How to Eat

by Nigella Lawson

  WITH UNCOOKED MEAT

  I tend to make cottage pie rather more often than shepherd’s pie, but then I buy my—organic—beef from a good butcher and get it freshly ground (as it must be for this version). I wouldn’t want to buy any meat that had been lying under film and the lights in a supermarket. I like to know the source of meat and I instinctively shrink from getting meat from anyone except a butcher.

  The quantities as specified make enough filling for about 2 small oval dishes or one larger one, measuring about 10 inches at its longest point. If I’m cooking a batch in advance, I freeze it without the potato in bags for quick defrosting. As often as not, the children eat it then with rice rather than as a pie with potatoes—and, if you want to use it to sauce pasta, add some milk on reheating.

  1 pound potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks

  3 tablespoons milk, plus more, if needed

  4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsweetened butter, plus more, if desired

  1 medium onion, cut into rough chunks

  1 medium carrot, peeled and cut into rough chunks

  1 garlic clove, chopped roughly

  ½ celery stalk, cut into rough chunks

  2 tablespoons oil

  ¼ pound button mushrooms, sliced thinly (optional)

  8 ounces ground beef or lamb

  1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

  ¼ cup Marsala or apple juice

  1 cup canned tomatoes, drained

  1 teaspoon soy sauce or Worcestershire sauce

  salt and freshly milled black pepper

  ¼ cup grated Cheddar (optional)

  Put the potatoes into a large saucepan filled with cold, salted water. Bring to the boil and cook till soft enough to mash easily, 25–45 minutes. Drain them and put them back in the pan over the heat for 1 minute to dry off. Push the potatoes through a ricer and then beat in the milk and butter; add more milk if you wish but remember you want a stiff mash to top the meat, not a near-liquid purée. Set aside.

  Put the onion, carrot, garlic clove, and celery into a food processor and pulse to chop finely (or do this by hand). Heat the oil in a medium frying pan with a sturdy bottom and, preferably, a lid and stir in the vegetables. Cook for a good 10 minutes until soft, then add the mushrooms, if using. You may want to add a knob of butter at this stage, too. After 2 minutes, add the meat, pushing and breaking it up with a wooden spoon or spatula. You want it to unclump and lose its pinkness. Sprinkle over the flour and stir well, then add the Marsala or apple juice (most houses with small children seem to have apple juice in the fridge), then the tomatoes and soy or Worcestershire sauce. Stir well, cover, and let simmer for 20 minutes. Uncover, prod, season with the salt and pepper, and cook for about another 10 minutes, by which time the meat should be cooked and not too liquid. You can thicken using the methods suggested in the recipe for already-cooked ground meat above, but the chances are you’ll need such strategies less here.

  Put into the dishes and top with potato. If you want the top crispy, dot with butter and put it under a hot broiler—sprinkling on grated cheese first, if you like—for a few minutes.

  VEAL, LIVER, AND BACON PIE

  Although this recipe includes liver, I have yet to find a child (even one who would never own up to eating liver) who didn’t like it. This quantity makes enough to fill 2 little oval pie-dishes 5½ inches at their longest point and 2½ inches deep (this is about the right size for an older child or adult; smaller children can share one and you can freeze the other—or, if you’re wise, eat it yourself). If you are opposed to veal, then this pie is a double insult, as it also contains calves’ liver. Not all calves, thank God, are kept in confinement; I suggest you talk to your butcher about his veal—but if you have objections, please turn over a few pages.

  You could grind the meats yourself—in a food processor if you wish, as you want a gentle mush. But I buy the meat from my butcher and ask him to grind veal scallops and liver together.

  I have specified heavy cream because it’s what I had in the fridge (left over, as it happens, from the Marsala muscovado custard on page 330). Light cream would be fine, too.

  I think you do need canned petits pois here; that gray-green, sugary softness, just on the verge of evoking the cooking at a dusty-carpeted residential hotel, is precisely what’s required. Frozen young peas wouldn’t be catastrophic, just not quite of a piece. But just use what you have at hand.

  2 medium potatoes, about ¾ pound total, peeled and cut into chunks

  salt

  1 small carrot, peeled and chopped roughly

  1 garlic clove, peeled and chopped roughly

  ½ onion, chopped roughly

  2 slices bacon, chopped coarsely

  ½ stalk celery, cut into rough chunks

  3 tablespoons unsweetened butter, plus more, if desired, for topping

  1 2-ounce veal scallop, ground

  2 ounces calves’ liver, ground

  1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

  good pinch ground cinnamon

  2 bay leaves

  1 cup canned whole tomatoes

  ¼ cup canned petits pois, drained

  5 tablespoons heavy cream

  2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan, plus more, if desired

  whole nutmeg

  salt and freshly milled black pepper, if needed

  Put the potatoes into a large saucepan filled with cold water, bring to the boil, and, when boiling, add salt. The potatoes will probably need about 30 minutes, so bear that in mind as you get on with everything else.

  Put the carrot, garlic, onion, bacon, and celery into a food processor and process until you have a finely minced mess: your batutto or sofritto.

  Put 1 tablespoon of the butter into a frying pan and, when it’s melted, add the chopped vegetables and cook on a gentle but not indolent heat until more than softened; you want them cooked and mushy. Ten minutes should do it, but just keep testing. By the time they are soft enough, you will probably find they’ve absorbed all the fat, so put another tablespoon of butter into the pan. If not ground together, combine the veal and liver, add to the pan, and give a good stir. Add the flour and stir in well, then add the cinnamon, bay leaves, tomatoes, and peas and give another good stir. Cook over a low heat for about 5 minutes until the meats have lost their rawness, stirring and prodding with your wooden spoon every now and again. Add 3 tablespoons of the cream and cook gently for another 5 minutes or so. Remove from the heat while you mash the potatoes.

  Drain the potatoes when you’re sure they’re cooked enough. And don’t be impatient: mashed potatoes made with even minimally undercooked potatoes can cause instant, but justifiable, depression. Mash them (I push the potatoes through my ricer) and return to a hot, dry saucepan. Stir well, adding the remaining butter and cream and the Parmesan. Grate over, too, some nutmeg, and taste to see if you need salt and pepper. The potato shouldn’t be too slurpy.

  Divide the meat mixture between bowls and cover with potato. This doesn’t make a thick layer of potato for the top, but I think it’s better like this. It looks stingy until you start eating, and then it tastes just right.

  You could dot with butter, grate over some more Parmesan, and blitz under a grill, although as small children don’t like furiously hot food I tend not to bother. But if you’re freezing one, or just keeping it in the fridge to be reheated later, you might as well sprinkle with cheese and a few shavings or gobbets of butter just before putting it into a 375°F oven for about 20 minutes.

  BEEF AND BEANS WITH PASTA

  1 medium onion

  1 garlic clove

  1 medium carrot

  ½ celery stalk, chopped roughly

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  8 ounces ground beef

  ½–1 can (15 ounces) red kidney beans, drained, as desired

  1 quart beef stock, homemade or prepared with bouillon cubes

  1 can (14.5 ounces) chopped tomatoes

  2 tablespoons red wine (optional)

  8 ounces small ma
caroni, preferably gnocchetti sardi or ditalini

  salt and freshly milled black pepper

  chunk Parmesan

  This is all you do: put the onion, garlic, carrot, and celery in the processor and pulse for a few seconds until you have a finely chopped orangey-jade mess. (If I’m chopping finely by hand I might, out of laziness or time pressure, not bother with the carrot or celery.) Cook the vegetables in the oil in a medium-large saucepan for 5 minutes or so, until soft but not brown, and then add the beef and turn it in the hot pan, pushing it and breaking it up with a wooden spoon, until browned. Add the drained beans—just half the can if you don’t want too many of them. Add the stock, tomatoes, and wine, if using. Don’t put the liquid in all at once; add it bit by bit and stir. Bring to the boil, add the macaroni, and cook for about 15 minutes or until tender. Much of the liquid should have evaporated or been absorbed and what you’ll have is a thick, busy stew of a soup. Taste and season with the salt and pepper, grate some Parmesan over, and let the eaters grate some more themselves.

  If we’re partaking of this with the children (and it comfortably makes enough bowlfuls for the four of us), I pour over mine some fierce and glowingly orange chili oil.

  MEATBALLS IN TOMATO SAUCE

  I think it’s the smallness of it all, the walnut-sized balls of meat in sauce, that children like, but they also find the texture of ground meat more digestible than even the tiniest strips of the minced kind.

  Because making meatballs is more fiddly than preparing shepherd’s pie (but only marginally—no potatoes to peel, remember), I tend to do a lot and then freeze them in little bags of 4 apiece. If I want to cut corners, I don’t do all that chopping and gentle frying for the sauce (though mince the vegetables together in the processor for this); I just use canned tomatoes and simmer them for a while with the chopped carrot, as below, but without the onion and with the celery stalk and garlic cloves left whole. I retrieve the bits along with the bay leaves once the tomato and vegetables are cooked, and I give them only 10 minutes simmering before immersing the meatballs. And if you can’t bear the idea of precooking the onion to go in the meatballs, just leave it out.

  FOR THE MEATBALLS

  1 medium onion, minced

  salt

  1 tablespoon vegetable oil

  4 slices stale white bread, crusts removed, broken into pieces

  1 cup milk

  2¼ pounds ground beef

  2 beaten eggs

  ¼ cup grated Parmesan

  1 heaping tablespoon chopped parsley

  freshly milled black pepper

  FOR THE SAUCE

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  1 tablespoon unsalted butter

  1 medium onion, minced

  2 garlic cloves, minced

  1 medium carrot, peeled and minced

  1 celery stalk, minced

  2 tablespoons red wine or apple juice

  3 cans (14.5 ounces each) whole tomatoes with their juice

  3 bay leaves

  salt and freshly milled black pepper

  1 cup milk

  all-purpose flour

  1 tablespoon oil, plus more, if needed

  For the meatballs, sauté the onion, sprinkled with salt, for about 10 minutes in the oil. When it’s cooked, remove to a plate and set aside. In the meantime, cover the bread with the milk in a dish and leave for about 10 minutes or until soft.

  Put the beef into a large bowl. Drain the bread by squeezing in your hands and add with the beaten eggs, the Parmesan, the cooked onion, the parsley, and some salt and pepper. Mix well, but gently, with your hands, or get the children to do so. Reserve.

  Meanwhile, get on with the sauce. In a large saucepan or flameproof dish (I use a rectangular cast-iron affair that goes across 2 burners), combine the oil and butter with the onion, garlic, carrot, and celery. Cook the onion mixture until it becomes a soft, sweet stew and then add wine or apple juice and 2½ cans of the tomatoes with their juice. Push the tomatoes around until they break up, then add the bay leaves and season with salt and pepper. Cook for about 20 minutes, add the milk, then cook for a further 10 minutes, by which time everything should be thick and sweetly tomatoey.

  Spread a large surface with the flour and have 2 large plates ready. Using your hands, form the meat mixture into small balls, about the size of a walnut. Then turn each ball in the flour and place on the plates. I make about 46 meatballs with this amount.

  Heat the tablespoon of oil in a nonstick frying pan (you will probably have to add more oil as you go) and brown the meatballs in it. I fit in about 11 a time and as each batch cooks put the meatballs into the pan with the sauce. When you’ve done them all, throw the remaining ½ can tomatoes into the pan in which you’ve been browning the meatballs and then put the contents on top of the meatballs and sauce. Cook in the sauce for 20–30 minutes. You can test the odd one to see whether they’re cooked through. Because my big, low cast-iron pot has a lid, I cook them covered, but it doesn’t really matter. Remove the bay leaves if you feel like it, and serve.

  We always eat these with rice.

  DUCK MEATBALLS

  I make meatballs out of anything, usually halving or quartering the basic recipe above. When I make duck meatballs, I use duck breasts, and just one will do. Because they’re often sold in packs of two, I sometimes broil one for myself for supper and use what remains for the children. I strip the fat off and render it down to fry the onion and meatballs in. I chop the meat roughly and put it in the processor to grind, then mix it by hand with some very finely chopped orange zest, a good pinch of cinnamon, an egg, and a slice of bread, as above, but soaked here in yogurt made runny with milk (or buttermilk—either makes the fat-stripped meat more tender when it’s thus ground). I often use a canned tomato sauce mixed with some canned tomatoes to which I’ve added a good pinch of cinnamon (or I cook it with a short cinnamon stick, which I remove later), another good pinch of ground ginger, and, if I’ve got some in the cupboard, some gorgeous red-golden saffron.

  HAM AND TURKEY

  And after Christmas one year, I made some meatballs that were too moussey for adults but that the children (and their friends) were very keen on, out of leftover ham and turkey chopped in the processor and bound with some sausage meat—that’s to say, the meat from some good butcher’s sausages.

  SPECIAL MEATBALLS

  But my favorite meatballs are a Judeo-Italianified variant. I use 1 pound each veal and beef, 2 eggs, and 1 onion, as above, and add some marjoram to the parsley. I use slightly less bread—3 slices—and add about 2 ounces chicken livers, pulped in the processor. Continue as above. These are fabulous—light in texture, smokily delicate in flavor, and what I cook when I’ve got masses of children and their parents coming for lunch. The sauce is good if you throw in some marjoram with the onions and use Marsala, generously, in place of wine. And sometimes I process one of the cans of tomatoes with another 2 ounces of chicken livers. In my notebook, these go by the name of Special Meatballs, and rightly so.

  CLOVE-HOT CHILI CON CARNE

  In my experience, children like much stronger tastes than adults assume. When I make a chili con carne for them—well, I’m a child of the seventies, what do you expect?—I use spices—cloves in particular—to infuse it with heat rather than chili. I love it, too.

  If you don’t want to soak and cook dried beans, by all means use canned ones and add them 15 minutes before the end. I often soak beans at night and cook them at breakfast-time, letting them cool in their cooking liquid for the rest of the morning.

  And if you don’t want to use porcini, use button mushrooms, about 4 ounces sautéed in 2 tablespoons oil and added to the chili at the end of its cooking time, or no mushrooms at all. But what I do recommend, if not using the porcini, is that you track down some Italian-imported porcini-flavored bouillon cubes and add ½ cup stock made from them when you put in the tomatoes.

  FOR THE BEANS

  2/3 cup dried pinto beans, soaked overnight

&nb
sp; 3 garlic cloves, minced

  1 celery stalk

  3 dried porcini

  1 medium onion stuck with 2 cloves

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  ½ ounce dried porcini

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  2 medium carrots, peeled and minced

  2 medium onions, minced

  3 garlic cloves, minced

  1 celery stalk, minced

  1 dried red chili pepper

  1 pound ground beef

  ½ teaspoon cinnamon

  ½ teaspoon cloves

  1 can (14.5 ounces) whole tomatoes, with their juice

  2 tablespoons bottled barbecue sauce

  2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

  Drain the soaked beans and combine in a saucepan with the garlic, celery, porcini, onion, and oil. Add fresh water to cover generously and simmer over medium heat, covered, until well flavored, about 1 hour. Drain.

  Meanwhile, for the rest, cover the porcini with hot water and set aside to soften. Heat the oil in a frying pan, add the vegetables and dried pepper, and cook for about 10 minutes or until soft. Remove the pepper (my daughter, when she was barely three, liked it hotter by having the chili pepper minced with the vegetables in the processor, but go cautiously). Add the meat and the spices, and turn and push about in the pan before pouring in the tomatoes and the barbecue sauce. Add the softened porcini. Strain and add their soaking water, pouring slowly so the gravelly, grainy bits don’t gush in too. Stir in the brown sugar and the drained beans and simmer for 1 hour or so.

  DUCK LIVER SAUCE

  I suppose it’s because it was dinned into me when I was a child, but I can’t help thinking it incontrovertibly a Good Thing when children eat liver. Duck livers are sweeter and moussier than chicken livers, and so more child-friendly. Sometimes, when I buy a couple of ducks to roast, I use the livers either with leftover meat (in the unlikely event there is any) or some specially bought breast, diced small, to make a chunkier, meatier pasta sauce than the one that follows. For this you’d need to buy duck livers especially, I should think.