How to Eat (30 page)

For some reason, I don’t eat jam with this version of semolina, but drizzle from a gummy teaspoon a glowing, teak-colored, dripping bead of honey.

1 vanilla bean or 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract or 2 tablespoons vanilla sugar

2 cups milk

3 tablespoons semolina

1 egg, separated

2 tablespoons sugar if not using vanilla sugar

Preheat the oven to 350°F and butter a dish with a 2-cup capacity.

If you’re using a vanilla bean, heat the milk in a saucepan and infuse it with the bean for 15 minutes. Otherwise, just heat the milk and sprinkle in the semolina, stirring all the time to prevent lumps. After about 10 minutes the semolina should be cooked, swollen, and thick. Leave to cool for about 10 minutes. Whisk the egg white till stiff; you may find this easier if you first wipe the bowl with the cut side of a lemon and sprinkle a little sugar into the whites.

Stir the yolk into the semolina and then the vanilla sugar, if you’re using it; otherwise, add the plain sugar and/or the vanilla extract, if you’re using that. Add a good dollop of the whisked white, just to loosen the mixture, then fold the rest in gently. Pour into the waiting dish and bake for 35–45 minutes; the pudding will be risen, the top golden and blistered.

Serves 2.

I don’t make desserts very often when there’s just the two of us. I might do something with the plums or apples from the garden, maybe put together a crumble. The amount of actual crumble needed for a little pie dish is so small as not to be worth worrying about. You don’t need to go dragging a machine into it.

APPLE AND WALNUT CRUMBLE

Crumble is a good way to start fiddling about with the idea of a crust; it’s pastry, really, only without the fear factor. Just plain, it’s wonderful enough, especially on those grim days with saucepan-lid skies in late November and early February, but it’s truly good as expanded here, with the nubbliness of the nuts and the almost honeyed crunchiness of the brown sugar. For two people who are wisely eating this with custard (see
page 32
if you intend to make your own), ice cream, crème fraîche, or just old-fashioned cream in a pitcher (check where applicable) but with nothing else before or after at all, use a pie dish of any sort with a capacity of about 2 cups. Though I call for Marsala here, dark rum works well too; once it’s cooked, the rumminess ripens into something more aromatic than boozy.

2 tablespoons raisins or sultanas

3 tablespoons Marsala or dark rum, warmed

¾ cup all-purpose flour

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into small dice

½ cup walnuts, chopped finely

¼ cup light brown sugar plus 1 heaping tablespoon

1 very large or 2 medium cooking apples

Heat oven to 375°F. Grease a pie pan with butter. Cover the raisins or sultanas with the warmed Marsala.

Sift the flour into a bowl and rub in the butter with your fingertips; the crumble should look like rubbly meal. Stir the walnuts into the mixture, then stir in the sugar. Set aside in a cool place—even stash in the freezer. Peel and core the apples and cut them into 1-inch chunks. Put them in a heavy saucepan with the tablespoon of sugar and the Marsala and raisins. Put the lid on and cook for 5 minutes to soften, giving the pan a good shake once or twice in that time. Then put the fruit into the pie pan, cover with the crumble mixture, and cook for about 25 minutes or until the top is golden brown.

There are times when real rice pudding is what’s wanted, but it can take a good 3 hours to make one. It occurred to me that you could proceed along the lines of a risotto—turn the rice in butter and then add hot liquid, ladleful by ladleful, until it’s creamily absorbed. I did, and it worked—the perfect rice pudding for one. And all the stirring kept me occupied (without eating) until it was ready. This takes about half an hour. You need to give it about 10 minutes longer than the usual risotto, as you want the rice rather less al dente.

RISOTTO-INSPIRED RICE PUDDING

3 cups milk

½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract or 2 tablespoons vanilla sugar

1 heaping tablespoon unsalted butter

2 tablespoons superfine sugar if not using vanilla sugar

¼ cup arborio rice

2–3 tablespoons heavy cream

Heat the milk in a saucepan that, preferably, has a lip. When it’s about to boil (but don’t let it), turn off the heat. (Or give the milk 4 minutes or so in a wide-topped plastic measuring cup in the microwave.) If you’re using the vanilla extract, add it to the milk now. Melt the butter and 1 tablespoon of the plain or vanilla sugar, if using, in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. When hissing away in a glorious pale caramelly pool, add the rice and stir to coat stickily. Slowly add the milk, stirring the rice all the time, letting each quantity of milk—about ½ cup at a time—get absorbed into the consequently swelling rice before adding the next. Start tasting at 20 minutes but be prepared to go on for 35. You may want to add more milk, too. (And if the rice tastes cooked before all the milk’s absorbed, don’t carry on adding it.)

When the rice feels as it should, thick and sticky and creamy, take it off the heat and beat in the remaining sugar (taste and see if you want yet more) and as much of the cream as you like. Think of this as the
mantecatura,
the final addition to a risotto, to thicken and add fat-globular volume of butter and grated Parmesan; indeed, just add butter if you haven’t got any cream in the house.

Eat as is: no jam, no syrup, no honey, no nothing. Serves 1.

Fast Food

For the past few years I have written
an annual roundup of cookery books and, putting aside fashions and fads, it is the subject of fast food that has recently begun to dominate. The reasons are understandable enough—we seem to have less time for cooking as we have more interest in food. Women have been traditionally the producers and providers of food in the home, but now that we go out to work, there’s no one to spend all afternoon making tonight’s supper. But the disinclination to spend hour upon hour in the kitchen every night is not sex-specific. No one would want, after a long day in the office, to come back and start on some elaborate culinary masterpiece. Cooking can be relaxing (although it’s interesting that it’s men rather than women who tend more often to cite its therapeutic properties), but not if you are already exhausted. And as the working day seems to get ever longer, why would you want to be cooking a meal that isn’t going to be ready for two and a half hours? What we all want is to eat something good and simple and soon.

POINTS TO REMEMBER

• Don’t take shortcuts with dishes that ought to be cooked slowly, to infuse and blend, to be cooled and added to. Choose instead food that is meant to be, has to be, cooked quickly, such as liver, fish, or meat scallops.

• Remember to think not just in terms of actual cooking time in the oven but of the amount of effort it will take you to put dinner together. I like shopping for food and I don’t work in an office; but on days when I’m really fraught, it’s the shopping, not the cooking, that finishes me off. And when you’re really exhausted, the easiest thing to cook is a roast chicken; it takes a while in the oven (see page
xviii
) but demands a minimum of interference and energy from you.

• Quick, last-minute-assembly food can be the most stressful cooking of all. Its popularity is in part due to the influence of restaurants on our culinary imagination and repertoires. Restaurant cooking has to be quick; food has to be made fast, to order; chefs and their minions have to conjure up the finished dish within minutes. The constraints of cooking at home are entirely different—what makes life easier for a chef can make life hell for the domestic cook.

• I shy away from recipes that, however quick they may be to cook, require too much detailed attention in the preparation. Stir-frys are an example. In delicate moods, the idea of having to shred finely, dice, mince, and slice into julienne seven different sorts of vegetable—even if the dish takes a mere three minutes to cook—could reduce me to tears.

• If you hate cooking, don’t do it. You can certainly eat well enough just by learning how to shop. You can buy food that you don’t need to cook—picnic food, cold food, things to heat up. Of course, trimmed vegetables and packaged salads are pandering to laziness and inviting extravagance on a ludicrous scale, but be grateful for them. If they taste good, don’t worry about it. No one has to be made miserable over cooking.

• Make use of your pantry and fridge. You can rely on bought pasta sauces, on cans of white beans, anchovies, and good tuna (in olive oil only) as well as small glass bottles of tapenade, green olive paste, and goat cheese in oil. Bacon is the easiest thing for the quick cook; grilling a piece of bacon is hardly cooking, and a few salty shards crumbled over or chopped into a pile of mashed potato, or mixed with beans and spinach or chickpeas and chili-fried tomatoes and topped with a poached egg, make a better dinner than anything more elaborate and expensive from the freezer case.

REMINDERS OF AND IDEAS FOR HASTY IMPROVISATIONS

SALAD

You don’t need to be reminded how to open a package of designer lettuce leaves. But if you’re in a hurry, salad can be useful, either as a starter to keep people quiet while you get other things ready, or as a main course if you are putting together a bought picnic supper (fruit, as well as cheese, good bread, pâtisserie). However, some lettuce leaves can be just a little too flabby; you need texture, too. So get a romaine lettuce, tear it into large, crisp chunks, and add it to any bought salad package (or mixture of packages). The quickest way of making a dressing is, at the last minute, to grind some salt over and then to drizzle some good olive oil and add the scarcest spritz of lemon (see also
page 23
).

To frisée or escarole, add hot, fried, diced pancetta or bacon lardons. Make a dressing by adding Dijon mustard, more oil, and some red wine vinegar to the bacony juices in the pan. Then, onto the warm tossed salad, shave some Parmesan or other hard cheese and toss very lightly again. The Chestnut and Pancetta Salad on page 326 is a slightly more solid variant. And you can substitute warm, just-cooked chicken livers, too.

To packages of baby spinach, add hot bacon and raw sliced mushrooms. Or make a spinach, gorgonzola, and pine nut salad. Cut the gorgonzola (or whichever blue cheese you happen to like best) into crumbly cubes (don’t worry about uniformity, size, or even shape, or you really will have a nervous breakdown) and toast the pine nuts in a hot dry pan until they begin to turn gold and fragrant.

To watercress and mâche—arranged on a plate, not in a bowl—add some sliced, just-cooked-through scallops. Better still, fry some bacon first, then fry the scallops in the bacon fat. Chop the bacon finely and sprinkle over the scallop salad.

If you’re in Germanic mood, then make a mustardy dressing for chicory—adding a stiff spoonful of crème fraîche—and buy thick slices of good ham, cut them into thick strips, and mix into the salad. You could do the same with warm potatoes, too, in which case you should really go whole hog and add, instead of the ham, thickly sliced frankfurters, though please don’t even think of using the flabby adulterated sort too often available.

A huge green salad, no funny stuff, with a walnut oil dressing and a good cheese selection, is one of the loveliest dinners I can think of. Have a tumbling mass of grapes, too, plus good bread, thin and thick crackers, and, if you can ever find ripe pears, then make sure you have a dish of those, too.

SOUPS

PEA SOUP

The quickest and best soup you can make is to cook 3 cups of frozen peas in 2 cups of vegetable stock made with a good-quality bouillon cube. When the peas are tender, purée in the food processor or blender. Add some olive oil (preferably basil-infused, see below) and season to taste. Serve Parmesan to sprinkle over.

You can improve on this; if you’ve boiled a ham previously, then freeze the ham stock it’s made and use that here. Also, if you’ve stashed any hard, unyielding rinds of finished Parmesan in the freezer as you go along, then salvage one now and throw that into the soup as it’s cooking.

TOMATO AND RICE

SPINACH

Just as easy is a tomato and rice soup (see
page 422
, too), which you can make by adding water to a good, bought tomato sauce to make it liquid enough for rice to cook in. Bring to the boil. Throw in some basmati rice and 10 minutes later you’ve got soup.

Spinach, because you can buy it frozen and ready chopped, makes a good basis for a quick soup. Chop and fry an onion first, then add the spinach and, when it has more or less thawed, add 2 cups or so of chicken or vegetable stock made from cubes. After about 5 minutes, add a good squeeze of lemon and, if you want to make it richer when it’s off the heat, whisk in some light cream beaten with an egg yolk.

PASTA

BUTTER

CREAM

PARMESAN

TRUFFLE OIL