The key texts constitute the framework of your repertoire—stews, roasts, white sauce, mayonnaise, stocks, soups. You might also think of tackling pastry.
Lacking a firmly based culinary tradition with the range and variation of, say, regional French cooking, we in Britain and America tend to lack an enduring respect for particular dishes. It’s not so much that we hunger to eat whatever is fashionable as that we drop anything that is no longer of the moment. The tendency is not exclusively Anglo-American—if you were to go to a grand dinner party in France or Italy, you might be served whatever was considered the culinary dernier cri—but what makes our behavior more emphatic, more ultimately sterile, is that, when we cook for company, we are inclined to try to reproduce style-conscious menu-fodder—dinner-party food with a vengeance.
I think it is true, too, that we are quick to despise what once we looked at so breathlessly in magazines and gourmet food shops. Just because a food is no longer flavor-of-the-month, it shouldn’t follow that it is evermore to be spoken of as a shameful aberration. It is important always to judge honestly and independently. This can be harder than it sounds. Fashion has a curious but compelling urgency. Even those of us who feel we are free of fashion’s diktats are, despite ourselves, influenced by them. As what is seemingly desirable changes, so our eye changes. It doesn’t have to be wholesale conversion for this effect to take place; we just begin to look at things differently.
Of course, fashion may lead us to excesses. It is easy to ascribe the one-time popularity of nouvelle cuisine—which fashion decrees we must now treat as hootingly risible—to just such an excess. And to some extent that would be correct. But what some people forget is that the most ludicrous excesses of nouvelle cuisine were not follies committed by its most talented exponents but by the second and third rank. It is important to distinguish between what is fashionable and good and what is fashionable and bad.
With food, it should be easier to maintain your integrity; you must, after all, always know whether you enjoy the taste of something or not. And in cooking, as in eating, you just have to let your real likes and desires guide you.
My list of basics—and the recipes that constitute it—are dotted throughout this book. The list is eclectic. And in this chapter I have tried, in the main, to stay with the sort of food most of us anyway presume we can cook; it’s only when we get started that we realize we need to look something up, check times, remind ourselves of the quantities. I want to satisfy those very basic demands without in any way wishing to make you feel as if there were some actual list of recipes you needed to master before acquiring some notional and wholly goal-oriented culinary expertise. My aim is not to promote notions of uniformity or consistency—or even to imply that either might be desirable—but to suggest a way of cooking that isn’t simply notching up recipes. In short, cooking in context.
First, you have to know how to do certain things, things that years ago it was taken for granted would be learned at home. These are ordinary kitchen skills, such as how to make pastry or a white sauce.
I learned some of these things with my mother in the kitchen when I was a child, but not all of them. So I understand the fearfulness that grips you just as you anticipate rolling out some pastry dough, say. We ate no desserts at home; my mother didn’t bake, nor did my grandmothers. I didn’t acquire early in life that lazy confidence, that instinct. When I cook a stew I have a sense, automatically, of whether I want to use red or white wine, of what will happen if I add thyme or bacon lardons. But when I bake, I feel I lack that instinct, though I hope I am beginning to acquire it.
And of course I have faltered, made mistakes, cooked disasters. I know what it’s like to panic in the kitchen, to feel flustered by a recipe that lists too many ingredients or takes for granted too much expertise or dexterity.
I don’t think the answer, though, is to avoid anything that seems, on first view, complicated or involves elaborate procedures. That just makes you feel more fearful. But what is extraordinarily liberating is trying something—say, pastry—and finding out that, left quietly to your own devices, you can actually do it. What once seemed an arcane skill becomes second nature. It does happen.
And how it happens is by repetition. If you haven’t made pastry before, follow the recipe for pastry dough on page 37. Make a tart. Don’t wait too long to make another one. Or a pie or a savory tart. The point is to get used gradually to cooking something in the ordinary run of things. I concede that it might mean having to make more of a conscious effort in the beginning, but the time and concentration needed will recede naturally and the effort will soon cease altogether to be conscious. It will just become part of what you do.
You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to?
BASIC ROAST CHICKEN
When I was a child, we had roast chicken at Saturday lunch and probably one evening a week, too. Even when there were only a few of us, my mother never roasted just one chicken; she cooked two, one to keep in the fridge, cold and whole, for picking at during the week. It’s partly for that reason that a roast chicken, to me, smells of home, of family, of food that carries some important, extra-culinary weight.
My basic roast chicken is the same as my mother’s: I stick half a lemon up its bottom, smear some oil or butter on its breast, sprinkle it with a little salt, and put it in a 400°F oven for about 15 minutes per pound plus 10 minutes.
My mother could make the stringiest, toughest flesh—a bird that had been intensively farmed and frozen since the last Ice Age—taste as if it were a lovingly reared poulet de Bresse. She, you see, was a product of her age, which believed that cooking lay in what you did to inferior products (and I expect she did no more in this case than use much more butter than anyone would now); I, however, am a product of mine, which believes that you always use the best, the freshest produce of the highest quality you can afford—and then do as little as possible to it. So I buy organic free-range chickens and anoint them with the tiniest amount of extra virgin olive oil or butter—as if I were putting on very expensive hand cream—before putting them in the oven. I retain the lemon out of habit—and to make my kitchen smell like my mother’s, with its aromatic, oily-sharp fog.
I can’t honestly say that my roast chicken tastes better than hers, but I don’t like eating intensively farmed, industrially reared meat. However, if you know you’ve got an inferior bird in front of you, cook it for the first hour breast-side down. This means you don’t, at the end, have quite that glorious effect of the swelling, burnished breast—the chicken will have more of a flapper’s bosom, flat but fleshy—but the white meat will be more tender because all the fats and juices will have oozed their way into it.
If you want to make a good gravy—and I use the term to indicate a meat-thick golden juice or, risking pretentiousness here, jus—then put 1 tablespoon of olive oil in the roasting dish when you anoint the bird before putting it in the oven; about half an hour before the end, add another tablespoon of oil and a spritz from the lemon half that isn’t stuffed up the chicken. By all means, use butter if you prefer, but make sure there’s some oil in the pan, too, to stop the butter from burning.
When you remove the chicken, let it stand for 5 or 10 minutes before carving it, and make gravy by putting the roasting dish on the burner (remove, if you want, any excess fat with a spoon, though I tend to leave it as it is). Add a little white wine and boiling water or chicken stock, letting it all bubble away till it’s syrupy and chickeny. If you don’t have at hand any homemade stock, a good-quality chicken bouillon cube, or portion thereof, would be fine. In fact, Italians sometimes put a bouillon cube inside the chicken along with or instead of the lemon half before roasting it.
ROASTED GARLIC AND SHALLOTS
My basic chicken recipe also includes garlic and shallots; this is the easy way to have dinner on the table without doing much. About 50 minutes before the end of the cooking time, pour 2 tablespoons olive o
il either into the same pan or another one and add, per 4-pound chicken (which is for 4 people), the unpeeled cloves of 2 heads of garlic and about 20 unpeeled shallots. They don’t roast, really, but steam inside their skins. Eat them by pressing on them with a fork and letting the soft, mild—that’s to say intensely flavored and yet wholly without pungency—creamy interior squeeze out on to your plate. Put some plates on the table for the discarded skins and, if not finger bowls, then napkins or a roll of paper towels. My children adore garlic and shallots cooked like this and sometimes, when I don’t want to cook a whole chicken for them, I roast a poussin instead and put the shallots and garlic and poussin in all at the same time. And if you want to make this basic recipe feel a little less basic, then you can sprinkle some toasted pine nuts and flat-leaf parsley, chopped at the last minute, over the food before serving.
If you’ve managed to fit the garlic and shallots in the pan with the chicken, you can roast a pan of potatoes in the same oven at the same time. Dice the potatoes, also unpeeled, into approximately ½-inch cubes, or just cut new potatoes in half lengthways and anoint them with oil (or melted lard, which fries them fabulously crisp). Sprinkle them with a little dried thyme (or freshly chopped rosemary) before cooking them for about 1 hour.
All of which leads us to the next basic recipe:
STOCK
Do not throw away the chicken carcass after eating the chicken. Go so far, I’d say, as to scavenge from everyone’s plate, picking up the bones they’ve left. I’m afraid I even do this in other people’s houses. You don’t need to make stock now—and indeed you couldn’t make anything very useful from the amount of bones from one bird—but freeze them. Indeed, freeze whatever bones you can, whenever you can, in order to make stock at some later date (see page 69 for further, passionate, adumbration of this thesis).
An actual recipe for stock would be hard to give with a straight face; boiling remains to make stock is as far from being a precise art as you can get. Look at the recipes for broth and consommé (see pages 83–84) if you want something highfalutin’, but if you’re looking for what I call chicken stock (but which classically trained French chefs, who would use fresh meat and raw bones, boiled up specifically to make stock, would most definitely not), then follow my general instructions. At home, I would use the carcasses of 3 medium, cooked chickens.
Break or cut the bones up roughly and put them in a big pot. Add a stalk of celery broken in two or a few lovage leaves, 1 or 2 carrots, depending on size, peeled and halved, 1 onion stuck with a clove, 5 peppercorns, a bouquet garni (see page xx), some parsley stalks, and the white of a leek. Often I have more or less everything at hand without trying, except for that leek; in which case I just leave it out. (I sometimes add a couple of discs of veal shin if I want a deeper-toned broth of almost unctuous mellowness.) Cover with cold water, add 1 teaspoon of salt, and bring to the boil, skimming off the froth and scum that rises to the surface. Lower the heat and let the stock bubble very, very gently, uncovered, for about 3 hours. Allow to cool a little, then strain into a wide, large bowl or another pot. When cold, put in the fridge without decanting. I like to let it chill in the fridge so that I can remove any fat that rises to the surface, and the wider that surface is, the easier.
When I’ve removed the fat, I taste the stock and consider whether I’d prefer it more strongly flavored. If so, I put it back in a pan on the burner and boil it down till I’ve got a smaller amount of rich, intensely flavored stock.
I then store it in differing quantities in the freezer. On the whole, I find packages of ½ cup and 1 cup the most useful. For the smaller amount, I just ladle 8 tablespoons into a freezer bag or small tub with a lid; for the larger, I line a measuring cup with a freezer bag and pour it in till I’ve got, give or take, 1 cup (it’s difficult, because of the baggy lining, to judge with super-calibrated accuracy). I then close the bag and put the whole thing, cup and all, into the freezer. This is why I own so many plastic measuring cups. I am constantly forgetting about them once they’re buried in the freezer. But, in principle, what you should do is leave the stock till solid, then whisk away the cup, leaving the cup-shaped cylinder of frozen liquid, which you slot back into the freezer. You may need to run hot water over the cup for a minute in order to let the stock in its bag just slip out. This is a useful way to freeze any liquid. Although it’s a bore, it pays to measure accurately and to label clearly at the time of freezing. Later you can take out exactly the quantity you need.
Poussins make wonderful, strong, easily jellied stock; it must be the amount of zip and gelatin in their poor young bones. So if ever you need to make a stock from scratch, with fresh meat, not cooked bones (in other words, the way you’re supposed to), and you can’t find a boiling fowl, then buy some poussins, about 4, cut each in half, use vegetables as above, cover with cold water, and proceed as normal.
I do not disapprove of bouillon cubes or other commercial stocks if they’re good, not overly salty, and, of course, leave no chemical aftertaste.
CELERY AND LOVAGE
One of the most useful things an Italian friend once showed me was how important even half a stalk of celery is in providing basenote flavor not just to stocks but to tomato and meat sauces, to pies—in fact, to almost anything savory. The taste is not boorishly celerylike; it just provides an essential floor of flavor.
In Italy, when you buy vegetables from the greengrocer, you can ask for a bunch of odori, which is a bunch of those herbs that breathe their essential scent into sauces and is given, gratis. Included in it will be one stick of celery. And I wish we could buy the same in our markets, let alone get it for free. You need so little of it when cooking—still, I’m gratified to know that a reliable product is in the market year-round.
In summer or even from spring onward, if you’ve got a garden or bit of yard, you can grow some lovage, the leaves and stalks of which fabulously impart the scent of a grassy, slightly more aromatic celery. You just pick a bit as you need it. I often use lovage as a replacement for celery; if I’m chopping some onion, carrot, and garlic to make a base for a shepherd’s pie or a thick soup, I chop in some lovage leaves at the same time.
LETTUCE AND LOVAGE SOUP
Naturally, you can use more if you want the lovage to be the subject, the actual focus. To make a lettuce and lovage soup, soften a handful of finely chopped lovage leaves along with 4 finely chopped scallions in about 2 tablespoons of butter, then add 2 shredded heads of romaine and let them wilt in the buttery heat. Stir in ½ teaspoon sugar and some salt, if the stock you’re using is not very salty itself. Add about 4 cups of stock—a light chicken stock, possibly from your freezer, or vegetable stock, homemade or prepared from best-quality cubes—or half stock and the rest milk. Gently simmer, uncovered, for about 10 to 15 minutes, then either blend in a blender or food processor or push through a strainer or a food mill. Taste again for seasoning. Add a good grating of fresh nutmeg. If you want a velvety cream rather than a light, pale broth, stir an egg yolk beaten with ½ cup cream, heavy or light, into the soup over the heat, but make sure it doesn’t boil. Remove from the heat and serve, sprinkling over some more chopped lovage leaves.
You can grow lovage from seed, but I bought a little pot from a garden center some years back and planted it; now each spring it grows back huge, its bushy, long-stalked arms outstretched, magnificently architectural.
You should grow your own herbs if you can and want to, but don’t spread yourself, or your plants, too thin. It is counterproductive if you have so little of each herb that you never pick much of it for fear of totally denuding your stock. In my own garden, I stick to rosemary, flat-leaf parsley, arugula, and sorrel. I like to grow lots of parsley—at least two rows, the length of the whole bed—and even more arugula. Some years I’ve planted garlic so that I can use the gloriously infused leaves, as they grow, cut up freshly in a salad. In pots I keep bay, marjoram, and mint. This year I’m going to try some angelica—to flavor custards—and Thai basil, so that I don�
�t have to go to the Thai shop to buy huge bunches of the stuff, wonderfully aromatic though it is, only to see it go bad before I’ve had a chance to use it all. I have never had any success with coriander (from seed). I can manage basil easily, but then I suddenly feel overrun. And I have to say, I find watering pots excruciatingly effortful.
As with so much to do with food, a lot of a little rather than a little of a lot is the best, most comforting, and most useful rule. You can always buy herbs growing in pots, in season, at good supermarkets and garden centers, and herbs cut in big bunches in specialist shops and at good greengrocers.
MAYONNAISE
Stock is what you may make out of the bones of your roasted chicken, but mayonnaise, real mayonnaise, is what you might make to eat with the cold, leftover meat. There is one drawback: when you actually make mayonnaise you realize, beyond the point of insistent denial, how much oil goes into it. But because even the best bottled mayonnaise—and I don’t mean the one you think I mean, Hellman’s, but one manufactured by a company called Cottage Delight (see page 461)—bears little or no relation to real mayonnaise, you may as well know how to make it.
When I was in my teens, I loved Henry James. I read him with uncorrupted pleasure. Then, when I was eighteen or so and had just started The Golden Bowl, someone—older, cleverer, whose opinions were offered gravely—asked me whether I didn’t find James very difficult, as she always did. Until then, I had no idea that I might, and I didn’t. From that moment, I couldn’t read him but self-consciously; from then on, I did find him difficult. I do not wish to insult by the comparison, but I had a similar, Jamesian mayonnaise experience. My mother used to make mayonnaise weekly, twice weekly; we children would help. I had no idea it was meant to be difficult, or that it was thought to be such a nerve-racking ordeal. Then someone asked how I managed to be so breezy about it, how I stopped it from curdling. From then on, I scarcely made a mayonnaise that didn’t break. It’s not surprising; when confidence is undermined or ruptured, it can be difficult to do the simplest things, or to take any enjoyment even in trying.
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