4 large flavorful tomatoes or 1 small can (14.5 ounces) plum tomatoes
6 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium onions, halved lengthwise and finely sliced
1 eggplant, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced
5 smallish zucchini, halved lengthwise and sliced ¼-inch thick
3 large red bell peppers, cored, seeded, and cut into thin strips or chunks
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 generous teaspoon coriander seed, pounded, or ½–1 teaspoon ground coriander
salt and freshly milled black pepper
2–3 tablespoons basil or parsley, chopped
Skin the tomatoes: plunge them into boiling water for a few minutes and slip the skins off. Then halve them, scoop out the seeds, and cut each hollowed half in two crosswise. Or if you’re using canned, just squeeze the seeds out of the tomatoes.
Heat the olive oil in a heavy-bottomed wide pot—a round Le Creuset casserole is good here, or I use my deep Calphalon frying pan as, even though it isn’t heavy-bottomed, it doesn’t stick on a low heat. Earthenware dishes look authentic—the perfect Sunday supplement picture—but they do tend to stick.
Put the onions into this pot, whichever one you’re using, and cook until they’re soft but not brown. Then add the eggplant, cook for a minute or so, then add the zucchini, stirring them into the oil for a few minutes. Carry on like this with the peppers and garlic. If you feel you need more oil, pour it in.
Cover the pot and cook gently for 40 minutes. Make sure, though, that it is gently. You don’t want the bottom burning and the top steaming. Now add the tomatoes and coriander and season with the salt and pepper. Cook for another 30–40 minutes until all the vegetables are soft but not mushy. Stir in the basil or parsley and eat hot or cold. I think that cold it is rather good with chopped fresh coriander, too. And it’s excellent as a side dish, served tepid, with cold roast chicken or pork, or hot roast lamb. It keeps in the fridge for 5 days, but remember to take it out of the fridge well before you eat it.
MOUSSAKA
Turning back to Elizabeth David reminded me of the smoky, satiny wonderfulness of eggplant stews.
This is a Lebanese recipe, very different from the traditional Greek one of the same name. Boldly, strongly flavored, but mellow, the spices and seasoning dovetail into a perfect, aromatic whole. The recipe is adapted from a wonderful book of Lebanese home cooking by Nada Saleh, called, evocatively enough, Fragrance of the Earth. The pomegranate molasses (or syrup) stipulated here is found in Middle-Eastern or specialty food stores. If you can’t get baby eggplant, use large ones, cut into ½-inch cubes.
1 pound baby eggplants
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, sliced thinly
10–12 small garlic cloves, peeled and left whole or sliced thickly
¾ cup chickpeas, soaked, rinsed, drained, and precooked (see page 78)
1½ tablespoons pomegranate molasses (optional)
1 pound tomatoes, rinsed, peeled, seeded, and quartered
1½ teaspoons salt, or to taste
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon allspice
¼ teaspoon freshly milled black pepper
1 cup water
2–3 tablespoons parsley, coriander, or mint, chopped
Trim the eggplant stems. Peel the eggplants partially to look like old-fashioned hot-air balloons, leaving alternating lengthwise strips of peel and flesh each about ½ inch wide. In a saucepan, heat 3 tablespoons of the oil over medium heat and sauté the eggplant for a few minutes or until golden brown. With a slotted spoon, remove to a side dish lined with paper towels and reserve. To the saucepan add the remaining oil, the onions, and the garlic and sauté, stirring constantly, until pale in color and soft, about 5 minutes, adding more oil if necessary. Add the chickpeas and stir occasionally for 5 minutes, then add the pomegranate molasses, if using. Return the reserved eggplant to the saucepan and add the tomatoes, sprinkle with the salt, cinnamon, allspice, and black pepper, and add the water; bring to the boil and quickly reduce the heat to moderately low. Cover and simmer for about an hour. If you’re using a large, shallow saucepan, you may find they are ready after 45 minutes.
Serve warm or cold, but either way, sprinkle with the parsley, coriander, or mint, even if Nada Saleh issues no such command. Eat with lots of bread. It keeps in the fridge easily for 3–5 days.
Cooking this sort of thing in advance enables you to make more of it later. You could cook this moussaka on the weekend and stash it away for a quick midweek supper by pairing it with some noisettes of lamb, cooked for a few minutes on each side. For vegetarians, sprinkle with feta cheese when reheating.
These dishes can be meals in themselves or served as a vegetable accompaniment alongside meat. But if you want to do an all-purpose vegetable accompaniment to meat or fish, plain or fancy, petits pois à la française are useful. Everyone loves peas cooked like this, fragrant with the lettuce and syrupy with the butter.
PETITS POIS à LA FRANçAISE
For the lettuce, I use part of a head of romaine, if I’m shopping specially for it, but otherwise I’m happy to make do with whatever I’ve got at hand. I use fresh peas when I’m in the mood to shell them and when they’re available; otherwise, I use a package of frozen young peas. Don’t bother to buy fresh peas ready shelled; there’s no advantage here over frozen. If you are using frozen peas, you won’t have to cook them for so long. I tend to thaw them first and cook them for about 10 minutes. I like using chicken stock in place of the water, but this is not classic.
3 tablespoons butter
3 1/3 pounds peas, in the pod, or 3 cups frozen young peas
1 small lettuce or 8–10 leaves of a larger lettuce, shredded roughly
6 scallions, white and green parts, chopped
salt and freshly milled black pepper
1 teaspoon sugar
Melt the butter in a saucepan and stir in the peas, lettuce, and scallions. Let everything become glossy and buttery and then add ¼ cup of boiling water, season with the salt and pepper, and add the sugar; remember that the liquid will boil down, so the seasoning will taste more acute in the finished dish. You can always add more salt or sugar later, anyway. And you may need to add more water if you’re using fresh peas. Put a lid on the pan and stew gently for about 20 minutes. The peas should be tender and the juices scarce but thick. Taste for seasoning. Let cool, put in the fridge—for a couple of days at most—and reheat on the stove when you want to eat them. You may need to add a little butter and water when you reheat.
When serving, I like sometimes to strike an unorthodox note by sprinkling them with some freshly chopped mint. Basil is wonderful, too—to me it always smells of summer. Chopped parsley is always good.
The next recipe isn’t exactly a vegetable course, but it is such a perfect example of the cooking-in-advance principle that I don’t want to leave it out. Actually, you can eat it as a vegetable, but it has wider uses and applications, as you’ll see.
ONION MUSH
This may not be a very attractive-sounding name for anything, but what it aims to describe is wonderful, a kind of savory honey. Indeed, this sort of thing often goes, in restaurants, by the name of onion jam. What it is, simply, is onion cooked slowly and at a very low heat till it turns golden and soft, a mellow, caramelized gloop to be stirred into anything when you want depth and flavor. It does take a long time to make (but with a food processor requires hardly any effort to prepare), but you need to do pretty well nothing while it’s cooking—the odd peek, the odd prod. I make up a lot of this, then freeze it in quantity-labeled bags to be brought out when needed. You need to bear in mind that every 1⁄3 cup of the mush is roughly equal to 1 onion in seasoning power. Freeze the mush in 1⁄3-cup quantities and use each in place of an onion whenever a recipe stipulates one. In practice, I like this so much I use much more than any recipe calls for; 1 pound of ground meat, cooked with even 1 cup of this, is out-of-this-world wonderful: sweet,
creamy, deep-toned, and softly hearty. And I love it plain, too, on sandwiches, with steak, with anything. It’s OK for 2 weeks in the fridge, or I find it so, but it does make life easier to make a lot and then freeze it in those small, recommended portions.
1 heaping teaspoon lard or butter and 3 tablespoons olive oil, or 4–5 tablespoons olive oil
2 pounds onions, very thinly sliced
salt
½ cup Marsala
Put a very large, heavy-bottomed frying pan over low heat, using a heat diffuser if you’ve got one. You may need a couple of pans. Put in the lard or butter and oil or olive oil and, when it starts melting and warming up but before any heat emanates or any sizzles can be heard, add the onions, press down with a wooden spoon, then sprinkle some salt over. Add to the Marsala in its measuring cup enough boiling water to bring the liquid up to the 3⁄4-cup mark and pour over the onions. Cut out some foil and press it down over the onions, shiny side down, to form a tight, low lid. Then put on the pan’s real lid and cook, over very low heat, for a good 2 hours. Check after an hour; the mixture shouldn’t be hot enough for any burning or sticking. If using a heat diffuser and a sound heavy-bottomed pan, you may want to give it a third hour. When the onion tastes completely cooked, very soft, take the lid and foil off and turn the heat up high to let all liquid bubble and burn off. When it’s reduced and evaporated, you should have a soft, thick, caramel-colored mush. That’s it.
DESSERTS
* * *
It is perfectly honorable to buy a tart from a pâtisserie. But I have discovered that I love making desserts, provided I can do them in advance. What I hate is having to get up from the dinner table to start fiddling with a dessert just as the evening is getting underway and I’m beginning to relax. Anyway, most of the sweet things I like need to be made a good day or so before they’re eaten.
Any trifle needs a day to sit in the fridge or a cool place, everything melding, setting, the component parts becoming this one glorious whole. Here are three such.
RHUBARB, MUSCAT, AND MASCARPONE TRIFLE
I first made this, like so many good things, by accident. I’d cooked some rhubarb and had some juice left over and turned it into jelly (and see page 312). I then thought that the jelly itself would be mysterious and wonderful as part of a toned-down but at the same time expanded trifle. I had some mascarpone in the fridge, so used that in place of the custard and cream of an English trifle. The result is more of a dinner-party trifle, but not affectedly so.
If you’ve got a suitable glass bowl or dish, use that, as the colors are ravishing—the dusty carmine of the rhubarb, the soft green of the pistachios, the soft squish of cream between. I find that the proportions are best if you use a relatively wide and shallow dish, but if a bowl-shaped bowl is all you’ve got, then just prepare for deeper layers. It’s best when you use hothouse rhubarb, but I make it just as often with the coarser stuff. And as for the pistachios, you can sometimes buy them ready-chopped. If you do, keep a stash in a jar with a lid in the fridge; 2 or 3 tablespoons sprinkled over the top should be fine.
The first time I put this together, I made my own cake for the base, but I’ve since moved on to bought sponge layers. Feel free to use a purchased 8-inch sponge layer (you may not need it all), although I’ll give the recipe for the homemade version just in case.
The mascarpone layer in this contains raw egg; assure yourself that the eggs you’ll use are wholesome and remember that the old, ill, vulnerable, pregnant, babies, and children are advised not to eat anything with uncooked eggs in it.
FOR THE SPONGE
2 eggs, separated
1/3 cup superfine sugar
pinch salt
½ cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a small (2-cup) loaf pan well, then dust with flour, tapping to shake off excess.
Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar (preferably with an electric mixer) until pale and thick and creamy. The mixture should have the texture of extraordinarily aerated mayonnaise. Add the salt to the flour and then sift it (sift it twice if you’re using all-purpose flour), holding the sifter high above the bowl so you get maximum lightness later.
Whisk the egg whites with another pinch of salt until stiff, then add a dollop to the egg yolk mixture and sprinkle over a couple of tablespoons of flour. Fold in with a metal spoon. Then carry on, gradually and with a gossamer touch, using up all the egg whites and all the flour until you have a creamily combined mixture.
Pour the cake batter into the prepared pan and bake for half an hour or until the surface is springy and the sides have shrunk a little away from the pan. Gently unmold onto a rack and leave to cool. You can, of course, make this even further in advance and either freeze it, wrapped tightly, or keep it in the fridge for a day or so.
FOR THE REST OF THE TRIFLE
2¼ pounds rhubarb, trimmed and cut into 1½-inch slices
juice of 2 blood oranges or 1 large ordinary orange
1½ cups sugar
about ¾ cup sweet muscat wine (see page 459)
6 leaves gelatin or 1 envelope plus 2 teaspoons granulated gelatin
2 egg yolks
½ cup superfine sugar
3 cups mascarpone
1 egg white
½ cup peeled pistachios (about ¾ cup in the shell), chopped very fine
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Put the rhubarb into an ovenproof dish, squeeze over the orange juice, spoon over the sugar, and then either put the lid on or cover tightly with foil. Cook in the oven for an hour—opening oven and lifting up lid to give a good, sugar-dissolving stir after 30 minutes—until the rhubarb’s soft and floating in a pool of pink liquid. Remove from oven and let cool a little before straining into a 4-cup measuring cup. Reserve the rhubarb pulp for the time being. You should have around 3 cups. Add 3⁄4 cup of the muscat—or however much you need—to take the liquid up to the 33⁄4 cups mark. If using granulated gelatin, remove ½ cup of the liquid, sprinkle over the gelatin, and allow to soften. Transfer the mixture to the top of a double boiler, and heat over simmering water until the gelatin has dissolved, about 1 minute. Otherwise, soften the leaf gelatin in cold water till soft, about 5 minutes. Heat 1 cup of the rhubarby liquid in a saucepan until boiling point, then remove from heat. Squeeze out the gelatin leaves, if using, whisk them into the hot liquid, and stir. Then pour that hot liquid into the rest of the juice, or add the dissolved granulated gelatin, and taste to see if you want more sugar or, to sharpen, a squeeze of lemon. Leave to cool.
Now get your dish: I find this amount does enough for an oblong shallow container measuring 12 × 8 × 2 inches, which would feed 12–14 people, though I’d use the same quantities for 8 and up; for 6–8, I do half measurements and use a bowl 8 inches in diameter and with a capacity of about 5 cups.
Cut the sponge cake into very thin slices or split bought sponge horizontally, and line the bottom of the dish with the slices. Next, spread over the rhubarb pulp, but if it is very green and stringy, then leave this step out. Now, pour over the jelly and put in the fridge to set for 6 hours or so—poke and see, but I am happy to do this over a few days, and indeed I prefer it.
To make the cream to go on top, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar and, when pale and moussy (though it doesn’t have to be quite as moussy as for the sponge, above), mix it into the mascarpone. When all’s combined, whisk the egg white till stiff and then fold it into the mascarpone mixture. Spoon over the jellied sponge and put back in the fridge for 12–24 hours. An hour or so before you want to eat this, take it out of the fridge and, before serving, sprinkle with the pistachios.
PROPER ENGLISH TRIFLE
When I say proper, I mean proper: lots of sponge, lots of jam, lots of custard, and lots of cream. This is not a timid construction, nor should it be. Of course, the ingredients must be good, but you don’t want to end up with a trifle so upmarket it’s inappropriately, posturingly elegant. A degree of vulgarity is requisite.
I soak the spon
ge in orange-flavored alcohol (I loathe the acrid dustiness of standard-issue sherry), infuse the custard with orange, and make an orange caramel to sprinkle over the top; this seems to bring out the fruity egginess of it all, even if you are reduced to using frozen fruit. I’ve specified raspberries, but you could substitute blackberries (maybe sprinkling with a little sugar and using blackberry jam with the sponge), and I have used, too, those packages of frozen mixed berries. They’re fine, but they definitely bring a sponge-soaked reminder of summer pudding, the classic English berry dessert, with them. You can use a purchased 8-inch sponge layer here, as I do, but for those who cannot countenance such an unchic thing, I suggest some brioche or challah, sliced; indeed, loaf-shaped brioche or challah, both of which have a denser crumb than the boulangerie-edition or echt article, are both perfect here.
In a way it is meaningless, or certainly unhelpful, to give exact measurements; as ever, it so depends on the bowl you’re using. Think rather of layers: one of jam-sandwiched sponge, one of custard, one of cream, and then the nutty, toffee-ish topping. So use the quantities below—which will fill a bowl of 10-cup capacity or a 9 × 13-inch rectangular dish—as a guide only.
2½ cups light cream
zest and juice of 1 orange
½ cup Grand Marnier
¼ cup Marsala
1 8-inch purchased sponge layer or 4–5 slices of brioche or challah
about 10 heaping teaspoons best-quality raspberry or boysenberry jam
4 cups raspberries
8 egg yolks
½ cup superfine sugar
2 cups heavy cream
½ cup flaked almonds
1 orange
about ½ cup sugar
Pour the light cream into a wide, heavy-bottomed saucepan, add the orange zest—reserving the juice, separately, for the moment—and bring just to the boil. Take off the heat and set aside for the orange flavor to infuse while you get on with the bottom layer of the trifle.
How to Eat Page 15