How to Eat (65 page)

6 ripe tomatoes

½–1 small red onion, to taste, minced

1 cucumber

½ cup chopped parsley

Put the couscous into a bowl with the salt and pour over 1 cup boiling water. Cover and leave for 15 minutes. Fluff up with a fork and add the olive oil and some pepper, and put in another bowl (or leave in the same one, if you’re in no hurry) to cool. Prepare the tomatoes by blanching, peeling, seeding, and dicing, only make sure you don’t leave them in the hot water too long. Cut the flesh into neat small dice.

When you’re about to put the main course on the table, dice the cucumber and stir, along with the tomatoes, onion, and 7 tablespoons of parsley, into the couscous with a fork. Add salt and more vinegar if you think it needs it.

Arrange on a plate and sprinkle on the remaining parsley.

TURKISH DELIGHT FIGS

with thanks to Pat Harrison and Masterchef

These figs are beautiful but not in an art-directed way—the purple-blue fruits are cut to reveal the gaping red within, so that they sit in their bowl like plump little open-mouthed birds. When they’re slicked with the flower-scented syrup, they become imbued with Middle Eastern sugariness, and the aromatic liquid itself absorbs and takes on a glassy pink from the figs. Perfect symbiosis.

Two figs a head should do it—they are very sweet, very intense—but if you can find only small figs, increase this to 3 per person. They’re wonderful, anyway, the next day.

2½ cups sugar

2 tablespoons rosewater

2 tablespoons orange-flower water

juice of 1 lemon

12 ripe purple figs

Dissolve the sugar in 2½ cups water in a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan over a low heat. Increase the heat, bring to the boil, and boil rapidly for 5 minutes. Add the rosewater, orange-flower water, and lemon juice. Bring back to the boil and simmer for 2 minutes.

Carefully cut the figs vertically into quarters, leaving them intact at the base. Arrange on a flat, heatproof dish and spoon the hot syrup over them. Set aside to cool, basting with the syrup occasionally. Serve at room temperature, with yogurt and pistachio crescents (below).

PISTACHIO CRESCENTS

These accompanying pistachio crescents, which resemble the hazelnut-smoky Middle-European kipferln, are rich and tender—almost soft and definitely friable. Their powdery texture is compounded by the blanket of confectioners’ sugar with which they are thickly, mufflingly coated; they have a one-thousand-and-one-nights feel, which is just right with the rosewater scent of the fig-basting syrup. And they’re not hard to do. The amount below makes about 12 aromatically gritty crescents.

3 ounces shelled pistachios

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, softened

2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar, plus more, for dusting

½ cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour, sifted

pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease 2–3 baking sheets or, better still, cover them with Cook-Eze (see
page 462
).

Toast the pistachios in a heavy-bottomed frying pan with no fat for a few minutes so that their rich, waxy aroma is released. Pour into a food processor and pulse until pulverized.

With a wooden spoon, beat the butter until creamy—you are getting it ready to absorb the sugar with hardly any additional beating—and then duly spoon the sugar into a tea strainer suspended over the bowl with the butter and push it through. Beat a while longer, until the butter and sugar are light and incorporated, almost liquid-soft, and then add the flour and salt. Keep stirring composedly and then add the ground pistachios, beating until just mixed. The dough will be sticky but firm enough to mold with your hands. If it feels too mushy, put it in the fridge for 10–20 minutes. To make the crescents, flour your hands lightly and then take out small lumps of the dough—about 1 scant tablespoon at a time if you were measuring it, but I don’t suggest you do—and roll them between your hands into sausages about 2 inches long. Slightly flatten the sausage as you curl it round to form a little bulging snake of a crescent and put on the prepared baking sheet. Carry on until all the dough mixture is used up. And, by the way, don’t be alarmed at how green these snakes look: cooked and dredged with confectioners’ sugar, the intense lichen-colored glow will fade.

Bake for about 25 minutes, though start checking after 15, or until the tops are firm and beginning to go blondly brown; the crescents will be soft just below the surface. Let the cookies sit on their baking sheets out of the oven for a few minutes and then remove to a rack. Go carefully—they are, as I said earlier, intensely friable. Dredge them with confectioners’ sugar very thickly indeed (again, I use a teaspoon to push the sugar through a tea strainer) and leave to cool. You can do these ahead, and just dust over a little more icing sugar as you serve them.

A Californian Zinfandel has the aromatic spicy quality to be ideal with this meal.

MILDLY WINTRY DINNER FOR 8

ONION TART WITH BITTER LEAVES

ROAST MONKFISH, PUMPKIN PURÉE, AND MIXED MUSHROOMS

ALMOND AND ORANGE-BLOSSOM CAKE WITH RED FRUIT

I think of this as a very calm menu; there’s enough food to warm but not so much that everyone will go staggering about afterwards vowing to turn macrobiotic. There aren’t potatoes with the monkfish—the pumpkin purée is starchy and filling—so you can comfortably accommodate the cream and the pastry in the tart. The cake for dessert is cooked in advance.

ONION TART

If you make and roll out the pastry the day before, along with caramelizing the onions, all you’ll have to do on the night itself is take it in and out of the oven a few times, and beat some eggs and cream together. In other words, it’s entirely manageable. Try to arrange things so that the tart comes out of the oven about 40 minutes before you want to eat it. This means that if you’re planning to sit down to dinner at 9
P.M.
it should go in, fully assembled, at 7:40. You should get your blind-baking under way, then, as soon as after 7
P.M.
as possible.

FOR THE PASTRY

1 cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted cold butter or 2 tablespoons each lard and butter, diced

1 egg yolk beaten with a pinch of salt and 1 teaspoon of crème fraîche

FOR THE FILLING

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

drop oil

1 pound onions, sliced very thinly

salt

1 teaspoon sugar

4 tablespoons Marsala

freshly milled black pepper

2 eggs

1 egg yolk

1¼ cups crème fraîche

whole nutmeg

Prepare the pastry using the listed ingredients and following the foolproof recipe on
page 37
. For the filling, melt the butter with the drop of oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan, add the onions and sprinkle over with the salt, and sauté over medium to low heat for 12 minutes, until soft and transparent; then stir in the sugar, reduce the heat further, cover the onions tightly with foil, and cook for another 20 minutes on the lowest heat, until tender (almost mush) and golden brown. Remove the foil, turn up the heat, add the Marsala, and let cook, on a moderate heat, stirring every now and again to make sure nothing sticks or burns, for another 8 or so minutes. By this time the onions should be a well-stewed, darkish brown tangle. Taste and season with salt and pepper, and then remove to a bowl to cool a little.

While all this is going on, roll out the pastry to line a deep, 8-inch tart pan or 9-inch shallower one, and leave in the fridge to rest for 15–20 minutes. Preheat the oven, to 400°F, making sure there’s a rack in there for the tart to sit on later. Line the pastry shell with foil, fill with beans, and bake blind for 15 minutes. Remove the beans and paper, wrap foil over the edges, and give the naked shell another 12 minutes. Remove and let it cool a little. Turn the oven down to 350°F.

Combine and beat the eggs, egg yolk, crème fraîche, and ½ teaspoon of salt. Add a good grinding of black pepper and even more of nutmeg. Line the pastry with the soggy, caramelized onions and then pour over the egg mixture. Leave it rather insufficiently filled until you’ve staggered over to the oven and put the pan on the rack; then you can spoon or pour in as much of the remaining egg mixture as you dare without it spilling over and down the sides and ruining the pastry. Give another grating of nutmeg on top and bake in the oven for 30–40 minutes, or until set but not firm.

I make a variation on this, replacing the ordinary onions with red onions, the Marsala with red wine, and the crème fraîche with yogurt.

BITTER LEAVES

To go with the onion tart, make a bitter salad out of Belgian endive and treviso, that elongated raddicho, or, if you’re lucky enough to find it, those young greens called
cicorie
by the Italians. Make the anchovy dressing the easy way by adding 1–2 drops anchovy essence to fillets, mashed into an emulsion of olive oil and lemon juice; add a pinprick of honey (very Apicius) if you think the balance needs adjusting. You can dispense with the onion tart altogether and make the salad the focal point, and sole constituent, of the starter. If so, make a dressing by mashing some anchovies to a paste with some thyme, adding a spritz of lemon juice and then as much oil as you need, gradually.

ROAST MONKFISH

Ask your fish seller for four approximately 1-pound pieces of monkfish tail; these are going to be easier to get than a couple of great, walloping ones. Have them trimmed and skinned, but with the bone in if possible, for flavor (it’s such a big bone, you can just lift it out of the fillets as you serve).

You hardly do anything to them, and what you do you do at the last minute—just before you sit down to the starter.

Preheat the oven to 375°F and, on the stove, sauté the fish a couple of minutes each side in about 3 tablespoons, more if you feel you need it, of butter and a drop or so of olive oil. I use a nonstick frying pan that will go in the oven later. If you’ve got any pan that you can use on the stove and in the oven and will fit all the fish, then use it; otherwise, use an ordinary or nonstick pan and transfer it to a baking dish, making sure to pour the frying juices over before baking.

When you’ve sautéed your fish, sprinkle over some sea salt and a bit of lemon zest, transfer to the oven, and bake for 20 minutes or until just cooked through and the flesh has lost its glassiness. Arrange the monkfish on a large plate, removing each fillet’s central bone as you do so. Put the pan or baking dish with its lemony, salty juices on the stove for a moment, stir in some boiling water and grate over some pepper, and then dribble a mere tablespoon or so over the pale firm fish on the plate. But taste and adjust to suit before doing anything. If you want to strew watercress or big and flat-leafed parsley around the edges of the dish, do.

PUMPKIN PURÉE

If you can, get three small (i.e., about 2 pounds each) pumpkins rather than one huge tough, more watery, less flavorsome one. For each 2 pounds of pumpkin, you need about 4 tablespoons of butter.

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Quarter each little pumpkin. Remove the seeds (though leave the skin as is) and cut out squares of foil big enough to wrap the chunks in securely. Place each piece of pumpkin in the middle of its foil and dollop on 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, then some salt (this does taste better than just using salted butter, I promise you) and pepper in each quarter’s deseeded cavity. Wrap loosely in the foil, but twist the edges tightly to seal it absolutely. Place these packages on one or two baking sheets and bake for 45 minutes or until the flesh is soft.

Remove, but leave the pumpkins in their packages on their baking sheet(s) till cool enough to touch, or—if you’re doing this in advance and then reheating, as I most often do—leave until completely cool. Then open the parcels into a bowl or pan (or, if you want your purée baby-food smooth, into a processor) so that all buttery juices are saved, and, using a spoon, scrape out the cooked flesh. Mash with a masher, whip with a wooden spoon, or purée in any other way you like; the pumpkin will be soft enough not to need more than pushing to turn it into purée. There is enough butter in this; you do not need to add anything, except salt to taste, later. Any leftovers make wonderful soup.

MIXED MUSHROOMS

If you can’t get a variety of fresh mushrooms, use about 2 pounds of those mixed sliced mushrooms you can pick up in ready-assembled packages in the supermarket.

1 ounce dried porcini

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

4 shallots, minced

2 very fat garlic cloves, minced

8 ounces cremini or portobello mushrooms, chopped into small dice