How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  Even in culinary terms alone there are grounds for satisfaction. Real cooking, if it is to have any authenticity, any integrity, has to be part of how you are, a function of your personality, your temperament. There’s too much culinary ventriloquism about as it is; cooking for yourself is a way of countering that. It’s how you’re going to find your own voice.

  One of the greatest hindrances to enjoying cooking is that tense-necked desire to impress others. It’s virtually impossible to be innocent of this. Even if this is not your motivation, it’s hard, if you’re being honest, to be insensible to the reactions of others. As cooking for other people is about trying to please them, it would be strange to be indifferent to their pleasure, and I don’t think you should be. But you can try too hard. When you’re cooking for yourself, the stakes simply aren’t as high. You don’t mind as much. Consequently, it’s much less likely to go wrong. And the process is more enjoyable in itself.

  When I cook for myself, I find it easier to trust my instinct—I am sufficiently relaxed to listen to it in the first place—and, contrariwise, I feel freer to overturn a judgment, to take a risk. If I want to see what will happen if I add yogurt or stir in some chopped tarragon instead of parsley, I can do so without worrying that I am about to ruin everything. If the sauce breaks or the tarragon infuses everything with an invasive farmyard grassiness, I can live with it. I might feel cross with myself, but I won’t be panicked. It could be that the yogurt makes the sauce or that the tarragon revitalizes it. I’m not saying that cooking for seven other people would make it impossible for me to respond spontaneously, but I do think it’s cooking for myself that has made it possible.

  NOODLES

  GARLIC, SCALLIONS, CHILI, SOY

  SESAME OIL

  Far too much cooking now is about the tyranny of the recipe on the one hand and the absence of slowly acquired experience on the other. Cooking for yourself is a way of finding out what you want to cook and eat, rather than simply joining up the dots. Crucially, it’s a way of seeing which things work, which don’t, and how ingredients, heat, implements, vessels, all have their part to play. When I feel like a bowl of thick, jellied white rice noodles, not soupy but barely bound in a sweet and salty sauce, I’m not going to look up a recipe for them. I know that if I soak the noodles in boiling water until they dislodge themselves from the solid clump I’ve bought them in, fry 2 cloves of garlic with some knife-flattened scallions and tiny square beads of chopped red chili in a pan before wilting some greens and adding the noodles with a steam-provoking gush of soy and mirin, with maybe a teaspoon of black bean sauce grittily dissolved in it, it will taste wonderful, comforting, with or without chopped coriander or a slow-oozing drop or two of sesame oil. I can pay attention to texture and to taste. I know what sort of thing I’m going to end up with, but I’m not aiming to replicate any particular dish. Sometimes it goes wrong: I’m too heavy-handed with the soy and drench everything in brown brine, so that the sweet stickiness of the rice sticks is done for, and there’s no contrast; I might feel, when eating, that the chili interrupts too much when I’m in the mood to eat something altogether gentler. These aren’t tragedies, however. And, frankly, most often I get satisfaction simply from the quiet putting together of a meal. It calms me, which in turn makes me enjoy eating it more.

  But cooking for yourself isn’t simply therapy and training. It also happens to be a pleasure in itself. As most women don’t have lives now whereby we’re plunged into three family meals a day from the age of nineteen, we’re not forced to learn how to cook from the ground up. I don’t complain. Nor do I wish to make it sound as if cooking for yourself were some sort of checklisted culinary foundation course. The reason why you learn so much from the sort of food you casually throw together for yourself is that you’re learning by accident, by osmosis. This has nothing to do with the culinary supremacism of the great chefs or those who’d ape them. Too many people cook only when they’re giving a dinner party. And it’s very hard to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour. How can you learn to feel at ease around food, relaxed about cooking, if every time you go into the kitchen it’s to cook at competition level?

  I love the open-ended freedom of just puttering about in the kitchen, of opening the fridge door and deciding what to cook. But I like, too, the smaller special project, the sort of indulgent eating that has something almost ceremonial about it when done alone. I’m not saying I don’t often end up with the au pair special, a bowl of cereal, or its street-princess equivalent, the phone-in pizza. But I believe in the rule of “Tonight Lucullus is dining with Lucullus.”

  BREAD AND CHEESE

  Eating alone, for me, is most often a prompt to shop. This is where self-absorption and consumerism meet—a rapt, satisfyingly convoluted pleasure. The food I want most to buy is the food I most often try not to eat—a swollen-bellied tranche of cheese, a loaf of bread. These constitute the perfect meal. A slither of gorgonzola or coulommiers sacrificed on the intrusive and unyielding surface of a cracker at the end of dinner is food out of kilter. Just bread and cheese is fine to give others if you’ve shown the consideration of providing variety. But I want for myself the obsessive focus of the one huge, heady baveuse soft cheese, or else a wedge of the palate-burning hard stuff, a vintage Cheddar or strong blue—too much, too strong. If I’m eating a salty blue cheese, its texture somewhere between creamy and crumbly, I want baguette or a bitter, fudge-colored pain au levain; with Cheddar, real Cheddar, I want doughier white bread—whichever, it must be a whole loaf. I might eat tomatoes with the bread and cheese, but the tomatoes mustn’t be in a salad, but left whole on the plate, to be sliced or chopped, à la minute. But, then, I love the takeout-shop equivalent of the TV dinner.

  MUSHROOM SANDWICH

  I am pretty keen on the culinary ethos of the Greasy Spoon, too—bacon sandwiches, fried-egg sandwiches, egg and bacon sandwiches, sausage sandwiches; none requires much in the way of attention and certainly nothing in the way of expertise. Even easier is a sandwich that on paper sounds fancier, a fab merging of diner and gourmet-store cultures. Get a large portobello mushroom, put it in a preheated 400°F oven stemmed and covered with softened butter, chopped garlic, and parsley for about 20 minutes; when ready, and garlicky, buttery juices are oozing with black, cut open a soft roll, small ciabatta, or chunk of baguette even, and wipe the cut side all over the pan to soak up the pungent juices. Smear with Dijon mustard, top with the mushroom, squeeze with lemon juice, sprinkle some salt, and add some chopped lettuce or parsley as you like; think of this as a fungoid—but, strangely, hardly less meaty—version of a steak sandwich. Bite in, with the juices dripping down your arm as you eat.

  SOUP

  FRANKFURTERS

  There are other memorable, more or less noncooking solitary suppers: one is a bowl of good canned tomato soup with some pale, undercooked, but overbuttered toast (crusts off for full nostalgic effect); another, microwave-zapped, mustard-dunked frankfurters (proper frankfurters, from a delicatessen, not those flabby, adulterated things from the supermarket). The difficulty is that if I have them in the house, I end up eating them while I wait for whatever I’m actually cooking for dinner to be ready. And my portions are not small to start off with. Two defenses, other than pure greed: I hate meagerness, the scant, sensible serving, and if I long to eat a particular thing, I want lots of it. I don’t want course upon course, and I don’t want excess every day. But when it comes to a feast, I don’t know the meaning of enough.

  Cooking for two is just an amplification of cooking for one (rather than the former being a diminution of the latter). To tell the truth, with my cooking and portion sizes, there isn’t often a lot to choose between them. Many of the impulses that inform or inspire this sort of cooking are the same: the desire to eat food that is relaxed but at times culinarily elevated without loss of spontaneity; the pleasures of fiddling about with what happens to be in the fridge; and, as with any form of eating, the need to make food part of the civilized context
in which we live.

  LINGUINE WITH CLAMS

  My absolutely favorite dinner to cook for myself is linguine with clams. I have a purely personal reason for thinking of fish, of any sort, as the ideal solitary food because I live with someone who’s allergic to it. But my principle has wider application: fish doesn’t take long to cook and tastes best dealt with simply, but because it has to be bought fresh needs enough planning to have something of the ceremonial about it. I don’t know why spaghetti alle vongole (I use linguine because I prefer, here, the more substantial, more resistant, and, at the same time, more sauce-absorbent tangle they make in the mouth) is thought of as restaurant food, especially as so many restaurants ruin it by adding tomatoes. I have to have my sauce bianco.

  The whole dish is easy to make. It is, for me, along with a steak béarnaise, unchallengeable contender for that great, fantasy Last Meal on Earth.

  15 littleneck clams, well rinsed and scrubbed

  1/3 pound linguine

  salt

  1 garlic clove, minced or finely sliced

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  ½ dried red chili pepper or pinch dried red pepper flakes

  1/3 cup white wine or vermouth

  1–2 tablespoons chopped parsley

  To further cleanse the clams of their sand, put them to soak in a sinkful of cold water to which you’ve added 1 tablespoon of baking soda. Allow to soak 1 hour.

  Heat water for the pasta. When the water comes to the boil, add salt and then the linguine. Cook the linguine until nearly but not quite ready; you’re going to give them a fractional amount more cooking with the clams and their winy juices. Try to time this so that the pasta’s ready at the time you want to plunge it into the clams. Otherwise drain and douse with a few drops of olive oil.

  In a frying pan with a lid, into which you can fit the pasta later, fry the garlic gently (it mustn’t burn) in the olive oil and then crumble in the red chili pepper or add the pepper flakes. Add the clams to the pan. Pour the wine or vermouth over and cover. In 2 minutes, the clams should be open. Add the pasta, put the lid on again, and swirl about. In another minute or so, everything should have finished cooking and come together; the pasta will have cooked to the requisite tough tenderness, absorbed the salty, garlicky, winy clam juices, and be bound in a wonderful, almost pungent sea syrup. But if the pasta needs more cooking, clamp on the lid and give it more time. Chuck out any clams that have failed to open.

  Add half the parsley, shake the pan to distribute evenly, and turn into a plate or bowl and sprinkle over the rest of the parsley. Cheese is not grated over any pasta with fish in it in Italy (nor indeed where garlic is the predominant ingredient, either) and the rule holds good. You need add nothing. It’s perfect already. Serves 1.

  COD WITH CLAMS

  If you are afraid of tackling fish in general and of cooking seafood in particular, just reading this recipe will show you how easy it is, but doing it is even better. Ease of execution is not the same as ease of attainment, of course; as with all fish, cod is ruined by overcooking. This is one of those simple but essentially last-minute recipes that is easier to cook for one or two (or, at a pinch, four) than a huge tableful of waiting people. But if you want to turn this into dinner-party food, choose a firmer (and more expensive) fish such as monkfish and strain the sauce to get rid of the stray bits of fishy detritus. I have nothing against cod, but it can disintegrate a little when it sits around.

  10 littleneck clams, well scrubbed

  and rinsed

  pinch cayenne pepper

  ½ pound cod fillet with skin, cut

  from the top end of the fish,

  ¾–1¼ inches thick

  scant tablespoon cornstarch

  1 tablespoon unsalted butter plus

  1 teaspoon, cold (optional)

  drop of oil

  1 fat clove or 2 smaller garlic cloves, minced or sliced

  4 tablespoons dry sherry

  2 tablespoons water

  1 tablespoon chopped chives

  1 tablespoon chopped parsley

  Throw out any clams that have remained open after cleaning. Put the clams to soak in a sinkful of cold water to which you’ve added 1 tablespoon of baking soda (this will help them disgorge sand) for 1 hour. Mix the cornstarch and the cayenne and dredge the cod lightly with it. You’ll have some flour left over; just chuck it out.

  In a wide, heavy-bottomed pan into which the cod will fit flat, melt the tablespoon of butter and the drop of oil. Add the garlic and cook for a bare minute, stirring all the time; above all, you don’t want the garlic to burn or even burnish. Put the cod in, skin side down (I don’t eat the skin; it’s just that I find the cod is more likely to stay in one piece if I cook it like this) and cook for 2 minutes, then turn and cook on the other side. Flip back to its skin side and throw in the clams, then add the sherry and water and put the lid on. Cook for about 3 minutes. Take out the cod, remove or keep the skin, as you wish, and put the gaping-shelled clams around it on your plate; discard any that stay shut. Then let the juices left in the pan reduce by bubbling away for 2–3 minutes. If you want—and I do—whisk in the teaspoon of butter, divided into 2 or 3 tiny bits. Pour the juices over the fish on your plate. Throw over the chopped herbs. Eat with thickly cut bread that’s good enough to be dunked without turning to pap.

  Serves 1.

  If you’ve never cooked moules marinière, you might balk at the thought—too fiddly, too unknown, too intimidating. But cook them once and you’ll see that actually this is scarcely cooking at all. It is easy to buy cultivated mussels that don’t require cleaning; then there’s just shallots to chop, with some parsley and garlic, and the rest is about applying heat and liquid. Try this once and you won’t need me to persuade you that it’s easy. After that you will automatically start thinking of this as something you can cook quickly, with little effort and to great effect.

  MOULES MARINIÈRE

  I like a lot of winy mussel liquor here, so use more wine to start off with than you might find elsewhere. Traditionally, the onion or shallot, garlic, and parsley are just simmered in the wine at first; then, after the mussels are in and steamed open, everything’s removed to the bowls, the liquid strained, and the butter whisked in. Do it that way, by all means, if you want to. More often I tend to do it as follows.

  4½ pounds mussels, preferably cultivated

  4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter

  2 shallots or 1 small onion, minced

  2 garlic cloves, minced or thinly sliced

  5 tablespoons chopped parsley

  1¼ cups white wine

  If using uncultivated mussels, wash them well. Scrape off any barnacles and pull off any beards. Throw away the cracked mussels or those that stay open after you’ve rapped rudely and insistently on their shells. (And when cooked, throw away any mussel that has stayed closed.)

  On medium heat, in a pot that will take all the mussels later and that has a lid, put in the butter with the shallots, the garlic, and about 1 tablespoon of the parsley. Stir about for a minute till the smell of the garlic rises and that particular, familiar fragrance wafts gloriously out of the pan. Add the wine; cook for another minute or so, with the lid on, but with the heat lowish. Then turn the heat up up up, throw in the cleaned mussels, and clamp the lid back on. Give the pot a shake occasionally. Look after 3 minutes and remove all the opened mussels you see, then put the lid on again and give them another 2 minutes. As you’ve got time while waiting for the rest of the mussels to open, I’d remove the empty shells of the already cooked mussels; it’ll just make the plates a little less crowded, but it’s hardly crucial. When the rest of the mussels are steamed open, remove them to your bowls (and you’ll need huge ones). Take the pot off the heat; let the juices settle for a moment so any grit that might be in the mussels sits at the bottom. Then pour the juices carefully over each bowl of waiting, gaping shells, leaving the gritty bits at the bottom. Sprinkle over the remaining parsley. On the table put anoth
er couple of bowls or plates for the empty shells and a baguette or other good white bread.

  Serves 2.

  As I say, I do think it’s a good idea to get into the swing of cooking fish. When I’ve got a lot of people eating, I might cook a fish pie (see pages 242 and 357), but when there’s just me, or two of us, I don’t mind a bit of the necessary last-minute flash in the pan. Fish, I think, is best fried in bacon fat, which you can’t easily buy. If the bacon you get is good enough, you can provide the wherewithal easily enough. I always mean to keep the fat left in the pan after frying bacon (I’ve given up grilling it; apart from anything else, I can’t wait that long for the grill to heat up), but the immediate pleasure of dunking a piece of bread in the pan to soak up the salty juices, the delectable grease, often prevents me.

  EXCEPTIONAL SALMON

  To cook exceptional but unfancy salmon for your supper, fry 2 slices of bacon, chopped fairly small (pancetta, cubed, would do as well), in a frying pan you’ve sprinkled with a little oil and then heated. When they’re beginning to go from crisp to hard brown, remove the bacon to a waiting paper towel. Immediately put a piece of salmon in the pan, sear on each side, then cook for a minute or so, depending on the thickness of the fillet, at a lower heat. Put together some green leaves—just lettuce, or varieties of, and some scallions cut into rings—and leave them be for a moment while you transfer the fish to a plate. Then squeeze some lemon juice into the frying pan and pour the juices over the waiting undressed salad. Toss the salad, add the bacon bits and toss again, and add to the plate with the salmon. Sometimes I leave the salad in a bowl, cut the salmon into pieces, and add it, tossing, with the bacon.

  If I’m feeling in the mood for excess, I boil 2 eggs for about 6 minutes (somewhere between soft and hard, yolk still oily but dense), peel and halve, and add them to the bowl of bacon and salmon salad. Or I take 2–3 tomatoes, briefly cover them in boiling water, then peel and seed them and add them in fat strips to the salad. This is one of the few times I’d consider eating tomatoes with fish. The following suggestion is another.