FOR 6

GUACAMOLE WITH PAPRIKA-TOASTED POTATO SKINS

COD WRAPPED IN HAM, WITH MASHED POTATOES AND SAGE AND ONION LENTILS

HAZELNUT CAKE, WITH RED CURRANT AND PEACH SALAD

This is the sort of food I want to eat when I’m holding onto summer, despite the sad, gray-skied truth of the actual weather on the streets. These are the strong flavors of hotter climates—lime, chilies, coriander, the honeyed saltiness of cured ham—banked down, with mashed potatoes, cod, buttery sage, for northern palates. After this starter, the culinary equivalent of a mariachi band, you need to strike some calmer notes, and the unexotic fish, potatoes, and sage-and-onion-spiked lentils do exactly that.

Dessert is another version of cake with berries; here the hazelnut, almost meringuey, sponge and the sharpness of the red currants and peaches provide a foil to the dominant tastes beforehand. When red currants aren’t around or available, or the only peaches you can get are stone-hard and green-tasting, substitute whichever fruits you want, but think of something, even if it’s just a thawed package of frozen mixed fruits; the cake wouldn’t work, here, just on its own.

In most instances I provide a couple of portions extra—6 pieces of chicken, say, for 4 people—so there’s never an emptied serving plate after the food’s been doled out. Here, I don’t—the guacamole before is more filling than most starters, and there are two carbohydrates to go with. Speaking of one of them, I love the potato skins with the guacamole, and they can scarcely be thought of as difficult to make in what is anyway a very uncomplicated culinary exercise. To make the skins, you bake the whole potatoes first, remove and reserve the pulp, season, and return the skins to the oven to heat and crisp slightly. This makes life easier for the second course—you already have your potato pulp ready-cooked and more or less mashed, and you’ve had no peeling to do earlier. You could, however, dispense with the potatoes and provide tortilla chips instead, in which case just do more lentils and add a lower-effect second vegetable.

But read through all the recipes that make up this menu and you will see that this is actually a very low-effort enterprise. As long as you’ve got some gadget that whisks the egg whites for the cake, you can handle this dinner after getting home, late and tired, from the office. Just remember, of course, to get started on the cake and put the red currants to steep as soon as you get in.

GUACAMOLE

This guacamole doesn’t include the tomatoes you sometimes find in it. It makes such a difference—it’s fresh and sharp, but instead of the usual mush, you end up with a perfect buttery-yellow and jade clay.

The quantities I give are restrained. That’s not to say that the portions are stingy, but that people will eat as much as you make, and you must leave room for later.

Although it’s eaten first, and you can do some chopping in advance, the actual avocado mixture must be made at the last minute.

3 ripe avocados

scant teaspoon salt

juice of 3–4 limes, to taste

4 tablespoons fresh coriander, chopped

½–1 fresh green chili, or to taste, minced

4 scallions (white and green parts), sliced finely

Get everything, bar the avocados, prepped when you get home.

Just before you want to eat, peel and stone the avocados and put the flesh in a bowl. Don’t worry about how you do it and how pulpy you make the avocado, as it will be mashed. Dissolve the salt in the lime juice and pour it over. Then add the other ingredients and mash with a fork until you have a rough lumpy mixture. At all costs avoid turning it into a smooth purée; by its nature the avocado will be smooth anyway, but you want as many soft but form-holding clumps as possible.

PAPRIKA-TOASTED POTATO SKINS AND THEIR MASHED PULP

9 medium baking potatoes

1¼ cups milk, warmed

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter or more, if desired

1 heaping teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more

freshly milled black pepper

whole nutmeg

1 heaping teaspoon paprika

4 teaspoons olive oil, plus more, if needed

Bake the potatoes for 1–1¼ hours in a 400°F oven or until the skins are crisp and the flesh soft. Take them out of the oven, but leave the oven on.

Halve the potatoes lengthways and, with a spoon, scoop out the innards into a bowl, leaving a thin layer lining the skins. When all the potatoes have been emptied into the bowl, mash with the milk, the butter (add more, if you like, or less, for that matter), salt, pepper, and freshly ground nutmeg to taste. Put aside to reheat later (don’t put the potatoes in the fridge; just leave the bowl, covered, in a cool place) and get on with the skins.

Halve the skins again perpendicularly to your work surface, so you have 4 long “boats” per potato. Mix the paprika with the heaping teaspoon of salt. Pour the olive oil into a bowl. With a pastry brush, dab the skins on both sides lightly with oil (use more if needed) and then sprinkle the salt mixture over the interior of the skins. Put in the oven and bake for another 12–15 minutes. Remove to a wire rack and, when cool, arrange on a couple of plates. These taste just right with the coriander-heady, mouth-filling creaminess of the guacamole. Serve the mashed potatoes, reheated in a double boiler, with the cod.

COD WRAPPED IN HAM

Get a few extra slices of prosciutto for patching up, if necessary, the ham-wrapped packages. You can get all your parceling-up done and then leave the wrapped cod in the fridge. But you don’t want the fish sitting around once it is cooked, so I’d put it in the oven as you sit down to eat the first course.

6 cod fillets, about 8 ounces each

6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter, melted

8 slices prosciutto, preferably prosciutto di Parma, or other cured ham, sliced thinly

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Get out a couple of baking sheets, preferably nonstick. Brush the pieces of cod with the melted butter, wrap with ham, and then brush with butter again. (If you’re doing this part in advance, leave the final buttering till just before you bake the fish.) Put in the oven and bake for 15 minutes or until, if you peek beneath the cod’s ham jacket, the fish appears opaque. Remove and place on top of the lentils.

SAGE AND ONION LENTILS

1 pound puy lentils

5 garlic cloves, peeled, 2 minced

2 medium onions, plus 1 large onion, minced

12 sage leaves, 6 whole, 6 cut into thin strips, plus more strips, if desired

1 celery stalk, halved, or 2 sprigs lovage