How to Eat (15 page)

VANILLA SUGAR

I know I said that flour and so forth doesn’t keep forever, but I do keep a modest and restrained selection, including flours, especially Italian 00, sugars, salt, spices, oil, vinegar, canned tomatoes, vanilla extract, and meat and vegetable bouillon cubes. I also make up a jar of vanilla sugar—simply by filling a screw-top jar with superfine sugar and chopping a couple of vanilla beans into about 2-inch lengths to go in it. This takes very little effort, makes one feel positively holy, and also gives one gloriously scented sugar to use in cakes, puddings, custards, and so forth whenever needed. The beans give out their sweet and fleshy scent for ages; just pour over fresh sugar as you use it.

MARSALA, NOILLY PRAT

CHAMBéRY, DRY SHERRY, AND SAKE

Naturally, what I want to keep in my kitchen cupboards might not be what you want to have in yours. But I couldn’t live without Marsala, Noilly Prat (or Chambéry vermouth), dry sherry, and sake pretty close at hand. I don’t drink much and so don’t tend to have bottles of wine open; if I need alcohol for cooking, I need to have it in the sort of bottles that come with a screw top. Most often, I use Marsala in recipes that specify red wine, vermouth where white’s required. Other drinks have their part to play. As ever, follow your own impulses; go with your own palate.

Anytime I let myself run out of garlic or onions, I curse. These base-note ingredients should be a given in your kitchen, or you always feel you’re scrabbling around before you can make anything. And for me, whole nutmeg is crucial, too. You don’t have to get a special little nutmeg grater (you could just shave off bits with a sharp knife), but it’s not expensive and it is useful.

FRIDGE

I keep a modest but restrained selection in my fridge, including butter, eggs, milk, salad leaves, some herbs, and blocks of Parmesan cheese. That’s in theory; in reality, it’s a constant culinary clutter. I have either too much or not enough. But that’s life.

ORGANIC FOOD

Not everything in my kitchen is organic, but it seems to be going that way. Eggs, I’ve already mentioned, though make sure the box says organic. I can’t buy meat any longer from a supermarket. I want it best quality, and I want to be able to talk with someone knowledgeable about where it comes from. I want it traceable, if at all possible, and not pumped full of revolting things. And now that supermarkets have got wise to the ever-more-widespread lure of organic produce, it’s easier to find vegetables from organic farms that aren’t utterly covered in mud just to show their virtuous credentials. I worry about the chemicals in nonorganic-reared fruit and vegetables, but to tell the truth, it’s the taste of the organic stuff that often seems to me better—that’s the clincher. And it’s worth buying organic oranges and lemons whose skins are free from chemicals. Because I use the zests of these fruit so often in my cooking, using these is only common sense.

Cooking in Advance

Quick cooking has become so implanted
in people’s minds as the way to eat well without having a nervous breakdown that everyone ignores the real way to make life easier for yourself: cooking in advance. Knocking out a meal in fifteen minutes is good for everyday cooking, when there’s just one or two of you, or if you’re one of those people who feels uncomfortable with too much planning. But when you’re having people to dinner, life is made so much simpler if you don’t have to do everything at the last minute. If you feel flustered at the very idea of cooking, indeed hate it, doing it in advance takes away some of the stress; if you enjoy it, you’ll enjoy it more if you don’t put yourself under pressure—that’s for the professionals, who thrive on it. I love the feeling of puttering about the kitchen, cooking slowly, stirring and chopping and getting everything done when I’m feeling well disposed and not utterly exhausted. When I cook with too much of an audience, I immediately worry about what’ll happen if something goes wrong—and then, of course, something does.

Cook in advance and, if the worse comes to the worst, you can ditch it. No one but you will know that it tasted disgusting, or failed to set, or curdled, or whatever. That may sound a rather negative approach, but in fact it’s liberating; moreover, because you’re not stressed out or desperately working against the clock, there’s less chance of disaster. And if something does go wrong, you have the time calmly to find a way of rectifying it.

And things do go wrong in cooking. Indeed, it’s one of the ways you learn and eventually find your own style. Some of the best food I’ve cooked has been as a result of trying to make up for some fault, some blip. It’s when you’re exploring and trying out, not simply following a recipe, that you feel what the food needs, what will make it taste how you want it to taste. Without the pressure of having to perform, you can concentrate on the food. This is not to say that cooking has to be a solitary pursuit. In a way, there’s nothing better than cooking with someone to talk to while you do it. But I am someone who panics if there’s too much commotion or if I’ve got too little time to think.

Perhaps this is a temperamental thing, but cooking is about temperament, and so, I think, is eating. You have to find a way of cooking that suits you, and that isn’t just about your life, your working hours, your environment—though these, of course, matter. But what counts, too, is whether you’re the sort of person who’s soothed or cramped by list making, whether you’re impatient or tidy, whether spontaneity makes you feel creative or panic-stricken. Most of us like eating, but many people feel flustered and a sense of panic and, frankly, boredom when it comes to cooking. It’s difficult to be good at something you aren’t really interested in. But some people don’t like cooking simply because they’ve never given themselves the chance to do it calmly and quietly and in the right mood. Obligation can be a useful prompt to activity, but it can be a terrible blight, too. Cooking in advance is a good way to learn confidence, to learn what works and why and how, and from that you can then teach yourself to trust your intuition, to be spontaneous—in short, to cook.

Cooking is about working toward a goal, toward something you have decided upon in advance. But any creative work (however cringe-makingly pretentious it sounds, cooking is creative, has to be) needs to liberate itself from the end product during the act of producing. This can be very difficult. There are practical constraints, which are what make the form, in cooking as in poetry. You have to learn to use these constraints to your advantage. Get over economic constraints by buying ingredients you can afford rather than making do with inferior versions of expensive produce. Make the best of the equipment you happen to have in your kitchen. Be ready to adapt to what you’ve got. But some other constraints—such as lack of time—merely add to your obstacles and to the risk that if your dinner is inedible, you and your guests will just have to live with it.

Some food actually benefits from being cooked in advance. Stews, for example, are always best cooked, left to get cold and hang around for a while, and then reheated. Desserts can need time to set or for their flavors to settle and deepen. Soups mellow. That’s why I love this sort of cooking; the rhythms are so reassuring, I no longer feel I’m snatching at food, at life. It’s not exactly that I’m constructing a domestic idyll, but as I work in the kitchen at night, or on the weekend, filling the house with the smells of baking and roasting and filling the fridge with good things to eat, it feels, corny as it sounds, as if I’m making a home.

SOUP

Soups are the obvious place to start for those thus in domestic-goddess mode. Soups, of course, are some of the quickest meals that you can make. Somehow the homemade soup, lovingly prepared in advance, is no longer popular. I think it comes down to making stock, our disinclination to make it from scratch, together with our disdain for bouillon or stock cubes. It is important to stress that even though the better a stock, the better a soup, it does not follow that no good soup, no superlatively good soup, can be made with bouillon cubes. Naturally, it depends on the kind of soup—no consommé or delicate broth should be made with anything but homemade stock—but a hearty vegetable soup can, frankly, be made with water, and in between these two extremes, use bouillon cubes. But, for making your own stock, see
page 9
.

If you haven’t already got a supply of homemade stock in the freezer, you’ll need a good day’s grace—time to make the stock, to cool it, to skim the fat off it. A ham stock (just the liquid in which a ham’s been cooked) makes all the difference to a pea soup; a chicken stock, light though it may be, gives instant depth and velvety swell to a very basic parsnip soup. Grate fresh Parmesan over the pea soup; drop chili oil into the pale sweetness of the parsnip soup to add a probing fierceness. To both you could add some bacon, fried, grilled, or baked in a hot oven, and crumbled into salty shards; marjoram, too, would work equally well with either.

Both these soups can be made in advance and kept in the fridge for reheating throughout the week, whether on the burner or in the microwave.

CHICKPEAS

The soups that you really have to cook in advance are the ones made from dried peas, beans, and other legumes. Most of these need a good day’s soaking. I tend to put beans in to soak as I go to bed even if I won’t actually be cooking with them until the next evening. Chickpeas need 24 hours, and I don’t mind if I give them 36. And they need a lot of cooking, much longer than you are usually told. There seems to be a conspiracy to misinform you about chickpeas; I cannot believe the number of times I’ve read that 45 minutes will do, when it takes double that time to cook them. Anna del Conte is realistic about this, admitting that some chickpeas can take as long as 4 hours. I use her technique for preparing chickpeas. Put them in a bowl and cover them with cold water. Then mix together 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1 tablespoon each of salt and flour—or those ingredients in that ratio; a very large quantity of peas will need more of this tenderizing mixture—add water to form a runny paste, and stir this paste into the soaking chickpeas. Leave for a good 24 hours. Then, when cooking the chickpeas (drained and rinsed), don’t lift the lid off the pan for the first hour or so, or the peas will harden. (Curiosity often gets the better of me.) Fava beans similarly need longer soaking than, say, cannellini or cranberry (both of which are fine with 12 hours), and all are better if you leave the salting till the last moments of the cooking time. If you’re cooking in advance, it doesn’t matter how long it all takes, and good though canned chickpeas are, dried, soaked, and cooked ones are so much better. You can taste the full, grainy, chestnutty roundness of them.

Chickpea and pasta soup is my favorite soup of all. You can cook it days before you actually want to eat it. Obviously it can’t all be done in advance because the pasta must be cooked at the last minute, but as you have to reheat the soup anyway, what does it matter to you if, when reheating, you keep it simmering for 20 minutes or so extra while the ditalini swell and soften.

I cook this soup so often—just for us, at home, for supper, in great big greedy bowlfuls; for a first course when I’ve got people coming for dinner; or, if they’re coming for lunch, for a main course, with a salad and cheese after—that I don’t follow a recipe any more. But this is the recipe that started me off. It is Anna del Conte’s, adapted from her
Entertaining All’Italiana.
I have several copies of this book; one in the kitchen—where, eccentrically perhaps, I tend not to keep my cook books—one in my study, where all books on food notionally live (in practice they are dotted on floors, in bathrooms, throughout the house), and one in the bedroom, for late-night soothing reading and midnight feast fantasizing.

ANNA’S CHICKPEA AND PASTA SOUP

This will make enough soup for 8. I sometimes add a glass of white wine or any stock at hand, from whatever animal it emanates, to it, but the soup has quite enough taste with simply water. Use the best vegetable stock you can make or buy. You can prepare the soup (bar the pasta) up to 3 days in advance, or longer if you freeze it.

2 cups dried chickpeas

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons salt

3 quarts vegetable stock, meat stock, white wine and water, or water

3 rosemary sprigs

8 garlic cloves, peeled and bruised

½ cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving (optional)

1 pound tomatoes, skinned and seeded

salt and freshly milled black pepper

8 ounces small tubular pasta such as ditalini

2–3 tablespoons chopped parsley (optional)

chili oil, for serving (optional)

piece of Parmesan, for grating over

Put the chickpeas in a bowl and cover with plenty of water. Mix together the baking soda, flour, and salt and add enough water to make a thin paste. Stir this mixture into the bowl with the chickpeas and leave to soak for at least 12 hours, and preferably 24.

When the chickpeas have doubled in size (you don’t have to get your ruler out; trust your eyes), they are ready to be cooked. Drain and then rinse them. Put them in a large pot and add the vegetable stock.

Tie the rosemary sprigs in cheesecloth and add to the pot. This will make it possible to remove the rosemary without leaving any needles to float in the soup. This might sound persnickety, but when I ignored the advice, I found the sharp and, by now, bitter needles an unpleasant intrusion. If you feel intimidated by the idea of cheesecloth then use, disgusting though it sounds, an old clean knee-high stocking and tie a knot at the open end, or use a tea infuser. Frankly, it doesn’t matter what you use providing it does the job, although I imagine untreated cheesecloth is better. You can get cheesecloth in most kitchen shops or hardware stores.