PECORINO AND PEARS
I cook the chicken in the oven just because I find it the most relaxing way to deal with it, but if you prefer to grill or sauté it, then do so.
If it’s summer or an approximation of it, then for dessert provide a lemony, crumbly wedge of pecorino and a bowlful of pears. Get the pears from a good greengrocer’s rather than the supermarket and buy them on the Wednesday before if possible (Thursday at the latest) to be sure they aren’t tooth-breakingly hard.
The chocolate pudding wouldn’t taste right in high heat, but in more customary warmth it’ll still work wonderfully.
LEMON CHICKEN
I prefer to go to my butcher for a proper, free-range bird, which he will then cut up into portions. I like the bird to be cut up small.
6 tablespoons olive oil, plus more, if needed
1 large chicken (about 5 pounds) cut into 8 or more pieces, or 2 small chickens (about 3 pounds each) cut into 6 pieces each
zest and juice of 1 large lemon or 2 small
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1¼ cups white wine, plus more, if needed
salt and freshly milled black pepper
Preheat oven to 425°F.
Put a large baking dish on the stove (one big enough to hold the chicken, which should fit more or less over two burners) and pour in the olive oil. If you can’t fit the chicken pieces in one pan and are therefore cooking them in two, you may need more oil. Turn the chicken in the hot oil for a few minutes until the pieces are golden. Add the lemon zest and oregano. Pour over the wine—you may need more—season with the salt and pepper; let it bubble up a bit, then add 1¼ cups water. Put in the oven and cook for about 30 minutes, more if the chicken pieces are large. (Check individual pieces; you may want to remove the breast portions first.) Arrange the chicken pieces on a plate that can go back in the oven while you make the sauce. Turn off the oven.
AVGOLEMONO
To make the sauce, first pour the chickeny juices into a measuring cup. You need about 1 cup. You can make avgolemono in a saucepan, but you may feel safer using a double boiler, the top over (but not touching) gently boiling water in the bottom.
In this pan put 3 eggs and lemon juice and start whisking. Keep whisking until the mixture’s frothy. Pour in gradually, still whisking, the chicken cooking juices. It shouldn’t curdle, but if you’re feeling nervous (or even if you’re not, for it’ll stop you needing to), put a bowl or pan of cold water next to you so that you can plunge the avgolemono pan in if it begins to look as if it’s thinking of overheating and curdling. It’s ready when it’s turned into a thin custardy substance.
Taste for salt and pepper and add more if needed. Pour some of the sauce over the chicken portions and put the rest in a small pitcher or leave it in its bowl and just put a ladle into it. You’ll have a nice big bowlful of it.
STICKY CHOCOLATE PUDDING
This is a variant on lemon surprise pudding, in which the mixture divides on cooking to produce a sponge above the thick lemony sauce that forms below. Indeed, it is known in my house as Lemon Surprise Pudding, the surprise being that it’s chocolate.
Although I didn’t actually eat this as a child, it is heady with reminders of childhood foods: the hazelnuts in the sponge bring back memories of Nutella, the thick, dark, fudgy sauce of chocolate spread. The proportions below are geared toward 6 but easily feed 8. It’s heavenly with fridge-cold heavy cream poured over it.
It is also child’s play to make. Choose good cocoa and good chocolate and stick carefully to the exact measurements. (You can, though, use 12⁄3 cups flour in place of the 1¼ cups flour and ½ cup ground nuts, if you prefer, increasing the amount of baking powder needed to 1½ teaspoons.) Use one of those standard white soufflé dishes 8 inches in diameter, or a shallow square 12-inch pan. If you’ve got only a single oven, it makes sense to use the shallow dish; it will take less time to cook.
FOR THE PUDDING
1¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch salt
¼ cup good unsweetened cocoa powder
½ cup ground hazelnuts
1 2/3 cups confectioners’ sugar
2½ ounces best semisweet chocolate, chopped roughly, or chocolate morsels
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1 egg
¾ cup milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
FOR THE SAUCE
1 cup dark muscovado sugar or dark brown sugar
1¼ cups unsweetened cocoa powder
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Sift the flour, baking powder, salt, and cocoa into a bowl, stir in the hazelnuts and the sugar, then add the chocolate. Whisk together the melted butter, egg, milk, and vanilla and pour into the dry ingredients. Stir well, so it’s all thoroughly mixed, then spoon into the buttered dish.
Now for the sauce—not that you make it yourself (the cooking does that for you), but you have to get the ingredients together. Bring 2½ cups of water to a boil. Mix the brown sugar and cocoa and sprinkle over the top of the pudding mixture in the dish. Pour the boiled water up to the 2-cup mark of a measuring cup, then pour over the pudding. Put the water-drenched pudding directly into the oven and leave it there for about 50 minutes. Don’t open the door until a good 45 minutes have passed, and then press; if it feels fairly firm and springy to the touch, it’s ready. If you’re using the shallow dish, it’ll be ready in 35–40 minutes.
Remove from the oven and serve immediately, spooning from the dish and making sure everyone gets both sauce and sponge.
AUTUMN LUNCH FOR 6
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RAGOÛT OF WILD MUSHROOMS WITH OVEN-COOKED POLENTA
CHEESES WITH BITTER SALAD
STEWED APPLES WITH CINNAMON CRÈME FRAÎCHE
You want mushrooms as fresh as you can get them. If you buy them in advance they’ll probably be lying, ever more limp and bruised and unappetizingly damp, in their brown paper bag in the fridge and you’ll get no pleasure at all out of the prospect of cooking them. So do your shopping on the morning before lunch.
This recipe for wild mushroom ragoût is adapted from a recipe in From Anna’s Kitchen by Anna Thomas. I was sent it one year among many other books under review and was surprised to find myself utterly seduced by it. Any description undersells it; it might be described, showily, as a gourmet vegetarian cookbook. But it has none of the worthiness or pretentiousness that might seem to suggest. It is fresh and alive and speaks directly and intimately to the reader. I could take so many recipes from it here, as I so often cook, if not exactly from it, then inspired by it (which is more telling).
STEWED APPLES
This ragoût is a sort of woodsy stew, odoriferously autumnal. As for the cheese afterward, I’d think about a really fulsome camembert or ammoniac gorgonzola, either paired with stringently dressed Belgian endive. Deal with the apples by peeling, coring, and segmenting about 4 Gravensteins or other cooking apples. Put them in a saucepan, cover with 5–6 tablespoons sugar (or to taste), a tablespoon of butter, the juice (and perhaps the zest) of 1 orange and 2 cloves, and/or a cinnamon stick. Cook, covered, on a low heat till the fruit is soft but not pulpy beyond recognition. Eat with crème fraîche sprinkled with cinnamon or bolstered with a whipped-in slug of Calvados. I love it with plain, sharp yogurt and maybe some soft brown sugar.
MUSHROOM RAGOÛT
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus additional, if needed
1 medium onion, minced
1 medium red onion, sliced thinly
2 celery stalks, sliced thinly
3 garlic cloves, chopped
salt and freshly milled black pepper
¾ cup dry red wine
1/3 cup Marsala
1 bay leaf
½ teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1 bay leaf
½ teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1¾ pounds fresh wild mushrooms, or a combination of wild and cult
ivated, wiped, stemmed if necessary, and sliced or cut into generous pieces
pinch cayenne
1 tablespoon Italian 00 or all-purpose flour
2 cups vegetable stock, heated
3 tablespoon chopped parsley
Heat 1 teaspoon of the oil and 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large nonstick frying pan or similar pan and sauté the onions and celery in it, stirring often, until they begin to soften. I sometimes find I have to add more butter. Add the garlic and some salt and pepper and continue cooking until the onions and garlic begin to brown. Add half the red wine and half the Marsala, the bay leaf, and thyme. Turn down the heat and simmer gently until the wine cooks away.
Meanwhile, in another large nonstick pan, heat the remaining 2 teaspoons oil with 2 tablespoons of the butter—again adding more butter if you like, though if you’re patient it shouldn’t be necessary. Sauté the mushrooms with a sprinkle of salt and the cayenne until their excess liquid cooks away and they begin to color. Add the remaining wine and Marsala, lower the heat, and allow the wine to simmer down. Then add the onions to the mushrooms.
Put the remaining tablespoon of butter in the pan in which you’ve sautéed the onions and let it melt. Stir in the flour and keep stirring over medium heat for a few minutes as it turns golden. Whisk in the hot stock and continue whisking as it thickens. Add this sauce to the mushrooms and onions, along with the parsley.
Simmer everything together very gently for about 10 more minutes. Serve with steamed or boiled rice—and I mostly just do a buttery pile of basmati—or polenta.
OVEN-COOKED POLENTA
This is the polenta senza bastone (the bastone is the here-unneeded wooden baton traditionally used to stir the polenta while it cooks) from Anna del Conte’s Classic Food of Northern Italy. It’s much less work than traditionally cooked polenta and infinitely preferable to the quick-cook stuff.
Bring 2 quarts water or stock to simmering point. Remove the pan from the heat and add 2 teaspoons salt. If you are using bouillon cubes (you’ll need 4), here’s where you add them to the water, in which case you probably won’t need the salt.
Gradually add 2½ cups polenta or, more properly speaking, cornmeal, letting it fall in a fine rain through your fingers while you stir rapidly with a long wooden spoon. Return the pan to the heat and bring slowly to the boil, stirring constantly in the same direction. Boil for 5 minutes, still stirring. Now transfer the polenta to a buttered oven dish. I use an old and battered oval enamel casserole, but it doesn’t much matter and you’ll be able to see easily which of your various dishes will be the right size just by looking at the grainy mass. Cover with buttered foil and cook in a preheated 350°F oven for 1 hour.
CHEESES WITH BITTER SALAD
As for cheeses, keep in mind those that will crumble or meld into the salad on the plate. You are not looking for a cheese-and-crackers kind of assortment. The salad should be made mostly of Belgian endive. Throw in one of those packages of mixed greens (or maybe just half a package) for ballast if you want and make a strong lemony, oily dressing thickened either with 2 pounded anchovy fillets or 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard mixed with a quick grating of orange zest.
And maybe put the apples and crème fraîche on the table at the same time as the cheese and salad.
I like aromatic, unstructured food: stews, braises, soupy mixtures of vegetables to be eaten with warm mounds of rice, couscous, pasta, or just thick wedges of bread.
A thick, squashy root vegetable stew with couscous, an earthy, grainy, aromatic braise of carrots, turnips, parsnips, and squash, is the ideal soothing weekend lunch. Abroad (in Paris, mostly) I’ve eaten this with lamb, but I don’t like the greasiness when I make it myself, unless I boil up the lamb (2–3 pounds neck pieces, generously covered with salted water) the day before and skim the fat off when cool (and see recipe for Cawl on page 94). That way you get all the glorious sweetness of the meat and the well-cooked stringiness (well, let’s be frank here) that is so characteristic of this kind of stew. (See below, too, for a chicken couscous recipe.)
BOLSTERING WEEKEND LUNCH FOR 6
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GOLDEN ROOT-VEGETABLE COUSCOUS OR CHICKEN STEW WITH COUSCOUS
COCONUT crÈME CARAMEL
I think of this as particularly good for weekend lunch if you’ve been feeling rather fragile; the food is soothing and so, too, are the rhythms of its preparation.
You do need to do a couple of things for this in advance—put the chickpeas in to soak (see page 78) and make the crème caramel. Neither of these activities should be too demanding even on a Friday for a Saturday lunch (morning for the chickpeas, evening for the crème caramel) after a long week at work. If you hate coconut (although the taste of it is subtle rather than pronounced here), then substitute for the coconut milk the same quantity of regular milk. But after the warm spiciness of the stew, the lightly aromatic coconut custard is just right; it offers a gentle but resolute ending to the meal.
Each time I do this I use different vegetables in differing quantities, but if that sort of permissiveness makes you feel unsafe, then follow this recipe word for word the first time and then gradually, as you do it and redo it, you will find you loosen up. Don’t think less of yourself for following orders to the letter. It takes time to learn when you can make free with a recipe and when it’s best to rein in the improvisatory spirit. Most of my mistakes have been as a result of fiddling about with a recipe the first time I’ve cooked it, rather than doing it as written, and then next time seeing where I could improve or change or develop it.
I’ve specified already ground spices here; it is certainly better if you dry-fry and then grind your own, but actually I resort mostly to the dried ones when I make this, and I wanted to be honest rather than high-minded here. I do buy good fresh spices, though.
Use vegetable stock if you want this to be vegetarian; otherwise use any stock—chicken, beef, lamb—that you want. And the stock doesn’t need to be strong; if you’re using bouillon cubes or cartons of stock, then use extra water to dilute them.
This recipe requires a lot of preparation, albeit of a basic and undemanding sort. I like a drink beside me and someone to talk to (or the radio to listen to). I peel, chop, assemble solidly—and then that’s it.
I use my couscoussier, but a big, deep pot will do. Obviously, you will need more or less liquid depending on the proportions of the cooking vessel, so be prepared to be flexible. Do remember that you can use extra water; there’s no need to have more stock on hand. Use a couple of saucepans if you don’t have anything very capacious.
Chief among the virtues of couscous is the speed with which it is cooked. I love it for its sweet, soft graininess, which needs nothing more than a nut or two of butter by way of dressing. Try to resist the modern tendency to use oil instead. When I make couscous just for myself or for the children, I often cook it just by immersing it in an equal volume of hot stock, but here I would soak, then steam it.
For serving, keep all the parts separate: the stew in one bowl, with plenty of juice; the grain in another; some harissa, that garlic-pounded paste of chilies, to the side. The culinary idea behind this is the contrast between spicy stew, spicier relish, and the plain, comforting blanket of grain. You can moosh them all up on your plate, but if they were all mixed up on the serving dish, it would be both too sloppy in texture and too monotone in taste.
Though it’s not strictly necessary, if you want some meat with this, get hold of some chorizo. But make sure you buy the spicy, paprika-tinted sausages rather than salami. If you happen to live near a shop that sells merguez (which are actually more traditional for this), then just grill them and serve them instead of the chorizo. Otherwise, use a cast-iron frying pan and cover the bottom with a film of olive oil. Prick the chorizo sausages, place them in the pan, and turn them so that they are sealed on all sides. Throw in a glass of red wine, lower the heat, and cook for about 10 minutes. Remove and slice each sausage diagonally into 3 squat logs.
GOLDEN
ROOT-VEGETABLE COUSCOUS
FOR THE STEW
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium onions, quartered and sliced thickly
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon each ground cinnamon, cumin, and coriander
½ teaspoon paprika
generous pinch of saffron strands
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch dice
2 medium parsnips, peeled and cut into 1-inch dice
2 medium turnips, peeled and cut into 1-inch dice
1 small kabocha or butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1-inch dice
½ medium rutabaga, peeled and cut into 1-inch dice
3 zucchini, peeled partially to make alternating ¼-inch strips of peel and flesh, then sliced ½-inch thick
4¼ cups chicken, beef, or vegetable stock
½ can (14.5 ounces) plum tomatoes, drained and roughly chopped, their liquid reserved
grated zest ½ large orange, plus juice from the whole orange (optional)
2/3 cup sultanas
1½ cans (14 ounces each) chickpeas or 8 ounces dried, soaked, and partly cooked chickpeas (see page 78)
salt
few drops chili oil or 1 teaspoon harissa (optional; page 208)
FOR THE COUSCOUS
½ cup pine nuts
4 cups quick-cooking couscous
2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter, plus more, if desired
4–5 tablespoons snipped fresh coriander or parsley
Heat the olive oil in a big, deep pot or the bottom of a couscoussier and turn the onions in it for a few minutes. Add the garlic, the ground cinnamon, ground cumin, ground coriander, paprika, and saffron, and stir over a low to medium heat for 5 minutes. Add the carrots, parsnips, turnips, kabocha, rutabaga, and zucchini and turn briskly, but don’t worry if you can’t do this very efficiently—there are a lot of vegetables. After about 5 minutes add the stock, the tomatoes, the orange zest, the sultanas (I love sultanas and hate raisins; if you feel differently, then do act differently), and the chickpeas. Turn again so that, if possible, all gets at least partially covered by the stock. Add the reserved tomato juice from the can and some water if the liquid level is looking too low. Season with the salt, taste, and, if you want to, add the orange juice. The stew benefits from an aromatic hint of orange, but don’t be too heavy-handed.
How to Eat Page 27