How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  POIRES BELLE HéLèNE

  Now for the pears. Old-fashioned they certainly are, and my grandmother used to make them for me when I was a child. But they’re not nursery food and it isn’t just nostalgia that makes me dredge them up. Pears are so rarely edible when raw. When they’re good, they’re wonderful, but I am beginning to think Ralph Waldo Emerson was being optimistic when he wrote, “There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” Most pears go from hard to woolly without ever passing through the luscious ripe stage. Poaching pears is one way of dealing with all those hard, unyielding fruits in the shops; somehow, however wooden they felt raw, poached they become infused with a juice-bursting plumpness. In fact, it is a positive advantage to use what would in other circumstances seem annoyingly firm fruit. (Actually, I have rather a soft spot for canned pears; the dense graininess of the liquid-soused fruit is remarkably seductive.)

  Traditionally, this dessert consists of ice cream topped with a poached pear, chocolate sauce, and, finally, candied violets. I’d rather put on the table a tub of ice cream, a plate of poached pears, a pitcher of chocolate sauce, and, if possible, a saucerful of the violets.

  FOR THE PEARS

  4–6 firm Bartlett pears or other dessert variety

  juice of 1 lemon

  ½ cup superfine sugar or vanilla sugar (page 72)

  1 vanilla bean, or 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract if not using vanilla sugar

  FOR THE CHOCOLATE SAUCE

  8 ounces bittersweet chocolate

  ½ cup strong black coffee, or 1 teaspoon instant coffee in ½ cup boiling water

  ½ cup superfine sugar

  ½ cup heavy cream

  1 quart best-quality vanilla ice cream

  crystallized violets (optional)

  Peel, halve, and core the pears and sprinkle over them the lemon juice to stop them from discoloring. In a wide shallow pan (in which the pears will fit in one layer—otherwise cook them in batches) put 1¼ cups water, the sugar, and the vanilla bean, if using. Bring to the boil, stirring every now and again to make sure the sugar dissolves, then lower the heat slightly and simmer for 5 minutes. Add the vanilla extract, if using. Put the pears into the liquid, cut side down, and raise the heat again so that the syrup boils up and the pears are covered by it. You may need to spoon the syrup over. After half a minute or so, lower the heat, then cover the pan and simmer for 10 minutes; turn the pears, cover the pan again, and simmer for another 10 minutes. Continue poaching until the pears are cooked and translucent; they should feel tender (but not soggy) when pierced. They may need more or less cooking time—it depends on the pears. Take off the heat, keep covered, and leave to cool.

  Now the chocolate sauce: place the chocolate, broken up into small pieces, in a thick-bottomed pan with the coffee and sugar and melt over a low heat, stirring occasionally. Then pour in the cream, still stirring, and when it is very hot pour into a warmed sauceboat or a bowl with a ladle.

  To serve, arrange pears cut-side down on a big flat plate and pour some syrup over. (Any remaining syrup will keep in the fridge or freezer and can be used to pour over apples or other fruit when making pies or crumbles. You can wash the vanilla pod, wipe it and put it in a canister of sugar.) Offer with the ice cream, sauce, and violets, if using, served separately; allow diners to help themselves.

  People are wrong to be daunted by pastry, but there’s no point in pretending they aren’t. There is something unhelpful about suggesting you come to grips with it at the end of a long day’s work, but on the weekend you can work calmly. And the weekend is just the time to eat simple, comforting food such as traditional English steak and kidney pie or rhubarb meringue pies or a soft and swollen, creamy crab tart.

  The following four menus all include a pastry factor.

  A SCHOOL-DINNER LUNCH FOR 4–6

  * * *

  STEAK AND KIDNEY PIE

  BANANA CUSTARD

  If you can’t stomach the idea of banana custard, substitute the trifle on page 109 or provide good ripe bananas and good thick cream and put them on the table with a bowl of soft brown sugar and let everyone mash their own.

  STEAK AND KIDNEY PIE

  Cook the meat in its licorice-dark gravy first and then assemble the pie later with the made, cooled filing. The advantage of the two-pronged attack is that the meat is at its best when cooked, on low heat, for a good long time and the pastry needs a shorter time at a higher heat to keep it crisp but yieldingly rich. Another advantage is that you can cook the meat in advance. I make a suet dough here rather than a regular one for two reasons. The first is the most compelling—it goes so well, it fits, tastes as it should; it somehow manages to give me a nostalgic glow of satisfaction about food I was never actually given to eat as a child. The second is simply that this is the easiest of all pastries to make and roll out; just stir all the ingredients together in the bowl, roll out, and stretch any old how over the pie. Suet crust (unlike ordinary pastry, which benefits from hanging around) has to be baked the minute it’s made, and it makes for a bumpy, ramshackle-looking pie.

  If you don’t like kidneys (and unless you’ve got a good butcher they can be bitter and somehow sawdusty and rubbery at the same time), then just boost the quantities of steak and add more mushrooms. These should be cremini mushrooms, if possible; regular button mushrooms can sometimes be just pretty polystyrene. I use stout rather than wine because I love it, and also because I make the pie filling in advance and don’t drink enough to have an open bottle of red wine on the go. Use the best beef stock you can, but if you can’t do better than a good cube, then don’t lose sleep over it.

  If you cannot get suet (beef fat from around the kidneys; see page 459), then use any plain pastry dough (see page 37) made with lard or half lard and vegetable shortening and butter.

  This is, of course, a standard British dish, but I start it off as the Italians do their stews, with a soffritto of carrot, onion, celery, and, less orthodox, sage. If the lovage is out in the garden, then I use that instead of celery, but to be frank, it isn’t for long that the desire to eat steak and kidney pie and the seasonal availability of lovage overlap. You could, I suppose, add garlic too, as the Italians would, but I don’t. Not because I think it would be disastrous, but because I just instinctively don’t.

  4 tablespoons vegetable oil

  2 medium onions, minced

  1 medium carrot, minced

  ½ celery stalk or small handful lovage leaves, minced

  3 sage leaves, minced

  2 tablespoons unsweetened butter

  7 ounces cremini or regular button mushrooms, quartered

  1 heaping tablespoon chopped parsley

  4 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  whole nutmeg

  freshly milled black pepper

  1 pound beef stew meat, cut into 1-inch chunks

  ½ pound kidneys, cut into 1-inch chunks

  1 cup beef stock

  1 cup stout or red wine

  salt

  FOR THE CRUST

  1½ cups all-purpose flour

  ½ teaspoon salt

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  whole nutmeg

  ½ cup beef suet

  Preheat the oven to 300°F. Put 2 tablespoons oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and heat, adding the vegetables and sage. Stir around over medium heat for about 5 minutes or until softish. Remove to a heavy casserole with a lid.

  Add the butter to the saucepan and sauté the mushrooms for a few minutes; add the parsley, turn well, and then transfer to the vegetables in the casserole. Sprinkle the flour onto a large plate and add an exuberant grating of fresh nutmeg and some pepper. Turn the beef and kidneys in the flour and, when all the pieces are done, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons oil in the pan and brown the meat. Don’t cram the pan or the meat’ll be steamed rather than seared; just do 4–5 chunks at a time, removing them to the casserole as you go. If there’s any flour left on the dredging plate, add it to the frying pan, stirr
ing as you do so. I use a flat wooden spoon-cum-spatula for this. Add the stock and stout and stir well, scraping any bits from the base of the pan, and pour over the meat and vegetables in the casserole. Season with the salt and pepper, cover, and cook for about 2 hours. You want the meat to be tender but not falling apart. But you shouldn’t have a problem at this low heat anyway.

  When it’s ready, leave to cool. If you can’t cook the pie filling in advance, then you need to decant it to make it cool more quickly. I would just pour it into a roasting pan (or anything that will take it in as thin a layer as possible) and put somewhere cold. Later, transfer to an 8-inch pie plate. Put a pie funnel (or upended eggcup) in the middle.

  The pastry will need 30–40 minutes to cook, so bear that in mind when you decide when to get started on the pastry. And how easy is that? Preheat the oven to 425°F. Put the flour, salt, baking powder, and another extravagant grating of nutmeg in a bowl. Stir in the suet and then, still stirring, add water, ½ cup of it at first. You need a soft paste; add more water (or flour, if you’ve been too heavy-handed with the water) as you think necessary. This is a forgiving kind of pastry, so don’t worry about exact calibrations.

  Sprinkle some flour onto a surface, some onto the rolling pin, and some more onto the surface of the dough, and start rolling. You need a fat disc, about ¼ inch or so thick, slightly bigger than the diameter of the pie dish. You’ll have rather more than this, so from the overmatter cut some strips and cover the rims of the dish with them. It helps to dampen the rims with a little cold water first. Now, lift up your circle of nubbly soft pastry and drape over the pie dish. Cobble it together somehow if holes appear and press down over the pastry rims. Put the pie in the oven and cook for about 10 minutes, then turn the oven down to 375°F and cook for another 25 minutes. Peep after 15; if the pastry looks as if it might stop browning and start burning, then cover loosely with foil. Whip the foil off, though, for the last couple of minutes. Allow to cool for 10 minutes and serve.

  I think you have to have peas with this; and as it obviously isn’t summer food, I mean by this frozen young peas. Potatoes aren’t strictly necessary, I suppose, given the pastry, but even so, potatoes mashed with an equal volume of parsnips (or rutabaga) and more butter than anyone would like to own up to would be just right.

  BANANA CUSTARD

  The first time I made a banana custard, it looked so pallid; terrifying schoolgirl memories had taught me to expect the bouncy canary-yellow of Bird’s custard mix, a British kitchen standby. The next time I added saffron to the custard (as long as you don’t add too much, the note it strikes is intriguing rather than intrusive), which turns it from palest primrose to a yellow that would do honor to the most dazzling tartrazine. It is more than just a culinary joke, though, enjoyable as that is in itself. And for once, powdered saffron may be a better choice than strands. Saffron strands leave little red strings, which are beautiful enough, to be sure, but what we are after is an uninterrupted blanket of unarguable yellow.

  If you hate the idea of the saffron, then leave the custard pale and uninteresting; there’s no mileage in adding food coloring and no point in using a mix.

  Use a dish with a 6-cup capacity and enough surface area to allow the banana slices to be spread in a single layer. The custard could also be baked (see page 339).

  2½ cups milk

  good pinch ground saffron

  8 egg yolks

  1/3 cup superfine sugar

  4 bananas, firm but ripe

  Fill the sink with cold water—you may need to plunge the custard pot into this later to stop it cooking quickly.

  Put the milk in a saucepan, sprinkle in the saffron, and bring to boiling point. Meanwhile whisk together the egg yolks and sugar with a fork, and just as the milk is about to come to the boil, pour it over the eggs and keep on whisking. Pour into a wide, heavy-bottomed saucepan (I use the largest one I’ve got) and cook on a low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. In about 10 minutes the custard should have thickened lightly. Remove from the heat and plunge the pan into the cold water in the sink and stir until cooled. If, indeed, at any stage you think the custard is about to boil or curdle, then immerse the custard pan in the cold water and beat vigorously.

  Slice the bananas into a dish. I do them in coins of lengthening diagonals. When the bananas are arranged as you like them, strain the custard over and leave to cool and form a skin. This is imperative. I don’t like skin on custard usually, but I recognize that banana custards must have a skin. You can make the custard in advance, sprinkling confectioners’ sugar on top to prevent it forming a skin, but in that case the bananas cannot be cut and the whole assembled till the last minute.

  LUNCH, TENTATIVELY OUTSIDE, FOR 8

  * * *

  CRAB AND SAFFRON TART

  PARSLEY SALAD

  BAKED CARAMEL APPLE

  In the heat of the summer you don’t want, I think, a rich and odoriferous crab tart. But in those first early days, when it is more hope than convenience that takes you outside, or when the sun is growing weaker but still invites, toward the end of September, this is the perfect lunch—not too filling and not a parody of a picnic to be eaten under those cloudless pre–First World War skies of nostalgic collective memory.

  If you think you can’t manage the pastry, buy it, but making the rich crust below is not a big deal, I promise you. I tend to make the pastry the night before and leave it in a disc, wrapped in plastic film, in the fridge to be rolled out the next morning. If I’ve got time to start it slightly earlier in the evening, I make the pastry, let it rest, then bring it out and roll it, line the tart pan with it, and put it back in the fridge, covered with film again. Then, the next day, all I’ve got to do is bake it blind (see below and page 39) and then get the filling together, which is not a strenuous exercise.

  CRAB AND SAFFRON TART

  PARSLEY SALAD

  This recipe is adapted from food writer Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories. Normally I don’t like tomatoes with fish, but here everything melds so harmoniously, seductively together that I forget my usual gripes. With it I’d serve the salad of parsley—flat-leaved, unchopped—capers and red onion that is copied from the salad served with bone marrow at St. John’s and mentioned on page 221. The rich and fragrant creaminess of the tart is offset particularly well by it.

  FOR THE PASTRY

  1¼ cups Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

  6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small dice

  1 egg yolk

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  1 teaspoon lemon juice

  FOR THE FILLING

  1 can (14.5 ounces) plum tomatoes, drained and chopped

  2 fat garlic cloves

  1 bay leaf

  1 sprig thyme

  ¼ teaspoon salt, plus more

  freshly milled black pepper

  1¼ cups heavy cream

  ½ teaspoon saffron threads

  4 egg yolks

  ½ pound lump crab meat

  First make the pastry following instructions on page 38. Go slowly when adding the water, incorporating 1 tablespoon at a time. About 4 tablespoons should do it, but you may need more. The weather, the flour, the egg will all make a difference. When the dough coheres into an unsticky ball, press it into a fat disc and cover with plastic film and put into the fridge for about 20 minutes, more if it’s a hot day, or leave overnight.

  Preheat the oven to 400°F. Then roll out the pastry to fit a 9½-inch tart or quiche pan that’s 2 inches deep. Bake blind (see page 39).

  Remove from the oven, turn the heat down to 350°F, and get on with the filling (or if you prefer, do the filling while the pastry cooks). Put the tomatoes, garlic, herbs, the ¼ teaspoon of salt, and a few grindings of the pepper in a saucepan and reduce to a thickish sauce. Cool, remove the herbs, and spread the sauce in the bottom of the pastry shell. Warm together 3 tablespoons of the cream with the saffron and allow to steep for a few minutes. Beat to
gether the egg yolks and the rest of the cream and add the saffron cream. Correct the seasoning. Loosely fold the crab meat into the custard and carefully pour into the tart shell. I think it’s easier to pour it in while the pastry shell is sitting on its (slightly pulled out) oven rack.

  Bake 30–40 minutes or until set and pale golden brown on top, but with a hint of runny wobble within. Serve neither hot nor cold but warm; this is at its paradisal, slightly baveuse best about 50 minutes to an hour after it comes out of the oven. And I have found that you can bring any fridge-cold leftover wedges back to optimum, faintly runny room temperature in a low microwave. Strange but true. And if you do have any left over, it is worth cutting into individual fat slices and freezing like that, only to resuscitate them for a perfect, gloriously luxurious dinner for yourself in evenings ahead.

  BAKED CARAMEL APPLES

  As with the crab tart, these apples are best eaten not hot but warm. If you put them in the oven just as you take out the tart, then they in turn will be ready to be taken out just as you sit down for lunch. Transfer the apples to a large plate or couple of plates and pour the juices into a saucepan. Then all you need to do at the last minute is come back to the stove to reduce and add cream to the buttery sour-sweet liquor in the saucepan before pouring it thickly over the softly cooling, glossy, and bulging apples on the plates. These are my favorite baked apples of all time and I wouldn’t change a thing. If, however, you want the sauce clear and caramelish rather than dense and fudgelike, then omit the cream.

  8 cooking apples

  10 tablespoons (1 stick plus 2 tablespoons) unsalted butter

  2/3 cup light muscovado sugar or light brown sugar

  1 cup Calvados or applejack

  juice of 1 lemon

  ½ cup light cream

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Core the apples and, with a sharp knife, cut a line round each as if circling the equator. Put them in a roasting pan. Press in the butter and sugar, alternately, in the holes and press any excess on top. Pour the Calvados and lemon juice into the pan. Put them into the oven and cook for about 50 minutes or until soft.