How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

bacon rind (reserved from making the chestnut stuffing), if available

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 tablespoon Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

  1 tablespoon unsalted butter

  1 tablespoon Marsala

  Put the giblets, except for the liver, in a saucepan (that’s to say the heart, neck, and gizzard), add the bouquet garni, the peppercorns, onion, carrot, and celery, and bacon rind, if using, and cover with 4 cups water, sprinkling over the salt. Bring to the boil, cover, lower the heat, and simmer for about 2 hours. Strain into a measuring cup. Set it aside if you’re doing this stage in advance, or else get on with the next stage, which takes place when the turkey’s cooked and sitting, resting, on its carving board.

  Pour off most of the fat from the roasting pan, leaving behind about 2 tablespoons plus all the usual sticky and burnt bits. Put the pan back on the burner at a low heat and, in a separate little bowl, mix together the flour with, gradually, 3–4 tablespoons of the liquid from the saucepan. When you have a smooth, runny paste, stir it back into the pan. Cook for a couple of minutes, scraping up any bits from the bottom and incorporating them, but make sure the pan’s not so hot it burns. Still stirring, gradually pour in 2 cups of the giblet stock, or more if the mixture seems too thick, bearing in mind you’re adding the liver later.

  While the gravy’s cooking gently, leave it for a moment (though keep stirring every now and again) to fry the liver. To do so, melt the butter in a small pan and toss the liver in it for 1–2 minutes, then remove to a board and chop finely.

  Add the liver to the gravy. Add the Marsala and stir well, cooking for another few minutes, before pouring into a couple of gravy boats. Since first making this gravy, I have bought a blender and would now add a little more of the giblet stock, say 2½ cups, and blend the gravy after the liver has been chopped and added.

  POTATOES

  You should parboil and roast the potatoes as instructed on page 253, and use goose fat if you have any (it can now be bought from some specialty markets, especially at Christmas). Otherwise, vegetable oil will do. The oven the turkey is in is not hot enough for the potatoes. If you don’t have a double oven, you can leave the turkey to sit while you’re blasting the potatoes.

  BRUSSELS SPROUTS AND CHESTNUTS

  I know there are chestnuts in the stuffing, but I’d put still more of them in with the brussels sprouts. I don’t suggest you peel your own; buy them in cans or jars. What makes a difference in preparing this is the butter you add after cooking; don’t refrain from using the whole quantity. And season well with pepper and fresh nutmeg.

  For 10 people, buy about 1 pound sprouts and ½ pound canned whole chestnuts. Roughly chop the chestnuts so that some are cut in 2, some in 3; that’s to say, you don’t need them whole, but nor do you want mealy rubble. After you’ve cooked the sprouts—lightly—drain them and melt about 8 tablespoons (1 stick) of unsalted butter in a large saucepan. Toss the chestnuts in the butter and then add the sprouts. Add salt, pepper, and fresh nutmeg and coat well with the butter in the pan before turning into a couple of warmed bowls.

  You need other vegetables too, but if you’re a large group of people, it cuts down the possibilities of what can be done easily. Delicious though a bowl of sharp-edged-tasting shredded cabbage would be (see page 335), you hardly want to stir-fry a large amount at the last minute. But you do want crunch. Barely blanch a bowl of sugar snap peas. Or buy some already prepared broccoli florets and toss them, just cooked, in butter to which you’ve added a little sesame oil. And I know it’s untraditional, but green beans are not a bad idea. I wouldn’t mind one puréed vegetable as well, though it’s not crucial. You could prepare it much earlier, even the day before, so it doesn’t add too much horror. Puréed Jerusalem artichokes would be my choice.

  BREAD SAUCE

  This is essential for a true English Christmas lunch. For 10 people you need:

  2 small onions, each stuck with 3 cloves

  1 bay leaf

  4 peppercorns

  blade of mace or ¼ teaspoon ground mace

  3½ cups milk

  salt

  1½ cups fresh bread crumbs (see page 22)

  2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

  2 tablespoons heavy cream

  whole nutmeg

  Put the clove-stuck onions, bay leaf, peppercorns, and the blade of mace (or sprinkle the ground mace over) into a saucepan with the milk. Add a good pinch of salt and bring to the boil, but do not actually let boil. Remove from the heat, cover the pan, and infuse. I tend to do this first thing in the morning when I get up, but if you forget or can’t, then just make sure you get the infusion done about an hour before eating.

  Back on a very low heat, sprinkle over and stir in the bread crumbs and cook for about 15 minutes, by which time the sauce should be thick and warm. I have to say I don’t bother with removing any of the bits—the onions, the peppercorns, and so on—but you can strain the milk before adding the bread crumbs if you want to. Just before serving, melt the butter and heat up the cream together in another saucepan, grate over quite a bit of nutmeg, and stir into the bread sauce. Taste to see if it needs any more salt or, indeed, anything else.

  CRANBERRY SAUCE

  We always had cranberry sauce out of a jar at home, which is why I’m fond of it, as I am of horseradish sauce out of a bottle, too. But both, truly, are better freshly made. Cranberry sauce is so easy as not to be worth even hesitating about.

  1 pound cranberries

  1 cup sugar, plus more, if desired

  2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

  zest and juice of 1 orange

  1 tablespoon Grand Marnier (optional)

  Put the cranberries, sugar, butter, juice and zest of the orange, and Grand Marnier, if using, in a saucepan. Add ½ cup water and bring to the boil. After a minute or so’s fierce bubbling, lower to a simmer and cook for about 10 minutes, until the berries have popped and you have a thick, fruity sauce. Taste to see if you want more sugar, then decant into a bowl and let cool before serving. Don’t panic if it’s still fairly runny, though, as it solidifies on cooling.

  I have to say I have never yet made my own Christmas pudding, the traditional Christmas lunch finale. I will, I will. One day. But buying one seems an entirely sensible thing to do (see page 462). And I pass on a tip I’ve learned from Coping with Christmas, coauthored by Fanny Craddock, the renowned British TV cook: use vodka in place of the brandy for flaming the pudding. Apparently it burns for much longer. Fanny boasts of keeping the flame alive for 11 minutes on a TV spectacular she did at the Albert Hall.

  But I do make my own brandy butter, the usual pudding accompaniment, to go with my unashamedly bought one, the brandy butter of my childhood. I have recently taken to making an odd sort of semifrozen rum sauce, too, which is a variant of the eggy, brandy-spiked cream a friend of mine makes.

  BRANDY BUTTER

  This is what was always traditionally called hard sauce, but somehow it looks affected and quaint to call it that now. I add ground almonds—because my mother did, so it’s the taste I know, and because they give it a glorious marzipanny depth and velvetiness.

  You need the butter to be as soft as possible before you start, but not at all oily. Obviously, it makes life easier if you can make this in a machine, either a mixer or processor; I prefer the former.

  10 tablespoons (1¼ sticks) unsalted butter, soft

  2 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

  ½ cup ground almonds

  3 tablespoons brandy, or to taste

  Beat the butter until creamy, then add the sugar and beat them together till pale. Mix in the ground almonds and, when all is smooth, add the brandy. Add a tablespoon at first, then taste, then another and see if you want more. You may find that the suggested 3 tablespoons is far from enough; it is a question of taste, and what is lethally strong for one person seems insipid to another. You must please yourself, as you can’t please everyone.

  ICED RUM SAUCE
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  This is a sort of rum-sodden and syrupy egg nog with cream that’s kept in the freezer until about an hour before eating. You put it on the searing hot pudding and it melts on impact. It’s odd, but it works.

  ¼ cup heavy cream

  2 egg yolks

  2 tablespoons golden syrup (see page 460) or light corn syrup

  2 tablespoons dark rum

  Beat the cream until stiff. In another bowl, beat the yolks until extremely frothy. Add the syrup and rum to eggs, still beating. Then fold this egg mixture into the cream. You could serve it straightaway, as it is, un-iced; the plan, though, is to put it in the freezer to set hard and then transfer it to the fridge, allowing it to ripen for about an hour so that it’s frozen but beginning to flop by the time you add it to the hot pudding.

  MINCEMEAT

  Mince pies, I feel, are a bit like Christmas pudding: you may as well buy one. I once made my own mincemeat—adding quince in place of the more usual apple, and eau de vie de Coings instead of the brandy—but it was years ago and I’ve still got most of it lying about. I am not, therefore, inspired to repeat the experience just yet.

  What you can always do, if you want to go one step further than getting bought pies, is use about 1½ cups of the best commercial mincemeat you can buy and, a couple of weeks before Christmas, grate into it a cooking apple or a quince, stir in 3 tablespoons of rum, Grand Marnier, or eau de vie de Coings, add some chopped flaked almonds (about ½ cup) and the juice of half a lemon and half an orange each, and a bit of the grated zest of both. Then you’ll almost feel you have made your own mincemeat.

  There are two ways of approaching the making of the pastry for your mince pies: either make tiny pies of about 2 inches in diameter (which I think I like best) and use a plain pastry dough (see page 37), binding the dough with iced, salted orange juice in place of water, or make them the usual size, 8–9 inches in diameter, but out of almond pastry (see page 264). For the small pies, cut out circles of dough, put in tartlet tins, add a scant 1 teaspoon of mincemeat to each, and top, not with a round pastry lid, but with a star stamped out with a specially shaped cutter. About quarter of an hour in a 400°F oven should be fine. For the bigger pies, use an almond pastry base and top with a dollop of frangipane. Cook at 400°F for about 10 minutes, then at 350°F for another 15–20 minutes.

  LEFTOVERS

  * * *

  BUBBLE AND SQUEAK

  This dish, which consists of fried mashed potatoes and cabbage, has an unexpected buttery and nutty resonance when made with brussels sprouts. Though the sprouts have become something of a byword for the culinary awfulness of a British Christmas, my absolute favorite Christmas Day or Boxing Day supper is a bubble and squeak made by frying leftover, roughly chopped sprouts with an onion and some mashed potatoes in a pan, then topping it with a fried or poached egg, and maybe some crisp, salty bacon.

  And I know I said that leftovers must not be reformulated in any way, but here is the exception.

  ED VICTOR’S TURKEY HASH

  Obviously, one can’t be specific about amounts; who knows how much you’ve got left or how many people you are trying to feed? I give you this recipe, then, just as my literary agent, Ed Victor, gave it to me. Use whatever quantities and proportions feel right, taste good, to you.

  Sauté chopped onions and green peppers in a mixture of butter and olive oil in a large saucepan. Add diced turkey (white and dark meat) plus any leftover stuffing to the cooked onion and peppers mixture, and cook till warmed through. You can season it at this stage with salt and pepper.

  Then stir in pitted ripe black olives and toasted almonds. Finally, drizzle over the top some beaten eggs mixed with heavy cream, and stir till set.

  Optionally, you can finish the hash off with some grated Parmesan on top and brown it under the grill.

  Voilà! It’s usually much, much better than the turkey itself. In fact, it’s the only reason to eat turkey on Christmas Day!

  I don’t concede that last point, but we should allow a man his prejudices.

  POTATOES

  You don’t need to do very much to make cold cuts interesting, as long as the meat’s good to start off with. I suggest serving alongside potatoes, cut small and roasted till crisp. Cut them into about ½-inch dice, toss in a freezer bag with garlic-infused oil (see page 459) and dried thyme, and then turn into a baking pan, or just sprinkle with the thyme and drop in a roasting pan with 2–3 tablespoons hot goose fat. Roast for about an hour at 400°F. When the potatoes are done, remove to a plate and sprinkle with coarse sea salt. Work on rations of about 1⁄3 pound potatoes per person. And serve with two salads: one green, another of tomatoes.

  ROASTED WHOLE GARLIC CLOVES AND SHALLOTS

  My other regular standby is a plate, a huge plate, of roasted whole garlic cloves and shallots. When I’m eating hot meat alongside (as with the chicken on page 7), I don’t peel them, but with cold cuts I do. This is made easier if you blanch them first. So, preheat the oven to 325°F. And, figuring on half a head of garlic and ¼ pound of shallots per person, peel the shallots and put them in a baking pan in the oven, coated with some olive oil. They’ll need about 45 minutes and the garlic will need about 25, so give the shallots a 20-minute head start. Meanwhile, separate the garlic cloves, put them in a saucepan of cold water, bring to the boil and let boil for 2 minutes. Drain and peel the garlic; the blanching will have made it very easy. Just exert pressure on one end of the clove and it will pop out of its skin at the other. Put the garlic in its own baking pan, with some olive oil, too, and roast.

  When both garlic and shallots are cooked, mix on a large plate and sprinkle salt and chopped parsley over them. I know half a head of garlic each and all those shallots sounds a lot, but people always seem to eat incredible amounts of this. You can also eat them cold, with a little more olive oil and a drop or two of balsamic vinegar poured over them, along with a load of fresh chopped parsley and maybe some toasted pine nuts. The vegetables reheat well, too, if you stir them over a low heat in a heavy-bottomed saucepan on the burner, so don’t skimp.

  LATKES

  If you want to make latkes to eat with the cold meats, then—for six or so people—push about 4½ pounds of peeled potatoes through the grater disc of the food processor. Remove and drain in a strainer, pushing well to extract all excess liquid. Then fit the metal blade in the processor and put a peeled medium onion, coarsely chopped, 3 eggs, 1 teaspoon salt, some pepper, ¼ cup flour, plus a scant ¼ teaspoon baking powder or fine matzo meal in the processor and process briefly. Add the grated potatoes and give a quick pulse till the mixture is pulpy but not totally puréed. You should have a thick mass; add more flour if it’s at all runny.

  Fry the latkes in lumps of about 1 tablespoon each in a heavy-bottomed frying pan with hot oil bubbling away in it to a depth of about 1 inch. About 5 minutes a side should do it, maybe even less. Drain on paper towels. These are not great if they are left lying around to cool off, but you can fry them earlier, then reheat in a very hot oven, about 450°F, for 5–10 minutes. You can even fry them, freeze them, defrost, and reheat them—or so I’m told—but I am not the freeze-ahead type.

  And while we’re mixing culinary cultures, I should mention that cookbook writer Sameen Rushdie’s potatoes with whole spices are wonderful with the Christmas cold cuts. I don’t include the recipe here just because it includes nigella seeds, but I admit that I was inspired to cook this for the first time by just such embarrassingly egomaniac promptings. You might need to go to a specialty store for them; you should know, then, that their Indian name is kalonji; or you can buy the particular spices listed below—called panchphoran—ready mixed.

  PANCHPHORAN ALOO (POTATOES IN WHOLE SPICES)

  ½ teaspoon fenugreek seeds

  ½ teaspoon nigella seeds

  ½ teaspoon black mustard seeds

  ½ teaspoon white cumin seeds

  ½ teaspoon fennel seeds

  about 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

  2 pounds potatoes,
peeled and cut into small dice

  ½ teaspoon turmeric

  ½ teaspoon ground red chili pepper

  salt

  3–4 tablespoons freshly chopped coriander

  Mix together the whole spices. Using a wok or other nonstick pan, take the minimum amount of oil needed to fry the potatoes and fry them over high heat to start with, then turn the heat down and cover. When the potatoes are a little more than half done, add the turmeric, red chili powder, and some salt, closely followed by the mixed-together whole spices. Stir to combine and put the lid back on once again. When the potatoes are nearly ready (and you will have to be vigilant to ensure they don’t get too soft), take the lid off, turn the heat up, and stir-fry to enable any excess liquid to evaporate.

  Garnish with the coriander and serve.

  LENTIL AND CHESTNUT SOUP

  Another way of adding zip to cold leftovers is to serve hot soup first.

  I first had this aromatic, velvety, buff-colored soup at Le Caprice, a fashionable London restaurant, about ten years ago, and still hanker after it. This is, with some help from the restaurant, my interpretation of it.

  I have specified vegetable stock, and I tend to use vegetable bouillon cubes, but obviously you can use chicken stock if you prefer.

  Peeling chestnuts gives me a nervous breakdown, so for this, I use the commercially packed whole chestnuts (and so, I have since found out, does Le Caprice).

  2 tablespoons olive oil, goose fat, or butter

  1 small onion, minced

  ½ leek, minced

  1 medium carrot, minced

  1 celery stalk, minced

  1 cup red lentils

  6 1/3 cups vegetable stock

  8 ounces canned chestnuts

  2–3 tablespoons chopped parsley

  heavy cream, for serving

  Heat the oil in the pan, add the minced vegetables, and let sweat and soften. Add the lentils and stir, then add the stock. Bring to the boil and simmer until the lentils are very soft, about 40 minutes. Add the chestnuts and simmer for a further 20 minutes or so. Purée in a blender or food processor until smooth, adding water as you need. When you want to serve it, reheat and, at the table, sprinkle each full bowl of soup with the parsley and lace with the cream. Serves 4–6.