How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  If you don’t want to go in for baking, buy a pot of ice cream and make the butterscotch sauce on page 275.

  FOR THE PASTRY

  ¾ cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

  2 tablespoons (¼ stick) cold unsalted butter, diced

  2 tablespoons vegetable shortening, diced

  1 tablespoon lemon juice

  FOR THE FILLING

  2/3 cup golden syrup

  ½ cup fresh bread crumbs (see page 22)

  juice of 1 lemon plus the zest of half

  3 generous tablespoons heavy cream

  Make the pastry according to the instructions on page 37, using a few tablespoons ice water and the lemon juice to bind, and let rest in the fridge. Roll out to line an 8-inch tart pan and then put back in the fridge for about 30 minutes. You can do this a day or so ahead.

  Preheat the oven to 400°F and put a baking sheet in to warm up, too.

  For the filling, put the syrup in a saucepan on the stove and, when warm and runny, add the bread crumbs, lemon juice, and zest and heat until warm and runny-ish. Leave for 5 minutes, then stir in the cream. Pour or spoon this mixture into the prepared pastry, place on the baking sheet, and bake for about 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350°F and bake for another 15–20 minutes or until the pastry is golden and the filling is slightly firmed on top.

  I like this best hot, with cold, cold vanilla ice cream.

  ELEGANTLY SUBSTANTIAL TRADITIONAL ENGLISH LUNCH FOR 8

  * * *

  ENGLISH ROAST CHICKEN WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS PLUS SOME

  TRIFLE

  When you speak to English ladies of a certain generation, you will notice that they use “meat” to mean “beef.” Thus “We ate meat only once a week” doesn’t preclude the consumption of vast and daily, or twice daily, platefuls of ham, pork, chicken, and lamb. A fine English Sunday lunch was roast chicken as it always used to be done, with parsley and thyme stuffing, bread or onion sauce, roast potatoes and sausages, and honey-roast parsnips, rather than the modern take (lemon, garlic, onions, olive oil—see page 7), much as I love it.

  A traditional English “pudding,” meaning dessert, is what you want after; of course, any pie or crumble or indeed steamed sponge pudding would be just fine, but a trifle would be perfect.

  ENGLISH ROAST CHICKEN WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS

  If you want the stuffing to be a stiff rather than dense and crumbly mass, add a beaten egg to combine before stuffing the birds.

  4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter

  drop oil

  1 medium onion, minced

  6 slices bacon, minced

  1 pound button mushrooms, minced

  salt and freshly milled black pepper

  2 cups fresh bread crumbs

  leaves from about 8 sprigs fresh thyme or 3 teaspoons dried

  6 tablespoons chopped parsley

  zest of 1 lemon

  2 chickens, about 3½ pounds each

  Preheat the oven to 400°F. Put 2 tablespoons of the butter with oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and, when melted, add the onion and bacon. Fry together, over medium heat, for about 10 minutes or until onions are soft. Remove the bacon mixture and, in the same pan, melt the remaining butter and cook the mushrooms, covered, with some salt and pepper, for about 5 minutes. Remove to a plate to cool. Put the bread crumbs in a large bowl and mix in the thyme, parsley, and lemon zest, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste. Stuff the birds and roast 15 minutes per pound, adding 10 minutes to the chickens’ cooking time, or until the juices run clear when the chickens are pierced between a thigh and the body.

  SAUSAGES

  As for the sausages, what I do is get 3–4 little sausages, pork and as plain as possible, per head, then I cook them slightly in advance for 30–40 minutes in a 400°F oven. Then, just about 15 minutes or so before eating, I put them back in the oven the chickens have just been taken out of to heat up.

  POTATOES

  The potatoes really need a hotter oven—turn to page 253 for the method for making them—but if you haven’t got a double oven, you will just have to let the chickens stand for a while and turn up the oven to 425°F. Roast about 3 pounds of potatoes for 20 minutes or so (in which case cover the reheating sausages with foil). If you like living dangerously, you can brown the potatoes by putting them, hot fat, baking pan, and all, on the stove. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  The recipe for bread sauce can be found on page 58. The following onion sauce, however, was what my mother more often cooked to go with roast chicken, whether it was stuffed as above, or just with a squeezed-out lemon half.

  ONION SAUCE

  Many people like a Frenchified onion sauce, with the onions almost minced and disappearing into a velvety mush. I love this sauce as we ate it at home, the onions boiled, drained, and some of the water added to the milk to make the white sauce. Three things: I don’t bother to fish out the cloves and bay from the milk. If you don’t want to add cream, and I often don’t, just make the initial milk up to 3 cups instead. And you may substitute 6 leeks, each cut into 3 pieces, for the onions. We nearly always ate leeks cooked like this in white sauce, at home, and they are particularly good, too, with roast pork or ham.

  2½ cups milk

  2 cloves

  1 bay leaf

  6 small or medium onions, halved

  salt

  6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter

  ¾ cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

  ½ cup heavy cream

  freshly milled white or black pepper

  whole nutmeg

  Pour the milk into a saucepan, add the cloves and bay leaf, and bring to boiling point. Just before it boils, remove from heat, cover, and let steep for 20 minutes or so while you cook the onions.

  Put the onions into a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, add salt, and cook, covered, at a gentle but insistent simmer until the onions are soft—20 minutes should do it. Onions retain heat ferociously (which is why an onion, boiled and wrapped in a tea towel, was always used as a remedy for earache, staying warm for hours as it was pressed against a throbbing head). Pour the onions into a colander suspended over a wide-necked measuring cup or other saucepan. Let them drip in for a good 5 minutes. Then add 2 cups of the oniony water to the milk. If you haven’t got that much, just make up the extra with more milk.

  Now make the sauce: put the butter in a saucepan over a low to moderate heat and, when it’s melted, stir in the flour and cook, stirring, while the roux turns nutty, for 2 minutes. Make sure it doesn’t brown, though.

  Off the heat, slowly pour in the milk and onion water, stirring all the time. I use a plastic whisk for this. Do it gradually, so the liquid is smoothly incorporated into the roux. Put back on a low heat for about 15 minutes until the sauce is cooked; it should be smooth, very thick (the onions and cream will thin it in a minute), and velvety.

  Stir in the onions and leave covered with a piece of buttered or wax paper until you want to eat it, at which time reheat and then stir in the cream. Season with salt and pepper and add a grating of nutmeg.

  Serve not in a gravy boat (it’s too thick) but in a bowl with a spoon.

  PEAS AND PARSNIPS

  I like peas with this as well as the parsnips. Normally I’d allocate a medium-sized parsnip per person but—with so many sausages—it’s probably more sensible to work along the lines of 3 parsnips per 2 people. Peel them, cut them into 4—that’s to say, cut them in half crossways and then cut each half lengthways—and parboil them in boiling, salted water for 3–5 minutes. In a baking dish in which they will fit in one layer, melt some fat—good dripping or lard is best; however, if you blanch at the very idea, do use oil. Put in the parsnips, toss well so that they’re coated, and drizzle about 3 tablespoons runny honey over them. Roast them in the oven for about 30 minutes at 425°F or 40 at 400°F. And give them a blast, the oven turned to very high, at the end of cooking while the chicken is resting. When they’re ready they should be ten
der at the prod of a fork within but brown and shiny and crisp without. If you can’t find room to roast the potatoes and the parsnips separately, then throw them all in together, but you will then have to forget the honey over the parsnips. It’s not ideal for the parsnips to be cooked at the high heat the potatoes require (you will end up with perhaps more burnt and crusty exterior than you’d like and rather less sweet and creamy interior), but it’s not the end of the world.

  GREENS

  I think as a third vegetable, if you’re willing to go the extra mile, you need something grassy and unsweet, and for that reason I’d choose kale or greens of some sort rather than white cabbage. Spinach is not at all a bad idea either—I am quite equable about the idea of frozen whole leaf spinach. If you do fresh spinach for 8 people, you will have to be carting pounds of the stuff back from the store.

  TRIFLE

  For the proper English trifle, see page 109. The rhubarb, muscat, and mascarpone one (page 107) has an awful lot going for it here too.

  SPRING-SCENTED LUNCH FOR 8

  * * *

  TARRAGON FRENCH ROAST CHICKEN

  GERMAN LEEKS AND WINE, RICE, PEAS, AND SNOW PEAS

  LEMON PIE

  GERMAN LEEKS AND WINE

  With tarragon chicken, I like rice or mashed potatoes, to mop up the chickeny juices. And I’d adapt Jane Grigson’s recipe for German leeks and wine. You cut clean leeks into pieces 2½–3½ inches long, depending on the overall size of leek. (And work on the principle of 3 logs, that’s to say probably 1 leek, per person.) Stew these logs slowly in butter in a covered pan for about 5 minutes, turning them occasionally—they should all be buttery. Then, pour in 3⁄4–1 cup dry white wine (more if the arrangement of the pan seems to demand it) and keep cooking over a low heat, lid on. After about 10 minutes, when the leeks are ready (tender but not squishy), remove them to a dish and, if there’s too much liquid left, boil down the juices. Whisk in a knob of butter and pour over the leeks. Use white pepper, not black, or it’ll just look as if you haven’t cleaned them properly.

  TARRAGON FRENCH ROAST CHICKEN

  Don’t go mad with the tarragon for this; it’s wonderful used with a light hand but suddenly whiffy when thrown in with too much exuberance. A straggly bunch comprising about 10 sprigs should be more than enough, which is about as much as is contained in those irritating see-through plastic envelopes you find at the supermarket.

  This should also give you wonderful leftovers for salad or sandwiches.

  6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter

  small bunch tarragon, leaves chopped, stalks reserved

  1 scant teaspoon sherry

  freshly milled white pepper

  2 large chickens, 4–5 pounds each

  2 cups chicken stock, homemade or from a well-diluted cube

  salt

  Mix the butter well with the tarragon leaves. Add the sherry and a good grinding of white pepper. Push your fingers underneath the skin of the chicken so that you’ve got a pocket between breast and skin. Be careful not to break the skin, so proceed slowly. Smear most of the tarragony butter onto the breast, pat the skin back over, and dot the rest in the space between leg and body.

  Preheat the oven to 400°F. Heat up the chicken stock and pour it into the bottom half of a roasting pan fitted with a rack. Add to the hot stock the stalks of the freshly chopped tarragon. Sit the chickens on the rack. If you’re not sure about the quality of your chickens, make a domed lid with foil to retain moisture; it should be baggy over the chickens, fastened around the pan’s edges. Keep the foil on for just 1 hour, though. Otherwise, just let the chicken sit on its rack over the hot stock, untended.

  Roast the chicken for 15 minutes per pound plus 10 minutes. (If you’re cooking a lemon pie at the same time—and the sour-sweet intensity of the lemons and the old-fashioned comfort of the pie are just right after the herbal hit of the buttery tarragon—you can have the oven on at 375°F and just make sure the chicken has 15 minutes or so longer in the slightly cooler oven, or cook the lemon pie in advance.)

  When the chickens are ready—golden, and the juices run clear when pierced between a thigh and the body—take them out of the oven and switch it off. Pour off the pan juices and either put the chickens in their pan back in the oven to keep them warm or let them wait on their carving board. I don’t mind what temperature chicken is when I eat it, and actually, there’s a lot to be said for that puffed-breath warmth.

  Pour the chicken-tarragon juices into a measuring cup. Pour some off into a small saucepan to boil down into a gravy-ish sauce. Obviously, taste for salt and pepper, too.

  FOOLPROOF RICE

  For 8 people, you need 4 cups of basmati rice and 4 cups of water. Pour the rice into a large strainer and hold it under the cold running water for a while to soak and rinse the rice. Shake well to drain. Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan (which has a lid that fits) and stir in the rice till it’s all coated. Then add the water, bring to the boil, add a good pinch of salt, then cover and turn down the heat to absolute minimum. For preference, use a heat-diffuser. Cook for 30–40 minutes or until all the water is absorbed and the rice is cooked. You can leave it with the lid on but the pan off the heat for 10 minutes or so without harm. You might consider, too, siphoning off some of the chicken stock from the chicken’s roasting pan to add to the water and lend flavor to the rice while it’s cooking.

  All I want else with this are some snow peas, possibly with some buttery young peas stirred in.

  LEMON PIE

  I first came across a recipe for lemon pie (as distinct, very, from lemon meringue pie and lemon tart) in Norma MacMillan’s In a Shaker Kitchen, a book I curl up with and read in a metaphorical fog of home baking after another stressed-out urban day. Reading recipes for chicken pot pie and maple wheat loaves is a wonderful antidote to modern life. The Shaker version of lemon pie takes lemons, slices them, macerates them in sugar, and then adds beaten egg yolks to this viscous sherbety mix and cooks it in an old-fashioned double crust. For me, it has the edge on both lemon meringue pie (the least impressive example of the type—and, if you want a meringue-topped pie, please just turn to the rhubarb-filled, meringue-topped, orange-fragrant pastry based version on page 234) and tarte au citron. I noticed that when I made it with sliced lemons, most people left pithy piles of politely regurgitated rubble on their plates. So I now cut off the pith after zesting and before slicing them. The easiest way to do this, I find, is by standing a lemon on a chopping board and then cutting thin slices off downwards. Don’t worry that you’re carving the lemons into interesting geometric forms; you can afford to lose some of the flesh along with the pith anyway, and besides, it doesn’t matter what they look like. And don’t worry, either, about this being a bit of a sweat—it doesn’t take longer than a few clumsy swipes of a knife.

  In effect, what you are making is a nubbly lemon curd, but even when you get rid of the skins, the fruit will hold up enough to create a proper pie filling rather than just goo. But although it’s solid enough, it isn’t stiff, and you’ll need a spoon rather than a cake slice to serve it out.

  4 lemons, zest removed and reserved, pith removed and flesh sliced ¼-inch thick (reserve any juice from the cutting)

  2 cups sugar, plus more, if needed, and for sprinkling

  FOR THE PASTRY

  2¼ cups all-purpose flour

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  pinch salt

  6 tablespoons (¾ stick) cold unsalted butter, cut in small dice

  6 tablespoons cold vegetable shortening, cut in small dice

  1 egg yolk

  4 eggs

  2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

  Seed the lemon slices and put them in the bowl with the zest, adding the reserved juice. Pour over the 2 cups sugar and turn well (but gently; as much as possible, you want the lemon slices to hold their shape) so that all the lemons are coated with sugar. (And don’t use anything metal; a wooden spoon or plastic spatula will d
o fine.) Cover and put the bowl in a cool place (or the fridge) for at least 12 hours or preferably 24.

  Make the pastry following the instructions on page 38, adding a few tablespoons of ice water to the egg to bind the dough.

  Divide the dough into 2 portions, one marginally bigger than the other, and then press each into a flattened ball, cover both discs with plastic film, and put in the fridge. The pastry will need to rest in the fridge for at least 20 minutes, but you can leave it in for days as long as you remember to take it out so that it isn’t icy cold when you start rolling.

  When you’re ready to cook the pie, preheat the oven to 375°F. Roll out the slightly larger disc of pastry and use it to line a pie dish 9 inches in diameter and 2 inches deep. I have a stainless-steel dish of these dimensions that I am very fond of, not least because the pastry never seems to stick to the metal; I am not keen on ceramic pie pans.

  Beat the eggs and stir them, with a wooden spoon or spatula, into the lemon mixture until well combined. Spread the softened butter on the base of the pastry (much as you would butter a slice of bread), then (tasting it first) pour in the lemons and their eggy-sugary juices. Sprinkle with more sugar if you feel they need it. Wet the rim of the bottom crust with water, roll out the other disc of pastry, and place on top. Crimp the edges to seal and cut some slits in the center to let steam escape.

  Cut a strip of foil, enough to cover, loosely, the perimeter of the pie dish, so that the thinner, crimped edges don’t burn. I find the pie needs about 1 hour in full, but you should start checking after about 45 minutes; it’s done when the filling is firm to the touch and the crust golden. I keep the foil on for about 30 minutes. You can always do it the other way round, if you like—that’s to say, leave the pie uncovered for 30 minutes and then put the foil on to stop it burning.

  Remove from the oven and put the dish on a rack. Sprinkle with sugar and serve from the pie pan, hot, warm, or cold.