How to Eat (17 page)

GNOCCHETTI DI SEMOLINO

Somehow these sound rather better in Italian than they do in English—semolina dumplings have a heavy, puddingy ring to them and these are light, puffy things.

1 cup milk

½ cup semolina flour

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, softened

1 egg, separated

4 tablespoons grated Parmesan

whole nutmeg

salt

Bring the milk just to the boil. Off the heat, add the semolina. Whisking constantly, hold the semolina in your fist and let a light rain of grain fall into the pan as you beat. Keep beating till you have a thick paste and then let the mixture cool.

Mix the butter with the egg yolk, the cheese, a good grating of the nutmeg, and a pinch of salt. Mash this mixture into the semolina paste to combine. Whisk the egg white with a good pinch of salt till stiff, and then fold in; you may find this easiest if you stir in a tablespoonful of whites quite briskly first to loosen the semolina. If it helps, too, do everything a few hours in advance up to the whisking and incorporating of the egg white. (Don’t keep the dough in the fridge.)

When the broth’s boiling, form little oval balls by scooping out bits with a teaspoon and drop them in. Cook until they swell and rise to the surface, about 10 minutes. Enough for 4–6 servings.

ROAST POTATOES

Some food won’t suffer if allowed a little resting time. By all means, parboil potatoes before you need to roast them. I have eaten for Sunday lunch roast potatoes that were parboiled on Friday evening. My one proviso here is that they shouldn’t be put in the fridge in the interim. I find potatoes go slightly powdery and heavy after they’ve been put in the fridge, even leftover mashed potato. Just leave them out somewhere cold, like a pantry.

If you are boiling the potatoes in advance, before roasting, rub over their surfaces (though gently—you’re not trying to make rösti) with the coarse side of a grater, just to rough them up before putting them in the hot fat. Cook in a hot oven.

SKINNING PEPPERS

Skinning peppers a day or so before you want to eat them is sensible even when you’re not planning anything elaborate. They’re better the longer they sit in their oily juices. So—blister them under the grill or in the oven and while they are still very hot, put them either in a plastic bag, which you tie tightly at the neck, or in a bowl, which you seal quickly with plastic film. The peppers then steam, and this enables the skins to be removed more easily. Skin them, seed them, and cut them into strips, being sure to catch the juice to add to the dressing. Make them glisten with some peppery glass-green olive oil. You can pound some anchovies into a paste and mix that with the olive oil now, or, just before you want to eat the peppers, arrange them on a plate, criss-cross them with the best anchovy fillets you can find, and dot here and there (not too neatly) with some stoned black olives, halved to form shiny little squished black rounds, like a teddy bear’s nose. Pour over some fresh olive oil and eat. I like the anchovies striating the glossy, flat mass of peppers rather than being actually part of the dressing, just because that can make the whole look rather muddy. Garlic and rosemary, added at any and all stages, are also to be welcomed. With food like this, you should just relax and do what tastes best to you. Peppers and anchovies are an incomparable mix and, pertinently, one that has consistently found favor, regardless of fashion, from the age of the hors d’oeuvres trolley to the balsamic-soaked present.

Some sauces can be cooked a day ahead and left in the fridge until you need them. If you don’t want a skin to form, then cover them flush with plastic film or a thin film of milk, if it’s a milk-based sauce. Obviously those egg-butter liaisons—hollandaise, béarnaise, and so on—need to be done at the lastish minute but a white sauce, béchamel, anything with a roux base, can be cooked and then forgotten for a while. Just reheat slowly and be prepared to add more liquid.

Pasta sauces can be made up to 3 days before you need them. At least, those pasta sauces that are not predominantly cream or butter can. Any vegetable-based sauce, even if it does contain cream, can be made when it suits you, which may well not be at the same time as cooking the pasta. Pasta itself obviously needs to be cooked at the last moment—unless, that is, it’s baked pasta. This is incredibly useful if you’ve invited quite a lot of people for lunch or supper when you’re not going to be at home very long before you want to eat. You can cook the pasta, the sauces, assemble everything a couple of days or so in advance, refrigerate and then give the whole thing about 40 minutes in a hottish oven when you want to eat it.

This is the only baked pasta dish I go in for much—it’s mellow, comforting, but resonantly flavored as well; you’re not swamped in puddingy béchamel, as you can be. My children love it, incidentally, and as you can feed a good 8 people (more if children are included in the numbers), this makes it a good filler for one of those low-key mixed-generation meals, when you’re too busy with everything else you have to do to be absolutely attentive in the kitchen before you eat.

BAKED VEAL AND HAM PASTA

The name I give it evokes, and is meant to, the old-fashioned flavors of those British hot-water-crust veal-and-ham pies: picnic food to be eaten on scratchy rugs; this is the winter, indoors variety. But it’s very garlicky, too, so it’s not a complete transposition of those pies’ mild, sausagy taste. Boiling the garlic not only makes it easier to peel but reduces any latent acridness, producing, later, warmth rather than smoky heat. The ham in question is pancetta (or chopped bacon, if you prefer) but if you’ve got some cold cooked ham in the fridge, do use that. Cut it into small cubes and stir it into the quantity of béchamel the pasta is coated in later.

6 garlic cloves

3 ounces pancetta, chopped roughly

2 celery stalks, chopped roughly

1 medium onion, quartered

1 carrot, peeled and cut into chunks

good handful fresh parsley

2 heaping tablespoons lard or 2 tablespoons olive oil

¼ teaspoon paprika

¼ teaspoon ground mace

3 tablespoons Marsala

¾ pound veal, ground

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, plus more for greasing and dotting

2/3 cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

pinch mace, plus ¼ teaspoon

salt and freshly milled white or black pepper

6 cups milk

5 bay leaves

whole nutmeg

4 ounces Parmesan, freshly grated, plus more for grating over later

1 pound penne or rigatoni

Put the garlic cloves in a small saucepan, cover with cold water, bring to the boil, and boil for 7 minutes. Drain. Put the pancetta into a food processor. Peel the garlic (just press them and the cloves will pop out of their skins) and throw into the processor with the celery, onion, carrot, and parsley, and pulse until finely chopped. Melt the lard or oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan and then, when it’s hot, add the vegetable mixture. Stir well over highish heat for a minute or so, adding the paprika, mace, and Marsala, then turn the heat down to low and cook, stirring regularly to make sure it doesn’t stick, for 15 minutes.

While this is happening, put copious water on to boil for the pasta.

When the 15 minutes are up, briefly turn the heat back to high, add the ground veal, and turn well for a minute or so before, again, turning down to low for 15 minutes. While this is cooking, get on with the béchamel. Melt the butter in a large saucepan, stir in the flour and pinch of mace, and cook for a couple of minutes, still stirring, adding a fat pinch of salt and some pepper. Off the heat, slowly stir in the milk. I don’t bother to heat the milk up; there’s too much of it.

When all the milk’s smoothly amalgamated, add the bay leaves and put back on a medium heat, stirring, until the sauce cooks and thickens, then reduce the heat to low. Although you want to cook this for a good long time—about 20 minutes—so it’s velvety, bear in mind that this is meant to be a thin, runny sauce. Toward the end of cooking time, taste for salt (though remember, you will be adding quite a bit of salty Parmesan later) and pepper and add, too, the remaining mace and grate in some nutmeg. When the sauce is cooked and the flouriness gone—taste after 12 minutes if you’re using 00 flour—turn off the heat and stir in the Parmesan, beating well with your wooden spoon to make sure all is smoothly incorporated. You should by now have started cooking the pasta. You want it slightly undercooked, as it will be cooked again in the oven. On the packages of penne I have at home, the instructions are to cook for 13 minutes; for this recipe, I drain them after 10.

Butter a lasagne dish or any form of shallowish casserole and pour in about a third of the béchamel; don’t bother to measure, just make a rough estimate by eye. Add the drained pasta and turn well to coat. Add the veal and toss well again, then another third of the béchamel and give a good final mix, adding more salt and pepper, if necessary. Level the pasta in the pan and pour over the last third of béchamel. Let cool, then put, covered, in the fridge for a couple of days or so before baking, though of course you can put it straightaway in the oven to bake if you want (in which case it will need less time than otherwise mentioned).

If you’ve fridged it, take it out and make sure it’s at room temperature before you bake it. Sprinkle with more Parmesan and dot with butter and bake in a preheated 375°F oven until golden and bubbly, about 40 minutes.

KAFKAESQUE OR SOFT AND CRISPY DUCK

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a roast could never ever be done in advance. Yes, we all know that any roast needs to rest after it’s come out of the oven and before it goes on the table, but I now do a roast duck—the best roast duck I have ever eaten, let alone cooked—that can be started a good few days before you want to eat it. This is semi-cooking in advance and I’m blazingly evangelical about it. A method of doing the perfect roast duck that leaves you with just three-quarters of an hour’s cooking on the night—and all in the oven, no basting, no fiddling, nothing—has to be a good thing. I let the duck sit around in the fridge in a state of semi-cookedness for up to 3 days, but if you feel at all nervous about this, don’t leave it as long. But actually, before we get on to it, it isn’t that new an idea: Apicius—he of the first cookery book—likewise instructed his readers, “lavas, ornas et in olla elixabis cum acqua, sale et aneto dimidia coctura.” Admittedly, even if he, to translate, suggested boiling the duck in water (with dill as well as salt) until half cooked, the second half’s cooking would not be exactly by roasting; it would have been more like pot roasting. Nevertheless, it reminds us pointedly that there is nothing new in cooking. That’s if it’s to taste good.

But this is the story: when I was last in New York, I bought a copy of Barbara Kafka’s
Roasting
, the premise of which is that roasting at very high temperatures makes for the most succulent, fleshily yielding, and crispy-skinned birds and roasts. The drawback is that you need a clean oven, otherwise all that roasting at very high temperatures gives you a smoky kitchen, burning eyes, and an acrid glaze on the putative pièce de résistance. I noticed that there was a recipe for roast duck that involved poaching the bird first in stock for about three-quarters of an hour and then blitzing it in the oven for half an hour. The result: tender flesh and crisp skin. And it’s true, if you’re not careful when you roast a duck in the more usual way, you often find that the desirably crunchy carapace comes at the cost of overcooked and thus stringy meat. Everyone has an answer to this one—covering the bird with boiling water, hanging it up on a clothesline on a blustery (but dry) day, suspending it on high by means of a clothes hanger and then getting a stiff wrist by aiming a hair dryer, at full though icy blast, at it for hours.

The
echt
Kafkaesque technique involves poaching the duck, upright, in a thin, tall pot in duck stock. I couldn’t quite see why you needed to poach the bird in stock, as the flesh is rich itself. More to the point, I had none. So the first time I tried it, I put the water into the requisite tall, thin pot (the bottom half of my couscoussier), added the giblets, brought it to the boil, added salt, and lowered in the duck. Then, as directed, I made sure the bird was submerged for the whole 40 minutes. I did this in the morning, let the duck get cool, put it in the fridge, and then brought it out in the evening, letting it get to room temperature before roasting it for the 30 minutes as recommended. The meat was wonderfully tender, but I wanted a crisper skin.

So, the next time I tried it, I made some changes. For one thing, duck doesn’t yield much flesh, and cooking a single, lone duck is no use unless there are only two or three of you eating. But I couldn’t get two ducks into my couscoussier, and getting even one out, from an upright position, tore its skin. So I decided to be even more disobedient. Figuring that the ducks would stay moist if they were steamed, not necessarily submerged, I put one duck, breast down, in a large, oblong casserole and the other in a large, deep, all-purpose frying pan. Both pans were filled with boiling salted water. The casserole had its own lid, and for the frying pan I made a tent of foil. I wasn’t sure it would work, but there’s only ever one way of finding out.