How to Eat (34 page)

I know that the idea of cream, and quite so much of it, added to sauce that is to swathe such oily fish might sound alarming. But when you’re cooking quickly, something’s got to give, and I find most often that something is the contemporary concern about cream and butter. Adding either or both of these is a way of adding instant depth, texture, and accomplished finish to a dish. But if you want to add less, then I’m not stopping you.

6 skinless mackerel fillets (about
8 ounces each)

3 shallots or 1 small onion, minced

1 cup hard cider, or ½ cup each apple juice and lager beer

salt and freshly milled black pepper

½ cup crème fraîche or heavy cream

lemon juice (optional)

1–2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Put the fillets in a lightly buttered, shallow baking dish. Sprinkle with the shallots and pour over the cider. Season with salt and pepper and cover tightly with foil. Bake for 20–25 minutes, until the fish is cooked through. Transfer the mackerel to a warm serving plate and cover to keep warm.

Pour the cooking liquid into a small saucepan and boil, reducing by about half. Add the crème fraîche and simmer with the heat low for a couple of minutes. Season to taste, adding lemon juice if you want.

Strain the sauce, pressing with the back of a spoon to extract all the liquid. Garnish the fish with parsley and serve with the cider sauce.

With this I can think of nothing better than plain boiled potatoes and spinach with a fragrant cocoa-brown dusting of freshly grated nutmeg. But frankly, you can put all your effort into the boiled potatoes (I think peeled large floury ones are more comforting here than the ready-washed and thin-skinned waxy ones, though I am prepared to accept them as an alternative) and then just make a quick salad with watercress and thinly sliced bulb fennel. This is the perfect foil to the pungent creaminess of the fish and sauce. A small amount of grainy mustard in the salad’s dressing will work well. I love my mother’s cabbage with caraway here, too. Shred half a large white cabbage, either by hand or in the processor (using the slicing disc). Melt 2 tablespoons or so butter and 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a large, deep frying pan or wok. Scatter in 1 tablespoonful of caraway seeds, then toss the cabbage in. Keep stirring and tossing over high heat till the cabbage has wilted and shrunk a little (a couple of minutes or so) and then throw in about 1 cup of hot stock (I use half a vegetable bouillon cube in some boiling water) and toss, then clamp on a lid. In another couple of minutes or thereabouts, remove the lid, let bubble away for another minute, and then serve. If you want to add more butter or more caraway seeds at this stage, do; anyway, sprinkle salt and grind pepper over generously.

BUTTERED APPLES

Fry 3–4 Gravensteins, peeled, cored, and cut into eighths, in about 4 tablespoons butter until brown on each side. Sprinkle thickly with superfine sugar until that too browns and then pile onto a plate and serve with ice cream or cream (or add the cream to the juices in the pan and make a sauce that way). Ben and Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch ice cream is delicious with these buttery, caramelly apples.

CHAMBÉRY TROUT

SALSA VERDE

GUSSIED-UP ICE CREAM

With the herby, vermouth-poached trout serve a salsa verde, which is the perfect foil for the fish and an excellent idea for the quick cook anyway, as all you need to do is to put everything in a food processor and turn it on. The salsa verde is good with poached chicken breasts, too (see
page 165
).

With either the fish or the chicken, I’d go for some fava beans, which are perfect with the salsa verde—being, I suppose, an Italianate version of fava beans with parsley sauce that I ate often as a child. Otherwise go for lentils, canned if need be, with bacon lardons or strips or cubes of pancetta stirred into them. But remember that the bacon is salty and the salsa verde is salty and that canned lentils tend to be salty, so go easy. That’s why pancetta, if you can get it, is a better choice. For dessert—ice cream slightly gussied up.

CHAMBÉRY TROUT

This is another easy way of cooking fish without touching it while you do so. I keep a bottle of Chambéry or Noilly Prat vermouth in the kitchen at all times, primarily because I am not much of a drinker and don’t necessarily want to open a bottle of wine when I need just a little for something I’m cooking. Of course, if you’ve got friends coming for dinner, you might want to drink white wine with the fish, so obviously use some of that rather than the Chambéry if you prefer. In which case, use 1 cup wine, dispensing with the water.

Save the fish-poaching liquid for the salsa, which follows.

4 trout (1–1¼ pounds each) cleaned, with the heads left on

salt and freshly milled black pepper

2/3 cup Chambéry or other white dry vermouth

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Grease a baking dish—I use an old enamel one I have that measures about 8 × 12 inches—and then put the cleaned and seasoned trout in it. Pour over the Chambéry mixed with ¼ cup water, cover loosely with foil, making sure the foil doesn’t touch the fish, and bake for about 20 minutes. When the fish is ready, the flesh should be beginning to be flaky and have lost its translucency. It’s probably better to take the fish out before you think it is absolutely
à point,
as you can just let it stand, still covered, and to one side, for a few minutes, in which time it will continue to cook gently, which is the best way.

SALSA VERDE

I first had salsa verde when I was a chambermaid in Florence. I was there with a school friend and we used to go, most evenings, to a trattoria called Benvenuto and eat tortellini in
brodo,
their
penne al modo nostro,
which involved an intensely garlicky tomato sauce, then moussy-sweet
fegato—
calves’ liver—or, my favorite, tongue with salsa verde. Now I wonder how good the restaurant was, but then, when most of the time we were living on a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and a kilo of tomatoes between us a day, it seemed like heaven. Anyway, after a while we came back mostly for the clientèle, made up in significant part by the local community of transsexuals and transvestites. The most beautiful of all of them, and the one generally held to be the glorious and burnished figurehead, the presiding force and icon, was a Bardot-esque blonde, only more muscular, known as La Principessa; those less appreciative of her aesthetic construction referred to her simply as La Romana. I felt I’d arrived when she huskily called out “
Ciao bella
” to me across the street one day.

Salsa verde has, since those days, become something of a menu commonplace in Britain, but the salsa verde that gets served up is often much fancier—with mint, basil, sometimes even coriander thrown in—than Benvenuto’s version, which was just parsley, capers, cornichons, anchovy, oil, and vinegar, making a semi-liquid, deep-flavored, and spiky sauce the color of pool table felt. I, too, sometimes add to that basic mixture. I might throw in arugula, bought in robust great bunches from a Greek greengrocer’s; it gives a wonderful pepperiness (itself a good balance for the gratifyingly searing saltiness of the anchovies). At other times, tarragon, just a little, lends an aniseedy and hay-fresh muskiness.

After the salsa verde has emulsified, to make it creamier and more liquid I spoon or dribble in a good few tablespoons of the winy liquid in which the fish has been soaking. Normally, salsa verde has lemon added at the end if it’s to accompany fish, vinegar if it’s to go with boiled meats, but I tend to use vinegar more often, even with fish. And although it is not at all
come si deve,
I quite like borrowing a trick from sauce gribiche and adding some finely chopped hard-boiled egg white, too—but for practical purposes, when the idea is to cook quickly, there’s no call even to consider such innovations.

Now I know most people put garlic in. But I thought I remembered that, when I had the salsa verde with tongue in Florence all that time ago, there wasn’t any garlic in it. I couldn’t be absolutely sure, so I asked Anna del Conte, the best Italian foodwriter in English, a great authority, utterly versed in her subject and a reassuring, illuminating recipe doctor. I felt doubtful suddenly only because every salsa verde I’ve eaten since has had garlic in. She reassured me, said that it most certainly wouldn’t have had. Salsa verde emanates from Lombardy (where the parsley is especially prized) and garlic was then anathema to the Lombardi. Bread crumbs or some boiled or mashed potato (to thicken the mixture) are also traditional. Of course you can add garlic if you want, but I suggest not too much. I don’t add bread crumbs or potato simply because I use the food processor to blend it all, and the machine automatically thickens it. It is difficult to be specific about amounts, but what you should end up with is a green-flecked, almost solid liquid that looks as if a spoon would stand up in it—even if, in fact, the spoon would, put to the test, soon sink gloopily into that thick, green, parsley-dense pond.

1 large bunch parsley

3 anchovy fillets

1 tablespoon capers, preferably packed in salt

2 cornichons (miniature gherkins)

8 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more, if needed

5 tablespoons fish poaching liquid (from Chambéry Trout, above), plus more, if needed

1 tablespoon wine vinegar or lemon juice, plus more, if needed

Tear the parsley leaves from the stalks (don’t worry about being too neat) and put them in the bowl of the food processor (don’t even think about doing this sauce, or at least not if you want to get it ready quickly and with a minimum of effort, if you haven’t got a food processor; just mix some oil and lemon together instead). Add the anchovy fillets (if they taste rebarbatively salty, then soak them briefly in a saucer of milk), the capers (well rinsed in cold water and drained if they’ve been packed in salt), and the cornichons. Pulse, then scrape the bowl with a spatula and, with the machine running, gradually pour the olive oil through the feed tube. Take the lid off to check how thick the sauce is becoming and dip in a finger to taste. Scrape down any mixture from the sides. Add more oil if needed; then when the fish is ready, spoon in some of the poaching liquid, all while processing. Taste after every small addition, adding more of the liquid if needed. Then pour the salsa verde into a bowl with a spoon and stir in the vinegar or lemon, a little at a time, adding more if needed. And that’s it. Keep whatever salsa’s left over in the fridge, covered with plastic film. Eccentric though this might sound, I love it, sharp and cold and salty, with hot, fat, spicy, or even not spicy, sausages.

GUSSIED-UP ICE CREAM

Again, this idea has been adumbrated earlier: to ice cream you simply add some processor-pulverized chocolate. Break 4 ounces of the best, most malevolently dark chocolate you can find into small squares and put them into the bowl of the food processor. Make sure they’re cold before you start. Pulse them to dusty rubble. Empty onto a plate and put this plate in the fridge until you need it. At which time, pour the pulverized chocolate into a small bowl and put on the table alongside the container of ice cream.

SALMON SCALLOPS WITH WARM BALSAMIC VINAIGRETTE

BREAD, CHEESE, AND GRAPES

Any thin fillet of meat or fish will cook quickly, but salmon is particularly useful because its oiliness stops it from drying to irritating cardboardiness in the heat. But still, exercise caution; don’t overcook—just dunk these fleshy, coral-colored slices into the pan.

Balsamic vinegar is one of those ingredients whose fashionability leads people to disparage it. But the sweet pungency of the balsamic vinegar here is so right with the oily meatiness of the fish that its use is justified. After this, you can expand into a good plate of perfectly
à point
brie or camembert and another of aromatic, wine-toned grapes. Both must be at room temperature.

SALMON SCALLOPS WITH WARM BALSAMIC VINAIGRETTE

1 tablespoon vegetable oil , if needed

8 scallops or thin fillets of salmon (about 4 ounces each)

small bunch chives, snipped

6 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

6 tablespoons olive oil

Heat a heavy-bottomed, well-seasoned frying pan or good nonstick pan or griddle. Add the vegetable oil if you have any doubt about the fish sticking, put in the salmon, and cook for 1 minute on each side, then turn again and cook for another minute on each side. The fish should be just cooked through. Put on a warmed plate and, when all are ready, sprinkle with chives. Keep warm with tented foil.

In a small saucepan, heat the balsamic vinegar and olive oil until warm (but not hot) and dribble a little over the fish. Pour the remaining vinaigrette into a small pitcher (with a teaspoon near it, for stirring) and let people pour or spoon over as they wish. The measurements I’ve stipulated, strictly speaking, give you more than you need, but otherwise you would be producing such a stingy-looking puddle.

Another way of doing this, and how I always do it if there’s just me eating, is to pour a few drops of oil into the pan (you can’t use a griddle here) and fry the salmon in it. Then, when the fish is cooked and on its plate, I pour a few drops of balsamic vinegar into the pan in which I’ve cooked the fish, swirl it about, and pour it over the fish. Dot with scissored chives and eat.