How to Eat (9 page)

When you want to bake, preheat the oven to 400°F, put a baking sheet in it, and line the pastry with foil. Then fill with the beans of your choice and bake on the hot sheet for 15 minutes. Take out of the oven and remove the beans and foil. Cut out a long strip or a couple of strips of foil and fold over the edges so they don’t burn. Put the foil-rimmed but bare-bottomed pastry case back in the oven and give it another 10–12 minutes or until it is beginning to color lightly. Sweet pastry burns more easily, so turn down the oven to 350°F for the second bout in the oven.

I used to bake blind and then fill the tart shell as soon as it cooled a little, but my friend Tracey Scoffield, one of the best cooks I know and the daughter of a wonderful pastry maker, has taught me that you can bake blind a day in advance as long as, when the case is cool, you slip it into a freezer bag and seal and keep it in the fridge. It must be wrapped airtight—plastic film would do—or it will go soggy. The advantage of staggering the work—making the pastry, rolling it out, and blind baking it on three different days if you really want to—is that you never need to spend more than a few minutes on it each evening. But even in one go, this method is relatively painless.

CRUMBLE

I can’t say I don’t ever use machinery to make crumble, but there is something peculiarly relaxing about rubbing the cool, smooth butter through the cool, smooth flour with your fingers. It also makes for a more gratifyingly nubbly crumble; the processor can make the crumbs so fine you end up, when cooked, with a cakey rather than crumbly texture. So just remember, if you aren’t making this by hand, to go cautiously.

In either case, the texture is improved by a quick blast in the freezer, but rather than freezing the flour and butter mixture before working on it, as with the pastry recipes above, I plonk it in the freezer for 10 minutes or so after it’s been rubbed together. And, if you want, you can just leave it there, in an airtight container, on standby for when you get home from work and want to make something sweet and comforting quickly.

PLAIN APPLE CRUMBLE

BLUEBERRY, BLACKBERRY, OR RHUBARB

I find this mixture makes enough to cover about 2 pounds of fruit in a 4-cup pie dish, which should easily be enough to feed 4–6 people. To make plain apple crumble (though see also the recipe on
page 156
), peel, core, and segment the apples and toss them for a minute or so in a pan, on the heat, with 1 tablespoon of butter, 3–4 tablespoons of sugar (to taste), and a good squeeze of orange juice, before transferring to the pie pan and topping with the crumble. In fact, I use orange with most fruits; it seems to bring out their flavor rather than striking an intrusive note of its own. Make a blueberry or blackberry crumble by tossing the fruit in a buttered pie pan with 1 tablespoon each of all-purpose flour and sugar for the blueberries, 2 each for the blackberries, and the juice of ½ orange. For rhubarb crumble, trim 1 pound of the fruit, cut it into 2-inch lengths, and toss, again in a buttered pan, with a couple of tablespoons each (or more to taste) of superfine and light muscovado sugar (see
page 460
), or light brown sugar, the zest of 1 orange, and the merest spritz of the juice.

I tend to add a bit of baking powder to the flour for the topping—it’s unorthodox, but gives a desirable lightness to the mixture, which can otherwise tend to heaviness. Add spices—ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, even a pinch of ground cardamom—as you like to the crumble recipe below; treat it merely as a blueprint.

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

pinch salt

6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into about ½-inch cubes

3 tablespoons light muscovado sugar (see
page 460
) or light brown sugar

3 tablespoons vanilla sugar or regular sugar

Put the flour in a bowl with the baking powder and salt. Add the cold cubes of butter and, using the tips of your fingers—index and middle flutteringly stroking the fleshy pads of your thumbs—rub it into the flour. Stop when you have a mixture that resembles oatmeal. Stir in the sugars. I love the combination of muscovado and vanilla sugars, but if you haven’t got round to making vanilla sugar yet (see
page 72
), then don’t worry about what white sugar you use; any will do.

Keep the mixture in the fridge until you need it or put the bowl, as is, in the freezer for 10 minutes. Preheat the oven to 375°F and, when ready to cook, sprinkle the crumble over the prepared fruit in the pie dish and cook for 25–35 minutes.

FOODS IN SEASON

Don’t believe everything you’re told about the greater good of eating foods only when they are in season. The purists may be right, but being right isn’t everything. If you live in the Tuscan hills, you may find different lovely things to eat every month of the year, but for us it would mean having to subsist half the time on a diet of tubers and cabbage, so why shouldn’t we be grateful that we live in the age of jet transport and extensive culinary imports? More smug guff is spoken on this subject than almost anything else.

There is no doubt that there are concomitant drawbacks: the food is out of kilter with the climate in which it is eaten; it’s picked underripe and transported in the wrong conditions; the intense pleasure of eating something when it comes into its own season is lost; the relative merits, the particular properties of individual fruits and vegetables are submerged in the greedy zeal of the tantrumming adult who must Have It Now. There’s no point in eating out-of-season asparagus that tastes of nothing (though not all of it does), or peaches in December, ripe-looking but jade-fleshed. But my life is improved considerably by the fact that I can go to my greengrocer’s and routinely buy stuff I used to have to go to Italy to find.

I love fresh peas, but they aren’t the high point of our culinary year for me. Once they get to the shops, all that pearly sugariness has pretty well turned to starch anyway. As far as I’m concerned, the foods whose short season it would be criminal to ignore are:

rhubarb: May–June; hothouse, which is superior, January–February

Seville oranges: January–February

asparagus: height of season, May–June

gooseberries: domestic, July–August; imported, November–January

grouse: imported marketed, October–November

damson plums: August–September

quinces: October–November

white truffles: November–January

RHUBARB

Rhubarb is amply covered in this book. I know many people are put off because of vile experiences in childhood. I have faith, however, or rather passionate hope, that I can overcome this prejudice. And as my own childhood contained little traditional nursery food, it takes on, for me, something of the exotic. My adult love affair with rhubarb is heady illustration of this (see
Index
).

SEVILLE ORANGES

Seville oranges are regarded almost exclusively as for making marmalade. This is such a waste. Seville oranges have the fragrance and taste of oranges but the sourness of lemons. Try them, then, wherever you’d use lemons—to squirt over fish, to squeeze into salad dressings, to use in a buttery hollandaise-like sauce or in mayonnaise to eat with cold duck. A squeeze of Seville orange is pretty divine in black tea, too. And although you can only buy them in January or early February, they freeze well. See, also, the recipe for Seville orange curd tart on
page 246
.

CANARD À L’ORANGE

Traditionally, oranges go with duck. Real
canard à l’orange
should be made with bitter and not sweet oranges; you shouldn’t end up with jam. Put half a Seville orange up the bottom of a duck (a mallard, preferably, if you have access to wild game, or see
page 458
) and squeeze the other half, mixed with 1 teaspoon honey or sesame oil, as you wish, over the breast before you cook it. Roast a domestic 4–5 pound duck in a 450°F oven for 15 minutes, reduce the heat to 400°, and cook 1¼–1½ hours, draining the rendered fat periodically. (Don’t throw this away; spoon it into a bowl, put it in the fridge, and use it to make the best, wonderfully crisp fried or roast potatoes.) Roast a mallard at 425° for 40 minutes.

If preparing the dish with a domestic duck, remove all visible fat from the pan and deglaze it with some stock and additional Seville orange juice. Stir in a teaspoon or so of honey, or to taste, and there’s your sauce. For a mallard, you won’t even need to deglaze the pan to make a sauce; the juices there will be good enough just as they are, though if you wish, you can add more orange juice, sweetened with honey to taste or left sharp. If you want something more saucelike, thicken with 1 teaspoon cornstarch, made first into a paste with some of the juice.

SCALLOPS WITH BITTER ORANGES

Scallops have been cooked with bitter oranges since the eighteenth century. You can do a modern turn on the same theme simply by sautéing the glorious white discs—whole bay scallops or sea scallops halved—in bacon fat, butter, or olive oil, 1 minute or so each side, before removing and deglazing the pan with a good squirt of Seville orange juice. Make sure you’ve also got enough juices in the pan to make a dressing for the watercress with which you’re going to line the plate.

If they make up supper in its entirety, I’d get about 5 scallops of either kind per head. Should you find scallops with coral, fry the coral for about 30 seconds or freeze it to fry up later with a lot of minced garlic to eat, alone and greedily, spread on toast.

SEVILLE ORANGE MARMALADE

I confess I have never made marmalade. The nearest I’ve got is buying a box of oranges that then, reproachfully, went moldy in my pantry. I have since never even pretended to myself that I’m the sort of person who’s about to turn into a bottler and canner and storer of good things, though I live in hope. A friend, however, swears it’s easy—you cook the fruit whole—and it doesn’t produce so much that you feel like you’re starting a marmalade-making factory.

1½ pounds Seville oranges

juice of 2 lemons

7 cups sugar

Put the oranges in a saucepan with water to cover by a few inches, bring to the boil, and then simmer robustly until the oranges are soft, about 2 hours. Remove the oranges, keeping the water in the saucepan. Cut the oranges up, pulp and all, into whatever size peel you prefer.

Remove the seeds and put them in a small saucepan, with a small amount of water to cover, and boil for 5 minutes. In the meantime, put the chopped oranges and the lemon juice into a bowl. Strain out the seeds and add their cooking water to the lemon juice and chopped oranges.

Return this mixture to the first saucepan, put over a low heat, add sugar, and stir until dissolved. Then bring to boil and cook till set. To establish this, put a small amount, 1 scant teaspoon, on a cold saucer. Let it cool and then prod or stroke it with a fingertip. The marmalade’s set if the surface wrinkles. You should remove the saucepan of marmalade from the heat while you test just in case the setting point has been reached. About 15 minutes is usually fine for a softish set.

Take off the heat and put in jars, after removing any scum and stirring to make sure the peel is mixed through. This should fill about six 8-ounce warm, cleaned jam jars. Leave to cool a little more before screwing on the lids.

ASPARAGUS

Asparagus is easy to cook well. Don’t worry about special asparagus pans; just trim the butt ends and cook the asparagus in abundant boiling salted water in a pan or couple of pans that are wide and big enough for the whole spears, stem, tip and all, to be submerged. Cook for 3–5 minutes (test and taste regularly—it’s better to waste some spears than for them to be either woody or soggy) and drain thoroughly, first in a colander and then flat on a paper towel–lined surface, but do it gently, too; you want the spears to stay beautiful and remain intact.

The usual accompaniment, and always a successful one, is hollandaise (see
page 14
), but often I like to do something more homey and give each person a boiled egg in an egg cup for them to dip their asparagus into, like the bread and butter fingers British children dip into soft-boiled eggs. The eggs have to be perfectly soft-boiled; there is no room whatsoever for error. I don’t wish to frighten you, but it’s the truth. Provide two per person and smash or cut the tops off each as soon as they’re cooked.

If you feel safer with a nontraditional method, then roll the asparagus in a little olive oil, then roast them, laid out on a pan, in a seriously preheated 450°F oven for 15–20 minutes. When cooked, the spears should be wilted and turning sweet and brown at the tips. Sprinkle over some coarse salt, arrange on a big plate, and line another big plate with thin slices of prosciutto imported from Italy, if possible. Let people pick up the hot, soft, blistered spears and use the ham to wrap around the asparagus like the finest rosy silk-damask napkins.

SCENTED PANNA COTTA WITH GOOSEBERRY COMPOTE

GOOSEBERRIES