How to Eat (67 page)

olive oil for frying

2 large eggplants cut lengthways into 2-inch slices

FOR THE STUFFING

6 ounces provolone cheese, cut into very small cubes

½ cup pine nuts

1/3 cup raisins, soaked in water until plump, then drained

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons fresh white bread crumbs

1 garlic clove, crushed or minced

2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan

1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil

salt and freshly milled pepper

1 egg, beaten

½ cup tomato purée

8 ounces mozzarella, cut into 2-inch slices

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Fill a large frying pan with about 2 inches of the oil and heat. Add the eggplant slices, a few at a time, and fry until golden on both sides. As they’re done, remove them to paper towels to drain. You will have to add quite a bit more oil as you go, so don’t panic about it. Leave the eggplant slices to cool as you make the stuffing.

In a bowl mix together the cheese, pine nuts, raisins, olive oil, bread crumbs, garlic, Parmesan, and basil; season with the salt and pepper and bind with the egg. Lay out the cooked eggplant slices on a work surface and divide the stuffing between them (I find 1–2 tablespoons per slice about right). Roll them up tightly to secure the filling and put them, as you go, into a lightly greased gratin dish into which they’ll fit snugly.

Pour over the tomato purée. Arrange the mozzarella down the center, in a line lengthways like a snowman’s buttons. Drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and bake in the oven for 25–30 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and blistered and the sauce is bubbling. Let stand for a bit before serving.

TAGLIATELLE WITH CHICKEN FROM THE VENETIAN GHETTO

This recipe comes from one of the best food books I’ve read, Claudia Roden’s
Book of Jewish Food.
It is rather far removed from the sort of food I think of as typically Jewish in Britian, which might be comforting but lacks many of the other culinary virtues.

Of course you can use raisins; I prefer sultanas.

1 3½-pound chicken

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

salt and freshly milled black pepper

leaves from 3 rosemary sprigs, minced

1/3 cup sultanas, soaked in warm water for 30 minutes

½ cup pine nuts, lightly toasted

1 pound tagliatelle

2–3 tablespoons chopped parsley

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Rub the chicken with the oil and sprinkle with the salt and pepper, then place it breast down in a roasting pan and roast for about 1½ hours, or until well browned, turning it over toward the end to brown the breast. It’s done when the juices run clear, not pink, when you cut into the thigh. When the chicken’s nearly ready, put abundant water on for the pasta, salting it when it boils.

Take the chicken out of the oven and take the meat off the bone, leaving all that glorious burnished skin on, and cut it into small pieces. I do much of this by just pulling, without a knife, but if you haven’t got asbestos hands, use a knife and fork or wait till it’s cooler.

For the sauce, pour all the juices from the roasting pan into a saucepan. Add the rosemary, the drained sultanas and the pine nuts. Begin to simmer the sauce when you are ready to cook the pasta.

Cook and drain the pasta, and toss it with the sauce, chicken pieces, and parsley in a large warmed bowl. No cheese, please.

The last suggestion in this section is less a recipe than, for me, a way of life: boiled chicken with rice and egg and lemon sauce. This is the food of my childhood, a taste that roots me in my past. When my brother, Dominic, and Rosa got married, this is what he asked me and my sisters to cook for him the night before. For us, this is the most significant kitchen supper.

CHICKEN WITH RICE AND EGG AND LEMON SAUCE

Exact quantities would not be in the spirit of things, but all you do is put a chicken, preferably a hen, or 2 younger chickens in a pot, throw in chunked carrots, an onion or two, some leeks, a stalk of celery, some parsley stalks, and peppercorns, cover with water, and add salt.

Bring to the boil and then simmer 2–3 hours for a hen, 1–1½ hours for younger birds, often skimming the foam that rises to the surface. About 40 minutes before the end of cooking time, remove as many of the vegetables as you can fish out with a slotted spoon and add fresh carrots and leeks (and if I’m not in the mood for rice, I might add peeled halved or quartered potatoes, too). If you’ve not been able to get a hen, the consequent stock will not be much stronger than water. In that case, either cook the chicken in stock instead of water to start or add a couple of stock cubes in place of the salt. Assuming you’re using rice—and I like plain basmati—cook it separately in time to serve with the finished dish.

The egg and lemon sauce, my mother’s sauce, is really just a loosened, saffron-streaked hollandaise, without the ceremony. In the top of a double boiler, over simmering water, put a couple of egg yolks, a pinch of saffron threads, and a grinding of pepper (my mother always used white), and start beating with a whisk. Cube by softened cube, add some butter—until it’s thick and pale yellow—then, always beating, add a ladle or so of the chicken stock from the neighboring pot. Keep whisking, though more gently perhaps now, and when you have a thickened but still runny warm sauce, add a squirt or two of lemon. Transfer to a bowl with a plate beneath it and place on the table with its own little ladle. I bring the whole chicken to the table and carve it there; diners help themselves to the sauce.

As for dessert for any of the kitchen suppers, if I’m in the mood to make one, I make what I feel like eating, whether it comes from my dinner-party repertoire or is something I might otherwise think of having after a weekend lunch. By not suggesting any particular desserts here, I’m not depriving you; all the sweet thangs mentioned in any chapter of the book are listed in the Index.

Low Fat

This is not the healthy foods chapter;
it’s not a healing, nurturing place where bad dietary consciences can come to self-congratulatory rest. You will not read about toxins and chai levels, about chakras and meridians. Nor am I interested in blood-sugar levels or cholesterol. Let’s be frank: the issue here is vanity, not health; whether your jeans will zip, not what your oxygen uptake is. No one likes to own up to such a narcissistic preoccupation as mere appearance. Dieting claims almost a moral status when health comes into play. With what piety and smugness do the dietetically pure wave away those wicked, fat-clogged foods and show us, sinners all, the way, the truth, and the Lite.

I don’t disparage the shallow concerns of the ordinarily vain, which, after all, I share. What I hate is all this new-age voodoo about eating, the notion that foods are either harmful or healing, that a good diet makes a good person and that that person is necessarily lean, limber, toned, and fit. Quite apart from anything else, I don’t see the muscular morality argument. Why should a concern for your physical health be seen as a sign of virtue? Such a view seems to me in danger of fusing nazism (with its ideological cult of physical perfection) and puritanism (with its horror of the flesh and belief in salvation through denial).

So I take it for granted that anyone wanting to read here about low-fat food is doing so because they want to improve their
ligne
, not their soul. More, I assume that anyone in need of diminution likes food. It is, after all, those of us who enjoy eating who tend to put on weight in the first place. All too often, though, the sort of people who espouse what I refuse to describe as “healthy eating” care little for food—and it shows.

Good low-fat food takes time, preparation, and thought. This puts a lot of people off, but it’s part of the lure for me. I love the whole business of food. One of the things that makes me miserable about diets and dieting (more so than the obvious restraints) is that all too often they reduce food not merely to fuel but to medicine. I like the ceremony of food preparation, the shopping, the chopping, the stirring, and attending.

Calorie intake is crucial. I shouldn’t need to say this, it is both so obvious and has been known, and scientifically proven, for so long, but as every contemporary dietary trend is against it, you do need to be reminded and you do need to take note: if your energy intake in the form of calories exceeds your energy expenditure—what it takes to keep you going plus any exercise you want to take to boost it—then you will put on weight; if the latter exceeds the former, you will lose weight. It can’t—pending findings, rather than wishful theories, to the contrary—not work. Everyone has their pet excuse, their alternative explanations—it’s metabolism, what you eat with what, the intrinsic properties of certain foods, or all down to allergies and intolerances.

Despite, however, a firm belief in the ungainsayable truth of the calorie-intake theory of weight control, I wouldn’t begin to suggest that’s all there is to it. Put at its plainest, we know that what makes us fat is eating too much, but that says nothing about why we might eat too much, why we get fat, why we might find it difficult to lose those self-destructive, self-sabotaging habits. I’d have found it very difficult to embark on a diet and stick to it unless I’d first tackled why I’d put on weight. I don’t imagine I’m very different from most women in that I turn to food when I’m unhappy or under stress. And of course, like most women, too, my eating habits and whole attitude toward food have been influenced by my mother’s eating habits and her attitudes toward food. I make this point not because I have any particular impulse toward self-revelation but because I do want to make it clear that I know dieting is not as easy as just eating less. Having said that, you won’t lose weight unless you do. And for all my long-held beliefs that fat was a feminist issue, that the modern tyranny of the scales was both ideologically and physically damaging, and that intolerance of the unthin was dangerous, I have to admit that I felt awful when I put on weight after the birth of my first child and better when I lost it.

If you stick to eating foods that are not high in fat most of the time, it is likely that your calorie intake will, anyway, be curtailed. I find (when I’m trying to lose rather than just not put on weight) I keep an eye on calories too, as I somehow seem to be able to consume such vast platefuls of food that I can, with relative ease, go calorifically stratospheric while virtuously applying low-fat principles. And if you want to, then I advise you to scour the bookstore shelves for a calorie guide that you can both read and fit into pocket or purse. When I draw up my own dietary accounts, my sums are not exact or scientifically correct. That’s to say, I erroneously zero-rate soy sauce, Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce, all herbs, cabbage, carrots, onions, mushrooms, zucchini, snow peas and sugar-snaps, green or French beans, spinach, chard, bok choy and all that sort of leafy stuff, all lettuces, baby corn, baby asparagus, turnips, leeks, and pretty well any vegetable that isn’t starchy.

But even when I just want to counteract an intensified bout of eating, either as a result of work or in the general run of a greedy life, I would never go below 1,250 calories a day. And on the whole, I don’t count the calories, I just concentrate on the following type of eating.

Much as I hate the false witnesses of the various new-age health movements, I accept that, in order to make this whole thing work, you need to get in the mood, adopt something of the mindset; you need to shift into the my-body-is-a-temple mode. This way none of it feels like self-denial or deprivation; it feels like giving yourself something, doing something positive for yourself. For all the intellectual muzziness or rapt self-absorption involved, this is crucially important. As the one-time mayor of New York, Fiorello la Guardia, put it, if the ends don’t justify the means, I don’t know what does.

There is no one easy way to lose weight—different people find different ways; it’s a case of what works for you. This is what works for me.

BEFORE YOU START

Because so much of this is about getting your head in gear, what you must do at the beginning is psych yourself up. And because you also need to make it easier for yourself, on a practical level, by having all the right foods around, you can combine the two by going on a mood- and scene-setting shopping expedition. This does two things: it helps banish any residual feelings of dismay about imminent deprivation (you are, after all, buying things for yourself and, moreover, things to eat) and it helps propel you into just that arena of obsession that is necessary to the successful outcome of any diet. Yes, yes, yes, to be too obsessed is a bad thing, and no, no, no, I am not for a minute suggesting you totter down the first steps toward anorexia and bulimia and associated eating disorders, but we all know that the less we’re trying to eat, the more we think about it, so it makes sense to exploit that. Here, it means getting every little thing right to facilitate the cooking and, later, it means thinking at length about what you’re going to cook and how. The planning is not only a necessary part of losing weight; it also satisfies the part of the brain that wants, in a normally greedy person—and who else would need to be concerned with all this?—to be occupied with food.