NIGELLA LAWSON
HOW TO EAT
THE PLEASURES AND PRINCIPLES OF GOOD FOOD
In memory of my Mother, Vanessa (1936–1985)
my sister Thomasina (1961–1993)
and for John, Cosima, and Bruno
with love
Contents
Preface
Charts and Measures
Basics, etc.
Cooking in Advance
One and Two
Fast Food
Weekend Lunch
Dinner
Low Fat
Feeding Babies and Small Children
Glossary
Sources
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Note
Index
Copyright
Preface
Cooking is not about just joining the dots, following one recipe slavishly and then moving on to the next. It’s about developing an understanding of food, a sense of assurance in the kitchen, about the simple desire to make yourself something to eat. And in cooking, as in writing, you must please yourself to please others. Strangely, it can take enormous confidence to trust your own palate, follow your own instincts. Without habit, which itself is just trial and error, this can be harder than following the most elaborate of recipes. But it’s what works, what’s important.
There is a reason why this book is called How to Eat rather than How to Cook. It’s a simple one: although it’s possible to love eating without being able to cook, I don’t believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating. Such love, of course, is not something that can be taught, but it can be conveyed—and maybe that’s the point. In writing this book, I wanted to make food and my slavering passion for it the starting point; indeed, for me it was the starting point. I have nothing to declare but my greed.
The French, who’ve lost something of their culinary confidence in recent years, remain solid on this front. Some years ago in France, in response to the gastronomic apathy and consequent lowering of standards nationally—what is known as la crise—Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, initiated la semaine du goût. He set up a body expressly to go into schools and other institutions not to teach anyone how to cook, but how to eat. This group might take with it a perfect baguette, an exquisite cheese, some local speciality cooked comme il faut, some fruit and vegetables grown properly and picked when ripe, in the belief that if the pupils, if people generally, tasted what was good, what was right, they would respect these traditions; by eating good food, they would want to cook it. And so the cycle continues.
I suppose you could say that we have had our own unofficial version of this. Our gastronomic awakening—or however, and with whatever degree of irony, you want to describe it—has been, to a huge extent, restaurant-led. It is, you might argue, by tasting food that we have become interested in cooking it. I do not necessarily disparage the influence of the restaurant; I spent twelve years as a restaurant critic, after all. But restaurant food and home food are not the same thing. Or, more accurately, eating in restaurants is not the same thing as eating at home. Which is not to say, of course, that you can’t borrow from restaurant menus and adapt their chefs’ recipes—and I do. This leads me to the other reason this book is called How to Eat.
I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater. I cook what I want to eat—within limits. I have a job—another job, that is, as an ordinary working journalist—and two children, one of whom was born during the writing of this book. And during the book’s gestation, I would sometimes plan to cook some wonderful something or other, then work out a recipe, apply myself in anticipatory fantasy to it, write out the shopping list, plan the dinner—and then find that, when it came down to it, I just didn’t have the energy. Anything that was too hard, too fussy, filled me with dread and panic, or, even if attempted, didn’t work or was unreasonably demanding, has not found its way in here. And the recipes I do include have all been cooked in what television people call Real Time: menus have been made with all their component parts, together; that way, I know whether the oven settings correspond, whether you’ll have enough burner space, how to make the timings work, and how not to have a nervous breakdown about it. I wanted food that can be made and eaten in a real life, not in perfect, isolated laboratory conditions.
Much of this is touched upon throughout the book, but I want to make it clear, here and now, that you need to acquire your own individual sense of what food is about, rather than just a vast collection of recipes.
What I am not talking about, however, is strenuous originality. The innovative in cooking all too often turns out to be inedible. The great modernist dictum, Make It New, is not a helpful precept in the kitchen. “Too often,” wrote the great society hostess and arch food writer Ruth Lowinsky, as early as 1935, “the inexperienced think that if food is odd it must be a success. An indifferently roasted leg of mutton is not transformed by a sauce of hot raspberry jam, nor a plate of watery consommé improved by the addition of three glacé cherries.” With food, authenticity is not the same thing as originality; indeed, they are often at odds. So while much is my own here—insofar as anything can be—many of the recipes included are derived from other writers. From the outset I wanted this book to be, in part, an anthology of the food I love eating and a way of paying my respects to the food writers I’ve loved reading. Throughout I’ve wanted, on prin-ciple as well as to show my gratitude, to credit honestly wherever appropriate, but I certainly wish to signal my thanks here as well. And if, at any time, a recipe has found its way onto these pages without having its source properly documented, I assure you and the putative unnamed originator that this is due to ignorance rather than villainy.
But if I question the tyranny of the recipe, that isn’t to say I take a cavalier attitude. A recipe has to work. Even the great abstract painters have first to learn figure drawing. If many of my recipes seem to stretch out for a daunting number of pages, it is because brevity is no guarantee of simplicity. The easiest way to learn how to cook is by watching; bearing that in mind, I have tried more to talk you through a recipe than bark out instructions. As much as possible, I have wanted to make you feel that I’m there with you, in the kitchen, as you cook. The book that follows is the conversation we might be having.
Charts and Measures
OVEN TEMPERATURES
°F description
275 very cool
300 cool
325 warm
350 moderate
375 fairly hot
400 fairly hot
425 hot
450 very hot
475 very hot
Approximate minutes per pound
ROASTING CHART
Beef
Starting temperatures, °F : 475
After 15 minutes, °F : 350
Rare: 15
Medium: 18
Well done: 25
Chicken
Starting temperatures, °F : 400
After 15 minutes, °F : 400
15+10 overall
Duck
Starting temperatures, °F : 425
After 15 minutes, °F : 350
20
Goose
Starting temperatures, °F : 400
After 15 minutes, °F : 400
15+30 overall
Lamb and venison
Starting temperatures, °F : 425
After 15 minutes, °F : 400
Rare: 12
Medium: 16
Well done: 20
Pork
Starting temperatures, °F : 400
After 15 minutes, °F : 350
30
Veal
Starting temperatures, °F : 425
After 15 minutes,
°F : 350
20
There is more than one way to skin a cat; you may well find that, throughout this book, instructions are given for cooking various meats in the oven at temperatures or for times that differ from those given in the chart. There are many variables in roasting, as in cooking generally, but the chart, drawn up with my butcher, David Lidgate, should provide a clear and reliable guide to roasting times. An important factor in following these timings is the temperature of the meat before it goes into the oven. If it’s fridge-cold the guidelines are irrelevant, inadequate; all bets are off. Let the meat stand, out of the fridge, to get to room temperature before you cook it as instructed. After the meat has had its advised cooking time, test it; either press it (if it feels soft, it’s rare; bouncy, it’s medium; hard, it’s well done) or pierce with a knife to see. With chicken, stick a knife in between the thigh and the body; if the juices run clear, it’s cooked. And always let meat rest out of the oven for at least 10 minutes before carving.
FISH
* * *
Go to a fish seller, while they still exist, to get good advice and wise information and to ensure, please, their continuing existence. Going to a fish seller, like going to a butcher, makes life easier where it matters—in the kitchen. I go for good fish, good meat, no funny stuff. But once there, I make the most of it; butchers and fish sellers have skills that we don’t. Don’t feel apologetic about asking a fish seller to fillet or a butcher to bone. When I order fish or meat, I practically hold a conference to discuss every possibility, every eventuality; I pick brains, ask for advice on cooking, and relentlessly exploit the expertise on offer. So should you.
For those times you can’t get to a fish seller, I suggest you check the advice offered by the Canadian Department of Fisheries concerning cooking times: for every 1 inch of thickness, cook the fish, by whatever means—frying, grilling, poaching, baking—for 10 minutes; for a whole fish, measure at its thickest point and multiply accordingly. I heed this advice, but I alter it; I reckon that 8–9 minutes per inch will do, so I recommend changing the 1-inch rule to 1¼ inches, thus giving myself an extra quarter-inch for the Canadians’ 10 minutes. When baking fish, whether wrapped in buttered foil or not, I use a 375° F oven. Obviously, there are exceptions. (See pages 289–290 for notes on cooking a whole salmon.) And there are times when I ignore these rules altogether.
SOME USEFUL WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
* * *
garlic: 1 minced medium clove = 1 teaspoon
onion: 1 average onion = ¼ pound
citrus fruits: Using a zester and an electric juicer, you should find, give or take, that you get the following amounts:
1 lime
1 teaspoon zest
2 tablespoons juice
1 lemon
2 teaspoons zest
8 tablespoons juice
1 orange
1 tablespoon zest
10 tablespoons juice
nuts: Figure on nuts weighing twice as much in their shells as shelled, and adapt shopping lists accordingly.
peas and beans: Peas in the pod weigh about 3 times as much as they do shelled; the weight of shelled fava beans is about a third of the weight in the pod. Again, adapt shopping lists accordingly.
shellfish
8 small clams (about 2 inches across) = about 1 pound
24 mussels = about 1 pound
rhubarb: There are a lot of rhubarb recipes in this book, so it may be useful to know that when cooked in the oven with sugar, as on page 107, but with no liquid added, about 2 pounds untrimmed rhubarb = about 1 pound trimmed = about ½ pound or 1 2⁄3 cups puréed (i.e., cooked and drained of excess juice)—producing, on average, 1 cup juice.
Throughout this book:
• All eggs are large (and see below).
• Olive oil is usually extra virgin; if “olive oil” is called for, you may use a lesser type, provided it’s high quality.
• When “a drop of oil” or “oil” is called for, use any vegetable oil or ordinary olive oil, if the dish is Western. The drop of oil is usually mixed with butter to help prevent its burning.
• Flour is often Italian 00 (farina dopia zero; see page 458); all-purpose flour can easily be used in its place. All flour is measured by spooning it gently into a measuring cup, then leveling the top with the back of a knife or spatula.
• Brown sugar, light and dark, is often muscovado sugar (see page 460).
•All parsley is flat-leaf.
• A bouquet garni is an herb bunch that consists of 4–5 parsley sprigs, 2–3 thyme sprigs, and a bay leaf tied together or enclosed in a small cheesecloth or muslin bag. Used to flavor soups and stews, from which it’s easily removable, it can also be bought in ready-prepared, dried form, in little bags.
I always use organic eggs from hens that are checked regularly for salmonella. I thus have no anxieties about raw eggs, but you should know that because of possible infection from salmonella, the old, the ill, the vulnerable, the pregnant, babies, and children are advised not to eat anything with uncooked egg in it.
see page 249 for a fuller discussion of beef, but as with the eggs, so with any foodstuff. Buy from shops where the produce is traceable; that’s to say, you can find out where it comes from and what’s happened to it along the way.
Basics, etc.
The Great Culinary Renaissance we have heard so much about has done many things—given us extra virgin olive oil, better restaurants, and gastroporn—but it hasn’t taught us how to cook.
Of course, standards have improved. Better ingredients are available to us now, and more people know about them. Food and cooking have become more than respectable—they are fashionable. But the cooking renaissance, so relentlessly talked up in the 1980s, started in restaurants and newspapers and filtered its way into the home. This is the wrong way round. Cooking is best learned at your own stove; you learn by watching and by doing.
Chefs themselves know this. The great chefs of France and Italy learn about food at home; what they do later, in the restaurants that make them famous, is use what they have learned. They build on it, they start elaborating. They take home cooking to the restaurant, not the restaurant school of cooking to the home. Inverting the process is like learning a vocabulary without any grammar. The analogy is pertinent. In years as a restaurant critic, I couldn’t help noticing that however fine the menu, some chefs, for all that they seem to have mastered the idiom, have no authentic language of their own. We are at risk, here, of becoming not cooks but culinary mimics. There are some things you just cannot learn from a professional chef. I am not talking of home economics—the rules that govern what food does when you apply heat or introduce air or whatever—but of home cooking, and of how experience builds organically. For there is more to cooking than being able to put on a good show. Of course, there are advantages in an increased awareness of and enthusiasm for food, but the danger is that it excites an appetite for new recipes, new ingredients: follow a recipe once and then—on to the next. Cooking isn’t like that. The point about real-life cooking is that your proficiency grows exponentially. You cook something once, then again, and again. Each time you add something different (leftovers from the fridge, whatever might be in the kitchen or in season) and what you end up with differs also.
You can learn how to cook fancy food from the glossy magazines, but you need the basics. And anyway, it is better to be able to roast a chicken than to be a dab hand with focaccia. I would be exhausted if the cooking I did every day was recipe-index food. I don’t want to cook like that all the time, and I certainly don’t want to eat like that.
Nor do I want to go back to some notional golden age of nursery food. I wasn’t brought up on shepherd’s pie and bread pudding and I’m not going to start living on them now. It is interesting, though, that these homey foods were not revived in our homes so much as they were rediscovered by restaurants. And, even if I don’t wish to eat this sort of thing all the time, isn’t it more appropriate to learn how
to cook it at home than to have to go to a restaurant to eat it?
By invoking the basics, I certainly don’t mean to evoke a grim, puritanical self-sufficiency, with austere recipes for homemade bread and stern admonishments against buying any form of food already cooked. I have no wish to go on a crusade. I doubt I will ever become someone who habitually bakes her own bread—after all, shopping for good food is just as much of a pleasure as cooking it can be. But there is something between grinding your own flour and cooking only for special occasions. Cooking has become too much of a device by which to impress people rather than simply to feed them pleasurably.
In literature, teachers talk about key texts; they exist, too, in cooking. That’s what I mean by basics.
Everyone’s list of basics is, of course, different. Your idea of home cooking, your whole experience of eating, colors your sense of what foods should be included in the culinary canon. Cooking, indeed, is not so very different from literature; what you have read previously shapes how you read now. And so we eat; and so we cook.
If I don’t include your nostalgic favorite in this chapter, you may find a recipe for it elsewhere in the book (see Index). And it is impossible to write a list without being painfully aware of what has been left out; cooking is not an exclusive art, whatever its grander exponents might lead you to think. Being familiar with making certain dishes—so familiar that you don’t need to look in a book to make them (and much of this chapter should eventually make itself redundant)—doesn’t preclude your cooking other things.
So what are basic dishes? Everyone has to know how to roast chicken and other birds, pork, beef, and lamb, and what to do with slabs of meat (turn to the roasting chart on page xviii). This is not abstruse knowledge, but general information so basic that many books don’t bother to mention it. I am often telephoned by friends at whose houses I have eaten something more elaborate than I would ever cook, to be asked how long their leg of lamb needs to be in the oven, and at what temperature.
How to Eat Page 1