½ tablespoon light or dark muscovado sugar, or light or dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon salt, or to taste
2 tablespoons dry sherry
2–3 tablespoons chopped fresh coriander
1 medium red onion, diced, for serving
1 cup sour cream, for serving (optional)
Tabasco sauce, for serving
Place the beans in a large pot and cover with 2 quarts water. There is no need to soak. Add the bay leaves and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer the beans for 1½–2 hours till soft but not squishy, stirring frequently and adding more water if necessary to keep them well covered.
Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large, deep frying pan and sauté the peppers, shallots, and onions over medium heat until the onions are translucent, about 15 minutes. Add the garlic, cumin, oregano, and lime zest and sauté for an additional 5 minutes. Transfer to a blender and purée until smooth.
When the beans are almost tender, add the puréed mixture, sugar, and salt, or salt to taste, to the beans and cook until just tender, 20–30 minutes. Adjust the seasonings and add the sherry if you’re serving straightaway, but otherwise season and sherry the soup when you’re reheating it later, and you will also need to add water as the soup thickens on cooling. Put the coriander, red onion, quartered limes, and sour cream, if using, in separate bowls and bring these to the table with the Tabasco so that people can add as much of each as they want.
But the soup you have to make in advance, and a soup unjustifiably ignored today, is consommé. There is, for most people, a ring of bon viveur about the word consommé; it conjures up a world of napkin-arranged gentility and brisk effortfulness. Well, then, call it brodo. A beautiful, clear, flavor-infused liquid that is unsurpassable. And it’s strange that, in our gush and lust for all things Italian, that amber broth, which is such an ordinary and integral part of the Italian diet, gets routinely ignored.
I’ve come to the conclusion that our disdain is twofold. It is fueled in the first part by fear and the second by insecurity. The fear is culinary, the insecurity social. There are certain words that immediately make people feel the recipe they are reading is not for them. Stock, pestle and mortar, bain marie are just some such. And stock is, I think, the most terror-laden. But more than that, people are afraid that a plain consommé will be boring. For all our modern talk about valuing simplicity, we balk when faced with something truly, perfectly simple. We want the vibrant, the robust, the instant, the simplified—that’s different. A consommé strikes us—correctly—as a dish that belongs to a formal dinner. We are afraid that borrowing from the earlier canon of the elaborately arranged dinner party will mark us out as infra dig, out of touch, or just plain suburban.
A clear soup, made properly, is not at all without personality. It is uplifting, delicately but insistently flavored. But even chefs, with their splendid stockpots, are rarely sufficiently confident to serve an unadorned broth. Too often, these days, it comes fashionably spiked with lemongrass or pebbled with beans. I love all variations—and I do willingly admit that the point of a good broth is that it is a wonderfully deep-toned base for the bits you can float in it—and am happy with just about any innovation that has integrity, but an ordinary, straightforward consommé or brodo, golden poolfuls of the stuff, is a joy and a restorative—bracingly elegant.
It is time-consuming to make but not difficult, and a wonderfully mood-enhancing way of putskying around in a kitchen. You need to get started a good day before you’re planning to eat it—in order to let it cool and skim off the fat—but you can leave it in the fridge for 3 or so days and not worry.
The recipe here is from a book that should never have been allowed to go out of print: Arabella Boxer’s Book of English Food—subtitled A Rediscovery of British Food from Before the War—which was published in 1991. You don’t read cookbooks just for culinary instruction—I don’t—but also for comment, for history, for talk. And it is for all these that I want Arabella Boxer’s literary company. Here she is on the fashionable emergence of the consommé in the 1920s:
Roughly speaking, the more elegant the occasion, the smoother, or clearer, the soup. A consommé was considered the ultimate test of a good cook, and the ideal start to an exquisite meal. It might be served quite plain, or with some small garnish floating in it: small vegetable dice, a few grains of rice, or minuscule soup pasta. In a less conventional household a more elaborate garnish might be served separately: round croûtons piled high with whipped cream, or a bowl of saffron-flavoured rice, or even a jug of beetroot juice for adding, with cream, to a consommé made with duck and beef stock. This practice of handing round a number of elaborate garnishes separately amused the English. Part of its appeal was that by enabling the guests to assemble their own dishes it pandered to their distrust of what they described as “mucky food.”
CONSOMMÉ
Arabella Boxer adapted this recipe from June Platt’s Vogue column in the 1930s and prefaces it with the remark—pertinent here—that it is best made over 2 days, adding that “the original recipe calls for 12 pints of water, but few of us have pans that large. I use half that amount, filling up the pan from time to time with more cold water.” Stewing hens, which are most desirable for making the consommé, are difficult to come by but not impossible to find. Kosher or halal butchers usually sell them, or you may find frozen stewing hens. I don’t want to be too prissy, but I like to feel confident about the origin of the birds. I don’t want to eat some miserable fowl raised on fish pellets in squalor somewhere. Poussins can also provide wonderful stock, as I’ve found (see page 10).
The idea of cooking anything for 7 hours seems incredible these days. Consider using a heat diffuser—you want a gentle simmer, the odd bubble rising up. Avoid, at all costs, all the precious liquid’s ungovernable evaporation.
1 stewing hen or large chicken (about 6 pounds)
2½ pounds beef stew meat, cubed
2 large carrots, peeled and sliced thickly
2 medium onions, sliced thickly
2 leeks, sliced thickly
3 parsley sprigs
3 thyme sprigs
1 large garlic clove, peeled
salt and freshly milled black pepper
2 cloves
Wash the hen and put it in a large soup pot, add the beef, and cover well with 4 quarts cold water. Let stand for ½ hour, then put on the heat and bring slowly to the boil. Remove the scum, add ½ cup cold water, and bring to the boil again. Repeat this process twice. (The added water stops the boiling; each time it recommences, the action draws more flavor from the hen and beef.) Simmer very slowly for 1 hour, then add the carrots, onions, leeks, parsley sprigs, thyme, and garlic. Season with the salt and pepper, add the cloves, and let simmer for 7 hours.
Strain through a fine sieve, then through wet cheesecloth. You can also use a clean reusable kitchen wipe or a paper funnel-shaped coffee filter. Paper towels won’t work; they’re too absorbent and end up not straining anything.
Chill overnight and, when cold, carefully remove grease. Makes 3–4 quarts; serves 12.
A basic brodo of an Italian sort provides a fragrant liquid base for tortellini or gnocchetti di semolino (see below) or any other manner of culinary punctuation. This broth is cooked for less time than the one above and so one would expect it to be lighter, more delicate, and less suited to being served just as it is. It is also, preeminently, designed to make divine risotti.
ITALIAN BROTH
1 pound piece of beef flank
2 pieces veal shank cut 1–1½ inches thick
1 pound chicken wings, 1 chicken carcass, or 1 poussin
1 medium onion, halved, each half stuck with 1 clove
2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced chunkily
2 celery stalks, sliced chunkily
2 leeks, white part only, sliced
1 ripe tomato, halved, or 1 canned plum tomato, drained of juice
1 garlic clove, peeled
1 bay leaf
6 parsl
ey sprigs
6 black peppercorns
1 teaspoon salt
Put all the ingredients into a stockpot or large saucepan and cover with water by about 2 inches. Bring to the boil slowly—over medium heat—then turn down the heat so that it simmers gently. Skim the scum from the surface and keep an eye on it so that you can see when more scum rises to the surface and needs to be skimmed off again. Do this about 3 times in quick succession, then every hour. Let simmer—always very gently, and you may well need a heat diffuser if even at the lowest heat the broth bubbles overexuberantly—for 3 hours.
Remove the large pieces of meat and vegetable with a slotted spoon and then pour the broth into a large bowl (a wide one makes it easier to remove the fat later) through a sieve lined with cheesecloth or a clean, single-thickness reusable kitchen wipe. When cool, put in the fridge. When it’s set (overnight or after about 8 hours), skim the fat off the surface. I find wiping the top, firmly but not so brutally you break into the jelly below, with paper towels the easiest way of degreasing it. It keeps in the fridge for up to 3 days. Makes about 3 quarts.
GNOCCHETTI DI SEMOLINO
Somehow these sound rather better in Italian than they do in English—semolina dumplings have a heavy, puddingy ring to them and these are light, puffy things.
1 cup milk
½ cup semolina flour
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 egg, separated
4 tablespoons grated Parmesan
whole nutmeg
salt
Bring the milk just to the boil. Off the heat, add the semolina. Whisking constantly, hold the semolina in your fist and let a light rain of grain fall into the pan as you beat. Keep beating till you have a thick paste and then let the mixture cool.
Mix the butter with the egg yolk, the cheese, a good grating of the nutmeg, and a pinch of salt. Mash this mixture into the semolina paste to combine. Whisk the egg white with a good pinch of salt till stiff, and then fold in; you may find this easiest if you stir in a tablespoonful of whites quite briskly first to loosen the semolina. If it helps, too, do everything a few hours in advance up to the whisking and incorporating of the egg white. (Don’t keep the dough in the fridge.)
When the broth’s boiling, form little oval balls by scooping out bits with a teaspoon and drop them in. Cook until they swell and rise to the surface, about 10 minutes. Enough for 4–6 servings.
ROAST POTATOES
Some food won’t suffer if allowed a little resting time. By all means, parboil potatoes before you need to roast them. I have eaten for Sunday lunch roast potatoes that were parboiled on Friday evening. My one proviso here is that they shouldn’t be put in the fridge in the interim. I find potatoes go slightly powdery and heavy after they’ve been put in the fridge, even leftover mashed potato. Just leave them out somewhere cold, like a pantry.
If you are boiling the potatoes in advance, before roasting, rub over their surfaces (though gently—you’re not trying to make rösti) with the coarse side of a grater, just to rough them up before putting them in the hot fat. Cook in a hot oven.
SKINNING PEPPERS
Skinning peppers a day or so before you want to eat them is sensible even when you’re not planning anything elaborate. They’re better the longer they sit in their oily juices. So—blister them under the grill or in the oven and while they are still very hot, put them either in a plastic bag, which you tie tightly at the neck, or in a bowl, which you seal quickly with plastic film. The peppers then steam, and this enables the skins to be removed more easily. Skin them, seed them, and cut them into strips, being sure to catch the juice to add to the dressing. Make them glisten with some peppery glass-green olive oil. You can pound some anchovies into a paste and mix that with the olive oil now, or, just before you want to eat the peppers, arrange them on a plate, criss-cross them with the best anchovy fillets you can find, and dot here and there (not too neatly) with some stoned black olives, halved to form shiny little squished black rounds, like a teddy bear’s nose. Pour over some fresh olive oil and eat. I like the anchovies striating the glossy, flat mass of peppers rather than being actually part of the dressing, just because that can make the whole look rather muddy. Garlic and rosemary, added at any and all stages, are also to be welcomed. With food like this, you should just relax and do what tastes best to you. Peppers and anchovies are an incomparable mix and, pertinently, one that has consistently found favor, regardless of fashion, from the age of the hors d’oeuvres trolley to the balsamic-soaked present.
Some sauces can be cooked a day ahead and left in the fridge until you need them. If you don’t want a skin to form, then cover them flush with plastic film or a thin film of milk, if it’s a milk-based sauce. Obviously those egg-butter liaisons—hollandaise, béarnaise, and so on—need to be done at the lastish minute but a white sauce, béchamel, anything with a roux base, can be cooked and then forgotten for a while. Just reheat slowly and be prepared to add more liquid.
Pasta sauces can be made up to 3 days before you need them. At least, those pasta sauces that are not predominantly cream or butter can. Any vegetable-based sauce, even if it does contain cream, can be made when it suits you, which may well not be at the same time as cooking the pasta. Pasta itself obviously needs to be cooked at the last moment—unless, that is, it’s baked pasta. This is incredibly useful if you’ve invited quite a lot of people for lunch or supper when you’re not going to be at home very long before you want to eat. You can cook the pasta, the sauces, assemble everything a couple of days or so in advance, refrigerate and then give the whole thing about 40 minutes in a hottish oven when you want to eat it.
This is the only baked pasta dish I go in for much—it’s mellow, comforting, but resonantly flavored as well; you’re not swamped in puddingy béchamel, as you can be. My children love it, incidentally, and as you can feed a good 8 people (more if children are included in the numbers), this makes it a good filler for one of those low-key mixed-generation meals, when you’re too busy with everything else you have to do to be absolutely attentive in the kitchen before you eat.
BAKED VEAL AND HAM PASTA
The name I give it evokes, and is meant to, the old-fashioned flavors of those British hot-water-crust veal-and-ham pies: picnic food to be eaten on scratchy rugs; this is the winter, indoors variety. But it’s very garlicky, too, so it’s not a complete transposition of those pies’ mild, sausagy taste. Boiling the garlic not only makes it easier to peel but reduces any latent acridness, producing, later, warmth rather than smoky heat. The ham in question is pancetta (or chopped bacon, if you prefer) but if you’ve got some cold cooked ham in the fridge, do use that. Cut it into small cubes and stir it into the quantity of béchamel the pasta is coated in later.
6 garlic cloves
3 ounces pancetta, chopped roughly
2 celery stalks, chopped roughly
1 medium onion, quartered
1 carrot, peeled and cut into chunks
good handful fresh parsley
2 heaping tablespoons lard or 2 tablespoons olive oil
¼ teaspoon paprika
¼ teaspoon ground mace
3 tablespoons Marsala
¾ pound veal, ground
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, plus more for greasing and dotting
2/3 cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour
pinch mace, plus ¼ teaspoon
salt and freshly milled white or black pepper
6 cups milk
5 bay leaves
whole nutmeg
4 ounces Parmesan, freshly grated, plus more for grating over later
1 pound penne or rigatoni
Put the garlic cloves in a small saucepan, cover with cold water, bring to the boil, and boil for 7 minutes. Drain. Put the pancetta into a food processor. Peel the garlic (just press them and the cloves will pop out of their skins) and throw into the processor with the celery, onion, carrot, and parsley, and pulse until finely chopped. Melt the lar
d or oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan and then, when it’s hot, add the vegetable mixture. Stir well over highish heat for a minute or so, adding the paprika, mace, and Marsala, then turn the heat down to low and cook, stirring regularly to make sure it doesn’t stick, for 15 minutes.
While this is happening, put copious water on to boil for the pasta.
When the 15 minutes are up, briefly turn the heat back to high, add the ground veal, and turn well for a minute or so before, again, turning down to low for 15 minutes. While this is cooking, get on with the béchamel. Melt the butter in a large saucepan, stir in the flour and pinch of mace, and cook for a couple of minutes, still stirring, adding a fat pinch of salt and some pepper. Off the heat, slowly stir in the milk. I don’t bother to heat the milk up; there’s too much of it.
When all the milk’s smoothly amalgamated, add the bay leaves and put back on a medium heat, stirring, until the sauce cooks and thickens, then reduce the heat to low. Although you want to cook this for a good long time—about 20 minutes—so it’s velvety, bear in mind that this is meant to be a thin, runny sauce. Toward the end of cooking time, taste for salt (though remember, you will be adding quite a bit of salty Parmesan later) and pepper and add, too, the remaining mace and grate in some nutmeg. When the sauce is cooked and the flouriness gone—taste after 12 minutes if you’re using 00 flour—turn off the heat and stir in the Parmesan, beating well with your wooden spoon to make sure all is smoothly incorporated. You should by now have started cooking the pasta. You want it slightly undercooked, as it will be cooked again in the oven. On the packages of penne I have at home, the instructions are to cook for 13 minutes; for this recipe, I drain them after 10.
Butter a lasagne dish or any form of shallowish casserole and pour in about a third of the béchamel; don’t bother to measure, just make a rough estimate by eye. Add the drained pasta and turn well to coat. Add the veal and toss well again, then another third of the béchamel and give a good final mix, adding more salt and pepper, if necessary. Level the pasta in the pan and pour over the last third of béchamel. Let cool, then put, covered, in the fridge for a couple of days or so before baking, though of course you can put it straightaway in the oven to bake if you want (in which case it will need less time than otherwise mentioned).
How to Eat Page 12