How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  FANCY CAKE

  Well, this is not so much a fancy cake as a plain one that looks partyish. It is just an almond sponge leavened with whisked egg whites and baked in a brioche or bundt mold. It looks wonderful, intrinsically celebratory, which is why I do it. Added to any plate of fruit—fresh or thawed frozen—it can be served after dinner or lunch. It’s no harder to make than a round cake; it’s just that the fancy mold (and try to find a nonstick one) makes it, illogically, look as if you’ve made about ten thousand times the effort. The brioche mold won’t work for a Victoria sponge because you need the whoosh of air supplied here by the whisked egg whites.

  6 eggs, separated

  1 cup superfine sugar

  2 cups ground blanched almonds

  zest of 1 lemon

  Preheat the oven to 325°F. Butter an 8-cup brioche or bundt mold (you can use a standard 10-cup bundt pan, but if you do, reduce the baking time by about 7 minutes).

  Whisk the egg yolks and sugar until you have a pale, creamy mass. It’s easier to use electrical equipment for this but not impossible with an ordinary, hand-held whisk.

  Fold in the ground almonds and zest. In another bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff. Add a dollop of egg white to the cake batter to lighten it and make it easier to fold the remaining whites in gently, which you should proceed to do with a metal spoon. When the whites are all folded in, pour the batter into the brioche or bundt mold and bake for 1 hour. The cake will rise and grow golden, but will deflate on cooling; that’s fine. When you take it out, give it a prod. If you feel it needs another 10 minutes or so (ovens do differ so radically from one another, it’s always a possibility), just put it back and don’t worry about the cake sinking. Think of it as accounted for.

  Let the cake cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then unmold onto a wire rack, immediately turn to stand the right way up, and leave to cool.

  A MOORISH CAKE

  I ate a cake rather like this once at Moro, a wonderful London restaurant with—as the name suggests—a Moorish menu. The proportions of the cake were slightly different (21⁄3 cups ground almonds, 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar, 8 eggs, the zest of 2½ oranges), but the method was the same. (Because of the increase in the batter’s volume, however, bake this in a 10-cup mold.) The real difference in the cake was the syrup, which was spooned over it as it cooled, leaving some more to be handed round on serving.

  THE SYRUP

  To make the syrup, combine the juice of 10 oranges, ½ cup sugar, and a cinnamon stick in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Let it bubble away for about 10 minutes or until the liquid is syrupy. Exactly how long this takes depends on the width of the pan and how it conducts the heat. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. If you need to cool the syrup quickly, stand the pan in a sink of cold water. And when it’s cool, taste, and add the juice of 1–2 lemons, depending on how sweet it is. Bear in mind that the cake will be very sweet, so it is important to keep a sour edge to the syrup for balance.

  Blood oranges, available at the end of winter/beginning of spring, make a spectacular, impossibly scarlet, syrup.

  BREAD

  * * *

  Bread is basic in the staff-of-life sense, but making it is hardly a fundamental activity for most of us. I don’t get the urge that often, but every time I have, and have consulted a suitable book, I have been directed to make whole-wheat bread. You may as well bake burlap. Why should it be thought that only those who want whole-wheat bread are the sort to bake their own? Good whole-wheat bread is very hard to make, and I suspect it needs heavy machinery or enormous practice and muscularity.

  Anyway, I give you this recipe for old-fashioned white bread, really good white bread, the sort you eat with unsalted butter and jam—one loaf in a sitting, no trouble. The recipe found its way to me at a breadmaking workshop given at the Flour Advisory Board in London by John Foster. He was an exceptional teacher, and completely turned me, a lifelong skeptic of the breadmaking tendency, into a would-be baker.

  BASIC WHITE LOAF

  Buy the best flour you can and use compressed fresh yeast, not dried, if at all possible. Before you get put off, you should know two things. The first is that fresh yeast is available at many supermarkets; the second is that you use the fresh yeast here as you would easy-blend or instant yeast—there’s no frothing or blending or anything, you just add it to the mound of flour. Be aware, however, that fresh yeast is extremely perishable; always check package expiration dates before buying it, and use it promptly—within two weeks if stored in the fridge. If you do want to use dry yeast, make sure it is easy-blend or instant.

  For a good white loaf such as even I can make convincingly—a small one, so double the quantities if you want a big loaf or a couple—you need:

  2¼ cups bread flour

  2½ teaspoons compressed fresh yeast, or 2 teaspoons easy-blend or instant dry yeast

  1 teaspoon salt

  ½ teaspoon sugar

  ¾ cup tepid water

  1 tablespoon lard, vegetable shortening, or oil

  So—tip the flour onto a worktop and add the yeast of whichever type, salt, and sugar. Pour over the water and bring together, working with one hand, clawing at the floury mess rather as if your hand were a spider and your fingers the spider’s legs. The spider analogy is apposite; you do have to be a bit “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” about bread making. As the dough starts to come together, add the fat and keep squishing with your hands. When the dough has come together, begin kneading. Do this by stretching the dough away from you and working it into the worktop. Rub a little flour into your hands to remove any bits of dough that stick.

  Keep kneading, pressing the heel of your hand into the dough, pushing the dough away, and bringing it back and down against the work surface, for at least 10 minutes. John Foster warns that after 5 minutes you’ll want to give up, and he’s right. He suggests singing a song to keep yourself going; I prefer listening to the radio or talking to someone.

  When the dough’s properly mixed—after about 10 minutes—you can tell the difference; it suddenly feels smoother and less sticky. Bring it to a ball, flour it and the worktop lightly, and cover with a plastic bag or sheet of plastic film and a kitchen towel. Leave it for 30 minutes.

  Then knead again for 3 minutes. Flour the worktop and dough ball again, cover as before, and leave for another 30 minutes.

  Flatten the dough to expel the gas bubbles. Fold it in half, then in half again, and again, and keep folding the dough over itself until it feels as if you can fold no longer, as if the dough itself resists it (rather than you can’t bear it), and then shape it into a ball again. Flour the worktop and so forth, cover the dough, and leave it, this time for 10 minutes.

  Then shape the dough as you want: either round or oval and smooth, or you can slash the top with a knife, or put it in a greased 9-inch loaf pan. Now, place on a baking sheet (or in its pan) and put it in a warm place, under a plastic bag, for 1 hour, before baking for about 35 minutes in a preheated 450°F oven. The trick is to lift the bread up and knock the base; if it sounds hollow, it’s cooked. Try to let the bread cool before eating it.

  IMPORTANT VARIANT

  You can do the final proofing in the fridge overnight (technically, this is known as retarding). This doesn’t cut out any work, but I find it makes things easier because I can do all the kneading when the children are in bed and before I go to bed (incidentally, it is, if not exactly calming, certainly very stress-relieving) and then bake the bread when I get up.

  You do, however, need to increase the amount of yeast for this. Exactly how much you need to increase it by will depend on your fridge and the nature of your yeast. This may not be helpful, but it’s true. Try increasing the yeast to 3 teaspoons if fresh and 2½ teaspoons if instant; then, if the bread over-rises when it’s in the oven, you’ll know to use less next time. When you get up in the morning, preheat the oven, taking the bread out of the fridge on its baking sheet as you do so. Le
ave it for about 30 minutes and then bake as above, maybe giving it an extra couple of minutes.

  If you’re going to start baking your own bread, what’s to stop you making something to go on it?

  LEMON CURD

  I must admit that I don’t use a double boiler, as commonly instructed, to make lemon curd. It isn’t because I’m brilliant and know how to stop it from curdling, or because I like living dangerously, but just because I’m impatient.

  Fill up the sink with cold water before you start—so you can plunge the pan in it if the mixture looks like it may be curdling—and just use a heavy-bottomed saucepan (with a heat diffuser beneath it as another safety measure, if you like) and keep stirring at all times. I use an electric citrus juicer; if you’re squeezing by hand, you’ll get less juice, so use 3 eggs and 3 yolks. The best way of zesting the lemons is with a zester, not a grater. If you use a grater, you spend hours with a knife trying to chisel out the stuck bits later.

  4 eggs

  4 egg yolks

  1½ cups superfine sugar

  14 tablespoons (1¾ sticks) unsalted butter

  4 organic lemons, zested and juiced

  Beat the eggs, yolks, and sugar together until the sugar’s dissolved. Add the butter, lemon juice, and zest and heat gently in a pan on a low heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens and grows smooth and looks, in fact, like lemon curd. If it’s in danger of curdling, dunk the pan into the icy water in the sink and beat like fury.

  Strain, if desired, and put into sterilized jars—if I’m in the mood, I boil the jars in water for 10 minutes before using them, though really I think the dishwasher sanitizes them perfectly adequately—seal, and keep in the fridge. This fills about two 8-ounce jars.

  PASSION FRUIT CURD

  Passion fruit curd may as well be made in half quantities (use 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, 3⁄4 cups sugar, 2 eggs, and 2 egg yolks), just because the amount of juice you get from each fruit is small, especially after you’ve removed the seeds. So, remove the inner pulp from 10 passion fruits and blitz it in the food processor for a minute before straining; this helps the seeds to separate from the pulp. Proceed as for lemon curd. Stir in the fresh pulp, including seeds of an eleventh passion fruit, before the end.

  See, too, the recipe for Seville orange curd on page 246.

  CUSTARD

  * * *

  In many ways, curd is just custard made using juice in place of cream. And I mean cream; I take the view that when custard originated, the milk used would have been much richer, much fattier, rather like light cream. So I use light cream or half milk, half cream.

  As when making curd, I fill the sink with icy water and am prepared to plunge the pan in and start beating like mad if the custard looks like it’s breaking. And I don’t even keep the heat all that low underneath the pan. If I do that, I lose patience and then suddenly turn it up in a fury—and then, of course, it does curdle.

  Better to keep the heat middling and stir all the time. With the quantities below, if I’m using my widest saucepan (8 inches in diameter), I find this takes 10 minutes. It’s always hard to explain when exactly custard becomes custard. I don’t find it particularly helpful to be told that it’s cooked when it coats the back of a wooden spoon, because it does that at the beginning. Think rather of aiming for it to be the texture and smooth thickness of good heavy cream. But you should, anyway, turn to page 339 to see my remarks about a revolutionary method for cooking pouring custard in advance in the oven, without stirring.

  REAL CUSTARD

  You may as well go the whole hog and use a vanilla bean. Otherwise, use vanilla sugar and/or stir in 1 teaspoon of good vanilla extract at the end. Or you can add 1 tablespoon of rum to the cream when heating it at the beginning.

  It is helpful to know, when making custard, that you need 1 egg yolk for each ½ cup of milk or cream. It’s harder to be precise about the sugar, as that really depends on your taste, what you’re eating the custard with, and whether it’s going to be hot or cold, but I should say 1 heaping teaspoon of sugar per yolk should be fine.

  2 cups plus 2 tablespoons light cream or half milk, half cream

  1 vanilla bean

  5 egg yolks

  ¼ cup sugar

  Half fill the sink with cold water.

  Pour the cream into your widest saucepan and add to it the vanilla bean, split lengthways. Heat, and when it’s about to come to the boil but isn’t boiling, remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 20–30 minutes.

  Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until thick and creamy and then strain the cream onto them, beating all the while, having swapped the whisk for a wooden spoon or spatula. To be frank, I find it easier just to fish out the 2 strands of vanilla; I don’t lose any sleep over the speckles of vanilla finding their way into the custard. But there is something to be said (for ease of pouring alone) for straining the vanilla cream into a wide measuring cup before adding it to the yolks and sugar. Whichever way you do it, wash out the saucepan and dry it well, then pour in the beaten-together yolks, sugar, and cream and, on a low to medium heat, stir unceasingly for 8–10 minutes.

  When the custard is cooked, even if it isn’t breaking, dunk the saucepan quickly in the cold water in the sink and beat well with a wooden spoon. If it looks as if it is curdling, then use a whisk or, better still, an immersion blender (or keep a blender jar in the fridge for just such eventualities) for some frenzied, violent beating here.

  Pour into a bowl to cool (you can reheat it over a saucepan of simmering water later if you like) or serve as is. Enough for 4.

  QUICK FOOLPROOF CUSTARD

  There is another way, and it’s adapted from British restaurateur Tessa Bramley’s book, The Instinctive Cook.

  2½ cups heavy cream

  1 vanilla bean

  5 egg yolks

  1 level teaspoon cornstarch

  1–2 tablespoons superfine sugar

  Put the cream into a saucepan. Split the vanilla bean in half lengthways and scrape out seeds into the cream, then bung in the bean, too. In a bowl, whisk together the yolks, cornstarch, and sugar. Bring the vanilla cream to boiling point. Remove the bean, allow the cream to rise in the pan, and then quickly pour it onto the egg mixture, whisking continuously until the mixture thickens. This takes about 10 minutes with an electric mixer, so do it with a hand whisk only if you’re feeling strong.

  Strain the custard and pour. That’s it. You can reheat it later, and if the custard looks like curdling during the reheating, then you can save it by quickly whisking in 1 tablespoon heavy cream. Serves 4–6.

  ICE CREAM

  * * *

  Frankly, if you’ve made a custard, you’ve made (bar the freezing) your ice cream; this asks no more of you, just of your kitchen. All that’s needed is an ice cream maker that slots into the freezer rather than a big expensive one that you plug in. Of course, you can just pour the mixture into a Tupperware bowl to freeze and keep taking it out of the freezer to beat the mixture and break up the crystals, but not only is this a bore, the ice cream just won’t be as voluptuously smooth as if it had been churned. Though in fact, the vanilla ice cream below is more doable than most without special equipment—one of the reasons I include it.

  BASIC VANILLA ICE CREAM

  The difference between custard and ice cream—the temperature at which it’s eaten—makes a difference to the amount of sugar you need; generally speaking, the colder you eat something, the sweeter it needs to be. All flavors, indeed, need to be intense when icy, which is why it drives me so mad when a dessert—or indeed any food—is kept in the fridge until the moment at which it’s served. The cold kills the taste.

  So—make the real custard above, only using 2⁄3 cup sugar in place of the ¼ cup stipulated, and using light cream. And I certainly wouldn’t worry here about the specks of vanilla; on the contrary, I’d welcome them. Indeed, scrape the seeds into the cream before adding the bean strips and don’t bother to strain the cream when you pour it o
ver the egg yolks and sugar; you want maximum flavor.

  When the custard’s made and you’ve plunged the hot pan into the cold water in the sink, beating well, then you can remove the bean. Let the custard cool (if you keep it in the sinkful of water, beating every now and again, it doesn’t take long) and then freeze in the ice cream maker according to its manufacturer’s instructions.

  If you want to make a creamier ice cream, you can stir 1¼ cups heavy cream into the cooled custard before freezing it, in which case use about another ½ cup sugar. And taste for sweetness once the cream’s in: if you think you need more, sifted confectioners’ sugar stirred in will dissolve easily enough.

  You can flavor this ice cream to make the flavor the Italians, who know about such matters, call crema. In place of the vanilla pod, infuse the cream with lemon zest and strain as above. I like lemon custard, too, and also custard made with cream infused with the zest of an orange.

  THE WORLD’S BEST CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM

  If you were only ever going to make one ice cream, it would have to be vanilla. But once you’ve lost your ice cream–making virginity, you have to allow yourself to be seduced by the world’s best chocolate ice cream. Marcella Hazan managed to procure the recipe for the Cipriani’s dark and smokily voluptuous chocolate ice cream for Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, and it is from that book that I reproduce it.

  4 egg yolks

  2/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

  2 cups milk

  3½ ounces semisweet chocolate

  ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, best available

  Whisk the yolks and 2⁄3 cup of the sugar in a bowl until thick and creamy, forming pale ribbons when you lift the beaters or whisk. Bring the milk to the boil and add it to the beaten yolks, pouring slowly and beating all the while.