Broccoli di rape is my favorite amongst bitter greens, but I am also fond of chicory, endive and escarole. These I serve once in a while. After a savory dish such as chili con queso or eggplant parmigiana or lasagna, I like to serve a chicory salad. With duck, I like a salad of beet and endive. On a cold, wet night, escarole sauteed in olive oil with garlic, pepper and lemon juice is just the thing. But nothing comes close to broccoli di rape, which I could eat happily every day of the week and never tire of.
Since it is definitely an adult taste, it is best to serve it to adults. A good bunch is one with more buds than leaves. There should not be so much as a spot of yellow on the leaves, although some of the heads may have those little yellow flowers. The leaves should be dark green and the stalks the deep jade of broccoli. In the fall you can find broccoli di rape loose in the farmers' markets where you will find some delicate, tender stalks and some thick with tightly curled flower heads that make its resemblance to broccoli very clear.
What you are after is the flower heads, although a few leaves look very pretty and taste good, too. The thicker the stalk the more it may require trimming. The secret is not to undercook. Undercooked broccoli di rape is tough and rubbery. Slightly overcooked it is tender and silky. It is hard to make a confession like this in these health-obsessed times, but I like vegetables to be very tender. I like a string bean that giues and does not fight
back. I am also very fond of the sort of stewed vegetables you get in Middle Eastern restaurants: string beans and okra that have been cooked in a sauce for hours.
Broccoli di rape stews up nicely, too, in broth, butter and garlic. You can add it to a soup, or serve it cold with avocado and a ginger dressing as a first course. It would make an admirable addition to a bacon and spinach salad. With buckwheat noodles it makes a filling and very nutritious lunch, and of course you can serve it as a side vegetable. But its most magnificent incarnation is in a three-part dish called Pepper Chicken with Polenta and Broccoli di Rape, which is perfect for supper in late fall.
PEPPER CHICKEN WITH POLENTA AND BROCCOLI DI RAPE
serves 4 / chicken (fryer)
1 tablespoon dried thyme V2 tablespoon black pepper
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1 dash ground clove
paprika
3 cloves garlic, slivered
butter
1-1 V2 pounds broccoli di rape
THE CHICKEN
/. Have the butcher cut up your chicken (or do it yourself), separating leg hrom thigh and splitting the breast into quarters. The idea is to have pieces of uniform size.
2. Make a dry marinade by combining thyme, black pepper, red pepper flakes, brown sugar and ground clove. Sprinkle this on both sides of the chicken and set aside for an hour or so. When it is time to put the chicken in the oven, dust it with paprika, festoon with slivered garlic and dot with butter.
3. Bake as you ordinarily bake chicken. There is no rule for this. Some people like their chicken falling off the bone (I am one of these) and some feel that this is an abomination and prefer theirs just done. Whichever way you prefer, make sure the chicken becomes crisp.
THE POLENTA
4. Make the polenta in the ordinary way. I have found it useful to stir it with a whisk. Add a nice piece of butter while you are stirring: boil 6V2 cups water and add cornmeal slowly when the water begins to simmer. Keep stirring for about twenty minutes. The polenta is done when it pulls away from the pot.
THE BROCCOLI DI RAPE
5. While you are stirring, steam one large bunch (about a pound to a pound and a half) of broccoli di rape from which you have removed any woody stalks and unnecessary leaves.
ASSEMBLING THE DISH
6. Turn the polenta onto a large platter Arrange the chicken pieces all around and then pour on top of the polenta all the pan juices, which includes all the chicken fat and butter. Remember, this is a party dish and not something you are going to
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serve every day. If there is not enough pan juice, add olive oil, butter or both and a little lemon juice.
7. Put the broccoli di rape on top of the polenta, or arrange it in some graceful way on the side of the platter. I like mine on top. Then dig in.
This is an amazingly delectable dish and serves to show off bitter greens at their best: they bring out the taste of everything else while contributing their own pungent contrast.
Furthermore, this dish is popular with men, but do not expect them to finish the meal with an endive salad.
SOUP
There is nothing like soup. It is by its nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your I soup from cans.
Soup embraces variety. There are silken cream soups that glisten on the spoon and spicy bisques with tiny flecks of lobster. There are broths in which float tiny tortellini and bouillons served in teacups on cold days, or, in the case of my great-aunt Julia Rice, ladled from silver punch bowls and served in punch cups to the conductors on the old Fifth Ayenue streetcar during snowstorms.
There are cold soups, soups that resemble stews, but when I think about soup, I mean something you eat with bread and butter and call a meal—meat soups and bean soups: thick, warming and consoling, and also a good way to deal with leftovers.
The best soup I have ever eaten was made from a friend's leftover Christmas pheasant, the remains of the potatoes Anna, peas, cabbage and stock. Not so long ago I bought a pheasant at my local farmers' market and served it roasted to my family only
so that I could try to replicate it. But that soup, like most leftover soups, is a kind of lost chord and no one will ever find it again.
Soup is the food of childhood, and I remember being brought up on Campbell's vegetarian vegetable soup, which contained, and still may contain, okra and lentils among the traditional corn, peas and string beans.
When we were ailing my mother made what she called chicken soup but is really poached chicken made with chicken breasts, carrots, onions, a strip of lemon peel, some peppercorns and spring water. After two hours of the gentlest poaching, it is done. You serve it in a soup plate with toast points and flat ginger ale to invalids of every kind.
It was not until 1 was a teenager that I tasted lentil soup which became a lifetime companion. There have been periods of my life when I have lived on lentil soup—made with veal bones, without bones, with spinach, tomatoes, potatoes, leftover baked chicken or steak. After having composed about ten thousand lentil soups, all of them good (since lentil soup is never bad), I have found that the most successful of all lentil soups calls for veal bones and leftover veal stew.
I could eat soup every day of the week, and now that I have a small child I have come to believe that it is curative. Chicken soup really does seem to help a cold, and there is nothing for intestinal disturbances like barley soup.
There is almost no soup I find alien, although 1 do not like the idea of sweet fruit soup. I have made summer soups in the blender of yogurt and cucumber, and I would like to make fish soup but I am married to a man who feels that fish must only be grilled. In a perfect world 1 would have a real freezer in which I would keep ice cube trays of frozen stock, or I would do what cooking magazines encourage: freeze the stock in ice trays, crack the cubes into bags and label neatly. I would also have little jars of meat glaze, stock that has been reduced until it resembles what Father Robert Farrar Capon calls "a tender shoe
heel" and makes the ultimate soup base if you can stop yourself from eating it straight out of the jar.
But we do not live in a perfect world, which is too bad since canned broth is pretty nasty. All soups are better for having been made of fresh stock, but some soups do all right with plain water.
There must be more recipes for soup than any other thing. It is a true convenience food and has been since Esau sold his birthright for a plate of lentil soup. Vegetables simmered in plain water with herbs and a little butter make a fi
ne soup and so do beans and meat, which must be simmered for hours. Even these soups are easy: you put them on the stove and leave them alone.
There is one soup I make all winter long which has the double virtue of being scrumptious and effortless. It is full of good things. You make it in the morning and eat it in the evening. All you have to do is skim the fat off the top. The second day you can add to it to change it, if you have any left over.
The meat for this soup is short ribs. There is nothing like it for soup, but it is fatty: shin makes a good enough substitute. Trim as much fat as you can from the short ribs, which can be kept in one piece or cut up by the butcher.
BEEF, LEEK AND BARLEY SOUP
serves 3-4
2 big, meaty short ribs
V2 cup barley
3 large cloves garlic, chopped
2 onions, chopped
3 large leeks, cut lengthwise
black pepper
8 cups filtered water or beef stock
other vegetables (optional)
/. Trim short ribs and put them on the bottom of your soup pot.
2. Add barley, garlic, onions, and leeks (use both the white and the green parts). You can also add mushrooms and any other vegetables you might like. Grind in a little black pepper.
3. Add filtered water or beef stock and let simmer on the back burner for at least three hours while you go about your business.
(You can add lima beans, cubed potatoes, peas, corn, string beans and chopped tomatoes. I myself would not put any kind of squash into this soup, and I am not fond of turnips.)
4. Before serving, skim off the fat, take the meat off the bones, chop it and put it back in the soup.
This sort of soup makes a meal, and if you are not feeding intimidating company, you can serve it as the meal. A little dish of pasta, followed by soup, bread and cheese and a salad makes a very heartwarming dinner, with grapes and chocolate cookies for dessert.
Soup has come to symbolize the ultimate in comfort and safety. Many years ago, when I was about fifteen, 1 saw someone served a cup of soup, and this vision, which had all the sentimental charm of a painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, is indelibly imprinted on my mind.
It was a cold, rainy autumn night and some grubby teenagers had gathered at a friend's rather splendid house. We heard the crunch of a car on gravel. A taxi pulled up and into the wet night stepped the friend's older sister, who was coming home from college for the weekend. She was probably nineteen but she looked like the picture of sophistication. She wore brown pumps, a green tweed suit, pearl earrings and her hair was pulled back in a French twist.
She took off her wet coat, sat down in front of the fire and her mother brought her a large, ornamental bone china cup of soup. She warmed her hands on the cup and then she set it on its saucer, balanced it on her lap and ate the soup with a bouillon
HOME COOKING
spoon. The dog, a weimaraner, lay dozing at her feet. Outside the rain clattered. Inside that pretty living room all was safe.
Of course you need not have a weimaraner or a fire or anyone coming home from college. To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.
ENGLISH FOOD
If you work up the courage to confess that you like English food people are apt to sneer and tell you that 1 it is impossible to get a decent meal in the British Isles
and that the English know nothing about cooking. Even the English, some of whom have been brought up on a dread substance known as School Food, often feel this way.
England, of course, has a long and grand tradition of cooking—it is a much plainer and more forthright variety than that of France and, since it is of a cold climate, it does not have the sun-drenched style of, say, Italian food, but it has pleasures all its own.
The first time I went to England I was a student and virtually penniless. I can't remember what I ate except a plate of custard at a cafe near Victoria Station and a gooseberry bread pudding in Canterbury. A slightly richer friend took me out for tea one afternoon at a place called Heals in the Tottenham Court Road.
Heals in the early sixties was a cross between Hammacher-Schlemmer, Design Research and the present-day Conran's. It sold top-of-the-line pots and pans and fixtures. Young marrieds
furnished their households at Heals, where you could get linens, lamps, knives, forks, plates and so on. On the top was a tearoom, which has since vanished.
We sat down to tea and 1 was in heaven. This was the wish fulfillment of a childhood filled with English children's books. It seemed a wonderful feast to me as a child and now that I am grown up tea is my favorite meal. But until 1 sat down at Heals I had never had a proper tea in my life.
All around us were real Englishwomen—there did not seem to be a man in the place—pouring out tea from brown teapots. Put before us was a plate of bread and butter, a seed cake and a dish of little cakes made with candied cherries. I felt I would never be as happy again as I was that afternoon.
On my next trip I stayed with my friend Richard Davies and his parents. At the Davieses' I was introduced to the institution of English Sunday lunch: roast meat, potatoes, two vegetables and a sweet. I learned that even when the papers bore the banner headline: whew! what a scorcher! the meal never varied. You might sit around the swimming pool at someone's country house and still emerge to be fed roast leg of lamb, roast potatoes, two vegetables and dessert.
It was on this second trip that I had my first cream tea, which many people feel is in itself the perfect meal: scones, clotted cream and strawberry jam. As you drive out of London you begin to see signs on houses that read we do cream teas. My cream tea was consumed at a tea house in Woodstock, right near Blenheim Palace, on a day thick with clouds. The tea shop had one large room full of tables dressed in white cloths. We sat down and consumed an amazing quantity of scones, cream and jam.
On my next trip I was more grown up, better heeled, and I decided it would be nice to do some cooking. I found myself wandering happily in the local shops and supermarkets where everything was so pleasingly different from what I saw at home. A trip to the Harrods food hall filled me with awe. I have never seen anything to compare with it: the dozens of local cheeses
and the variety of imported ones. The numbers of birds and kinds of eggs. The fish, pates, and cuts of meat I had never heard of.
In England you could get chicken that tasted like chicken, and gooseberries and tomatoes and those long pale green cucumbers with a silvery taste. In specialty shops there were raised pies: veal, ham and egg, chicken, and cottage pie. You could buy a bag of delicious cream cakes and eat them in the movies. You could even find a decent cup of coffee, although nothing compares to plain old English tea.
To divert me from my endless meanderings in food stores, Richard took me on a trip to the Highlands of Scotland, where we were assured we would never find anything edible at all. On a freezing night in June we had dinner in our hotel and we decided to order haggis, as a joke. Haggis is the national dish of Scotland. It is composed of minced liver and oatmeal (barley is a variation) in a savory sauce, stuck into a sheep's stomach and boiled. It is served with something called "mashed neeps," which are turnips. It sounded so dire that we felt we ought to try it.
The haggis was brought to our table in its stomach bag which was slashed before our eyes. Out slid the contents, which gave off a very delicious smell. To our amazement, we loved it. It was rich, savory, just right for a cold place and perfect with the slightly bitter turnips.
While wandering around the Highlands we ate magnificent smoked salmon, soused herring, wonderful bread and biscuits and something called Scotch tablet, which is a solidified bar of butter and sugar.
It is possible to get nasty food everywhere, but with the exception of a few eccentric meals fed me by my peers, the only awful thing I ever ate in England was a packaged pork pie; but then a person who eats a packaged pork pie gets what she deserves.
Once the English food addict is back on home turf it is
possible to stave off pangs of longing with the aid of any number of English cookbooks from which you can make such wonderful things as Queen of Puddings, Easter biscuits, potted shrimp, ginger cake, lemon sponge, Bath buns, orange custard, Lancashire hot pot and crumpets, which I have attempted many times, never with any success.
My copies of Jane Grigson's English Food and Mrs. Florence White's Good Things in England are falling apart. For late night reading 1 enjoy Mrs. Arthur Webb's Farmhouse Cookery, which has no copyright date but looks to have been published in the twenties and has descriptions of the Welsh Grate, the Devon Down Oven, the Suffolk frying pan and contains recipes for things like Whitby Polony (a kind of sandwich filling of minced beef, ham and bread crumbs) and Singing Minnies (a griddle cake). 1 am also fond of Alison Utely's Recipes from an Old Farm House, which describes a pudding made from the milk of a newly calved cow should you happen to have one around the house.
One of my greatest finds, in an old bookshop in the Hamptons, is a copy of From Caviar to Candy: Recipes for Small Households from All Parts of the World, by Mrs. Phillip Marti-neau. First published in 1927, it covers the territory from hors d'oeuvres to sweets and poses such questions as: "Now, why, I ask, should the same old fare be invariably provided at cricket lunches? I remember a cricket lunch at Hurlingham Club in the Argentine ..." Her first chapter, entitled "Cooks—Mistresses and Imaginations," sets the tone: "What chance has the average cook, unless her mistress will help her?" she asks. This is a question 1 have asked myself many times.
Her recipes are more chatty than scientific—"There be some that claim that it is worthwhile even to visit that dullest of all dull places, Bagnolle de I'Orne, to eat the tripe prepared at a nearby town" begins one.
When it comes to cakes and puddings, savories, bread and tea
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