How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  You could thaw some of the stock to make my next suggestion for a kitchen-bound weekend lunch: minestrone. I haven’t actually ever used ham-cooking liquid for it, but I’ve used chicken, beef, and vegetable stocks and all have tasted wonderful. Strangely, the best minestrone I ever made was with a stock cube (a Knorr one made for the Italian market—gusto classico, which indicates a beef and chicken broth). I think a soup like this makes one of the best sorts of weekend lunch. I love it not hot hot but a flavor-deepening lukewarm. Yes, you could serve cheese after it if you’re worried that it isn’t enough as it is for a main course, but you’d be wrong. This is perfect for lunch; it’s so nice, apart from anything else, to be able to have bowlfuls and bowlfuls of it rather than only a politely small amount in order to make room for a main course you’re almost bound to like less. For dinner, fine—have something after the soup; but for lunch—and supper, indeed—you don’t need to make a multicoursed assault on people. To be frank, I’d be happy with just an orange afterwards, but I will suggest a more proper dessert in the knowledge that you don’t need a recipe for peeling an orange.

  MOROCCAN ORANGE AND DATE SALAD

  If you want to do something even simpler than the recipe that follows for Baked Sauternes Custard, you could think of doing my great-aunt Myra’s Moroccan orange and date salad. Oranges are peeled, their pith removed, and then cut into thin discs; dates are halved, stoned, and laid alongside. All you do is make an orangy syrup by boiling up some water, sugar, zest of the orange, and some juice, plus orange-redolent alcohol if you like, though it wouldn’t be very Moroccan. Still, I don’t know if there is anything really Moroccan about this salad anyway. Sprinkle a small amount of syrup over the salad and then scatter with slivered almonds. And I rather like it without the syrup, but just with orange juice and a bit of orange liqueur sprinkled over, as well as the blanched (toasted or not) and slivered nuts and maybe some ground cinnamon. I have to say, though, that I find the custard (which involves just gentle whisking and stirring) rather easier to make than the orange salad, with all that fiddly pithy business. No cooking should ever be undertaken with the single and vulgar aim of impressing anyone, but it’s worth remembering as you make your choice that most people will presume that slicing a few oranges is as close to doing nothing as you can get, whereas baking a fragrantly grapey and wine-resonant custard counts as making an effort.

  I think of this following menu as being particularly suitable for a weekend away; chopping and preparing vegetables is ideal work to do with either a lot of people doing bits of it each or a lot of people sitting around to talk to while you do it. Don’t be put off by the formality of the term Country House Lunch. I mean no more by it than to evoke a lazy, long weekend with friends.

  COUNTRY HOUSE LUNCH FOR 6

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  MINESTRONE

  BAKED SAUTERNES CUSTARD

  MINESTRONE

  There was something of a fashion in Britain recently for season-specific minestrone—a spring one majoring in peas, an autumn one containing porcini, and so on—and while all these can be fabulous, the recipe here is for a plain, basic one (if such exists) that shouldn’t be too hard to throw together all the year round. I doubt, however, if you’d really want to cook this in high summer; it tends to be on the menu, as far as I’m concerned, any time between September and May. As ever, the list of ingredients is not meant to be interpreted too strictly; any vegetable, more or less, can argue its case here. I am, however, unpersuaded by tomatoes. Yes, it is normal to include them, but I resolutely (along with the Milanesi) prefer not to. The only drawback is that the soup, after all that cooking, turns out an undeniable khaki. But it tastes so good, with an almost honeyed savoriness, that it really doesn’t matter.

  I have listed canned beans below, but if you want to use dried ones, then soak and cook them first. The added work is not burdensome in itself, but I do understand that activities-to-be-undertaken can take up psychological space, so to speak.

  As for the work of chopping and preparing the vegetables, I like to chop the first one needed, then proceed to the next while the first is cooking, and so on. But most people want to be brisk and efficient, chop everything up in advance so that they’ve got an army of ingredients ready and facing them before they start, and I’ve followed this approach in setting the directions down.

  I always freeze the rinds of old used-up chunks of Parmesan and throw one, or two if they’re only little, into the minestrone while it’s cooking; this brings a flavorsome unctuousness to the carroty-oniony liquor. (I sometimes toss a rind into pea soup, as well.) You should discard the cheese rind before serving the soup; I dredge it out and then chew on it as soon as it’s bearable—I love its elastic stickiness. Last, the oil. I use Ligurian oil, which is sweeter and milder than the peppery Tuscan variety.

  8 tablespoons olive oil, preferably Ligurian

  2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

  3 large onions, sliced thinly

  5 medium carrots, peeled and diced

  2 celery stalks, chopped fairly small

  10 ounces potatoes, peeled and diced

  3 zucchini, diced

  4 ounces young green beans, cut into ½-inch lengths

  8 ounces Savoy cabbage, shredded

  6 1/3 cups beef, chicken, or vegetable stock

  rind of a finished piece of Parmesan cheese (optional)

  salt, if needed

  4 ounces dried white beans, soaked and cooked, or 1 can (15 ounces) cannellini beans

  6 ounces small tubular pasta, such as ditalini

  ½ cup grated Parmesan, plus more, for serving

  Get a big pot and put in the oil and butter and onions and cook until the onions are softened but not browned. Add the carrots and cook for about 3 minutes, stirring a couple of times. Do the same with the celery, potatoes, zucchini, and green beans, cooking each one for a few minutes, stirring a few times. Then add the cabbage and cook for 6–8 minutes, stirring now and then.

  Add the stock. Put in the rind if you’re using it, give a good stir, and season with salt if needed. (The rind will give a small saline kick of its own, and remember, if you’re using bouillon cubes, that they can be very salty.) Cover the pan and cook at a gentle boil for 2–2½ hours. The soup should be thick, so you have to cook it for long enough to lose any wateriness, but it has to have enough liquid in it at this stage for the pasta to absorb while it’s cooking. If the soup is too thick when you’ve finished cooking it but before you put in the pasta, then add some water.

  Now add the white beans and cook for 5 minutes, then turn up the heat slightly and put the pasta in. It should cook in about 15 minutes. When it’s ready, take out the rind, add the fresh Parmesan, and give the soup a good stir. Serve with more cheese.

  First time around I love to eat this with a slug of soft, light Ligurian oil poured into it, but afterwards, when it’s been left to get thicker and sludgier in the fridge, I like it heated up so that it’s warm (just) but not hot and with some tube-clearing chili oil—known to the Italians as olio santo—to punctuate its satiny depths.

  I don’t want to sound too fussy, but when you serve it, if you can, give people proper soup bowls (in other words, wide and shallow rather than deep and cupped); I don’t know why it should make a difference, but it does.

  BAKED SAUTERNES CUSTARD

  I first ate this custard at Sir Terence Conran’s restaurant Quaglino’s in London; it’s one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant, and I say that after about twelve years as a restaurant critic. There, it’s cooked in caramel-bottomed individual dariole molds and turned out, a golden-topped shivering tower of the stuff on the plate, and served with Armagnac-soaked prunes. My version, based on then-chef Martin Webb’s recipe, is somewhat simpler. I don’t know why I still call it Sauternes custard, except that it sounds so luxuriously evocative, as it is only if you’re feeling extravagant or generous (depending on how you look at it) that you will actually use Sauternes. Restaurants d
on’t have to worry about opening a bottle just for the odd cup of it. You can get a cheapish ordinary Sauternes, but then you will find it lacks distinction in general and in particular that musky, scented note of botrytis, which was the point of using Sauternes in the first place. If you’ve got guests who you can count on appreciating a bottle to go with the dessert, then it is worth it. You need a little for the custard, but the rest will get pleasurably and more or less immediately used.

  I like this warm, spooned straight from the dish it’s cooked in (eaten about 45 minutes to 1 hour after it comes out of the oven), but it is also wonderful cold, as long as you remember to take it out of the fridge a good hour before eating it. The cold option has two things going for it: first, it makes more of a contrast with the warm soup; and second, you can do it all the day before. Of course, it would look better unmolded, but that’s something I can’t manage and wouldn’t advise trying. Yes, I know that the gleaming construct of an unblemished, unmolded mound of smooth custard is a wonderful thing, and a gloopy scoop of it from a large oval dish is at best homely. But this is partly because we have all been too much influenced by restaurant preparation. If a dish looks homely, well then, that’s how it should be when eaten at home. The taste is so wonderful, so subtle but resonant, that any amount of visual inelegance is irrelevant.

  POACHED APRICOTS

  Cold, especially, it would be wonderful with poached apricots. The apricots that are sold are generally in no fit condition to be eaten, but poaching will help. Otherwise, just soak and cook some good dried apricots. Then transfer fruits and soaking liquid to a pan, add water to cover (if necessary), bring to the boil, and then simmer until soft. Remove the apricots to a bowl and then boil down the liquid in the pan to a syrup. Pour over the syrup and leave till room temperature or cold (but not fridge-cold). Or you can prepare ordinary dried apricots along the lines of the eastern Mediterranean recipe for them on page 320, or indeed the poached peaches I suggest as an accompaniment to the Sauternes custard ice cream on page 340. If all this is sounding a little complicated, then fresh raspberries or strawberries doused in some of the wine you’re using for the custard would do as well. But don’t start thinking that you absolutely have to be doing anything; this custard is good enough alone. No, more than good enough—sublime. In some moods, any accompaniment is a distraction.

  2 whole eggs

  4 egg yolks

  ½ cup vanilla sugar (page 72) or superfine sugar

  1½ cups heavy whipping cream

  1 vanilla bean, if not using vanilla sugar

  ¾ cup Sauternes or other dessert wine

  Preheat the oven to 300°F. Fill up the kettle and bring the water just to the boil. Whisk the eggs, egg yolks, and sugar in a large bowl. Put the cream and vanilla bean, if using, in a saucepan; put the wine in another. Bring the cream to just below boiling point and then remove from heat; if using the vanilla bean, cover and let infuse for 20 minutes or so. Meanwhile, bring the wine to just below boiling point. If you are using a vanilla bean, remove it after steeping.

  Start beating the egg and sugar mixture again. Pour the wine over it and continue beating while you then pour in the cream. Don’t go mad with the whisking. If you beat too much air in, it’ll go frothy and you will have a layer of bubbles on top, which you don’t want. Strain the mixture and pour into a 4-cup dish (this will help remove some froth). Put the dish into a roasting pan and pour the water into the pan to come about halfway up the sides of the dish. Cover loosely with parchment or waxed paper.

  Bake for about 1 hour. The custard should be firm but not immobile; when you press it with your fingers it should feel set but with a little wobble still within. When you eat it it should be just warm, soft, and voluptuous, like an eighteenth-century courtesan’s inner thigh; you don’t want something bouncy and jellied. A bit of dribble doesn’t matter: it might not look defined on the plate, but it will taste resolutely good on the palate.

  On my last birthday, I went to the local pub for lunch. I should amplify; the pub in question is the Anglesea Arms, whose kitchen is presided over by Dan Evans, a one-time protégé of British super-chef Alastair Little. Evans’s food is fresh, strong, modern, but not caricaturedly so, and eclectic but not vertiginously so. I suppose because it’s a pub rather than a restaurant—although there is a properly designated restaurant space—the food is bound to be more informal, nearer to the food you would like to eat at home.

  I had six oysters, then potato pancakes with quickly marinated smoked haddock, which lay on top of each pancake with a dollop of crème fraîche beneath and a flurry of snipped chives on top. This was heavenly. And, I have since found out, not hard to make. You can replace the haddock with smoked salmon, but somehow that seems to signify “no effort.” Although the smoked haddock is easily prepared once you get home, you do need to go to a fish seller to get the fish cut into the requisite thin slices. If this is too much trouble, you can wander off toward other things; these pancakes are good topped with chicken livers sautéed in butter and the pan deglazed with Marsala, sherry, or muscat wine. Or you might consider a tranche of just-seared salmon (or a silky layer of the smoked stuff) with a poached egg on top.

  These pancakes—crêpes Parmentier—are named in honor of the man who forced the potato into the affections of the French and who persuaded, to that end, Marie Antoinette to weave potato flowers into her hair. They aren’t difficult, but you need a blini pan about 4½ inches in diameter.

  THE SMALL BUT PERFECTLY FORMED LUNCH FOR 4

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  CRÊPES PARMENTIER WITH MARINATED SMOKED HADDOCK

  POIRES BELLE HÉLÈNE

  CRÊPES PARMENTIER WITH MARINATED SMOKED HADDOCK

  When you buy the haddock (you may have to order it in advance), ask the fish seller to cut it into very thin slices, rather like smoked salmon. It won’t be quite so thin, but you want him to be thinking in that direction.

  I get nine pancakes out of the quantities stated, so you’ve got room to lose one and still give people 2 each. If you think 2 each isn’t going to be enough, then just boost quantities.

  FOR THE POTATO PANCAKES

  1 pound floury potatoes, peeled and cut into ½-inch dice

  4 teaspoons all-purpose flour

  3 eggs

  4 egg whites

  ¼ cup crème fraîche or heavy cream

  ¼ cup milk

  salt and freshly milled black pepper

  vegetable oil, for frying

  FOR THE HADDOCK

  3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  juice of 3 lemons

  sea salt and freshly milled black pepper

  1 pound smoked haddock (finnan haddie), sliced very thinly (see headnote)

  1 cup crème fraîche

  small bunch chives, snipped

  3–4 tablespoons chopped coriander

  Put the potatoes in a steamer basket or perforated container (a metal colander would do) over gently boiling salted water and steam until tender. Try them after 20–30 minutes, and then keep trying. At about the time they’re ready, preheat the oven to 350°F and put in it a plate big enough to hold about 9 of the pancakes.

  Now, put the potatoes into a bowl and add the flour, mixing well. I tend to use a hand-held electric mixer for the entire operation. Then add the eggs, egg whites, crème fraîche, and milk; mix well so that you’ve got a smooth, thick batter, and add salt and pepper.

  Pour a film of oil into a blini pan and put it on to the heat. When it’s very hot add some batter, about a half ladleful or so. The pan should be slightly more than half filled. Keep it on the heat and watch; when the pancake is ready to turn, you’ll notice the top beginning to bubble and the bottom will be brown. You can judge this by slipping a spatula underneath the pancake and upturning it slightly. Having flipped it over, cook it for slightly less time than the first side. These pancakes are easy to turn anyway, so don’t worry about it. And if you make a mess of the first one, just jettison it and proceed. As each pancake is cooked
, put it on the plate in the oven to keep warm.

  While you’re cooking the pancakes, prepare the haddock. In a shallow dish big enough to take all the fish, pour in the oil and lemon juice and sprinkle on some of the salt (I know you think the fish is salty enough anyway, but it will need salt, I promise), grind over some pepper, and place the thinly sliced fish in this basic marinade for 4–5 minutes only. This means you can really wait to do this until you’ve more or less finished dealing with the pancakes. By this time you’ll be taking the pancakes in your stride so won’t worry about having to fiddle with something else at the same time.

  I like serving the component parts separately, for people to assemble themselves. On one plate place the lemony fish, on another the pancakes, in a bowl the crème fraîche, and in a couple of others the snipped chives and chopped coriander. Diners should put a pancake on their plates, lay on it a piece of fish, dollop over the crème fraîche, and douse all generously with the chives and/or coriander.

  ST. JOHN’S SALAD

  As for salads or something to eat with or after, I would offer a salad from London’s St. John’s restaurant of fresh, fresh flat-leaf parsley with red onion rings and soaked, drained, and dried salt-preserved capers (or use those put up in brine). A drizzle of oil with the quickest squeeze of lemon is all you need; it is important after the intense flavors of the haddock that the salad dressing should be light.