How to Eat (14 page)

FREEZER

I lived for years without a freezer without ever minding very much. Certainly this allowed me the luxury of dreaming of all the good things I would cook and put by should I ever have one; I imagined with pleasure the efficient domestic angel I would then become. Now that I do have a freezer, it is indeed full. And, yet, I feel faintly resentful of its fullness.

The difficulty I find with stuffing a freezer full of food to eat at some future date is that when that future date comes I probably won’t want to eat it. This is not because the food will spoil or disappoint, but because every time I open my freezer I see the same efficiently stowed-away packages of coq au vin or beef stew or whatever it may be, and I get bored with them. I begin to feel as if I’ve eaten them as many times as I’ve opened the freezer door.

The freezer can easily become a culinary graveyard, a place where good food goes to die.

If you’re someone who is meticulous about cooking, freezing, filing, and then thawing in an orderly fashion, you need no advice from me as to how best to use your freezer. But you must be honest with yourself. There is no point in stowing away stews and soups if you are going to let them linger so long in its depths that finally all you can do is chuck them out. You’ll probably find you stand more chance of eating the food you cook in advance if—when you put it in the freezer—you do so with some particular occasion in mind rather than just stashing it away for some unspecified future time. Obviously, if you know people are coming for dinner on Friday but the only time you can get any cooking done is on the weekend before, then the freezer will be useful (see Cooking in Advance,
page 75
). But unless you have an astonishingly capacious freezer and a mania for planning in advance, I wouldn’t advise stocking up for more than one or two such occasions at any one time. However, there are two areas in which even I am ruthlessly efficient about freezing and then using food: cooking for children and dieting are both unimaginably easier if you create a form of culinary database in the deep freeze (see Feeding Babies and Small Children,
page 405
, and Low Fat,
page 365
).

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK

Leftovers are obviously better put away in the freezer if the alternative destination is several days lingering in the fridge and then the trash can. On the other hand, beware of using the freezer as a less guilt-inducing way of chucking food you know you don’t want. If no one, including you, liked the soup the first time round (and that’s why you’ve got so much left over), there is no point in freezing it for some hopeful future date when, miraculously, it will taste delicious. But bagging leftovers—say, stews—in single portions can be useful for those evenings when you’re eating alone. Take the little package out of the freezer before you go to work in the morning and heat it up for supper when you get back at night. Immensely cheering.

The freezer really comes into its own not so much when you don’t have time for cooking as when you don’t have time for shopping. In other words, the best use for the freezer is as a pantry.

As with a pantry, you must be on your guard against overstocking. In fact, having far too much in the freezer can be very much worse than a moldering pantry, because food so easily gets buried and really forgotten about rather than simply ignored. But a solid supply of ingredients with which to cook, rather than just wholly prepared dishes, can really help you make good simple things to eat without exhausting last-minute trawls around the supermarket.

SHRIMP

You should always have in your freezer some raw shrimp. Most shrimp available to us has been frozen at some point on their way to the market, then defrosted. Therefore, if you buy shrimp to store in the freezer, it’s best to get them in still-frozen form rather than refreezing already frozen and defrosted specimens. Speak to your fish seller about the availability of these “fresh” still-frozen shrimp.

You can cook frozen shrimp without having to defrost them in advance; just plunge them, unthawed, into boiling water, salted and maybe spiked with a little vinegar. Peel them and pile them on top of garlicky puy lentils or mix them, cooled, into a fennel salad.

MASHED POTATOES, TRUFFLE OIL, AND WARM SANTA BARBARA SHRIMP

When I was in Los Angeles some years back, I ate at Joachim Splichal’s Patina the most wonderful starter of mashed potatoes and truffles with warm Santa Barbara shrimp on top. The combination works. Purée some potatoes (they need to be whipped as well as mashed) with butter and white pepper, put a small, or maybe not so small, mound on a plate, add some barely cooked shrimp, then drizzle over some truffle oil if you have some, or some Ligurian olive oil if you haven’t.

BACON

Bacon is another ingredient any cook should keep in the freezer. (And I like to keep some pancetta there too.) I always freeze bacon in pairs of slices so that they defrost in minutes. The point about bacon is that it’s sold everywhere, even the corner convenience store, but the good stuff is hard to find. I get my bacon from my butcher, and I know when I cook it that (1) white froth won’t seep out of it, and (2) it will taste of bacon. If your butcher doesn’t have excellent bacon (and very few do), I really wouldn’t turn to the supermarket, however upmarket its reputation; find instead a mail-order supplier (see
page 461
) and get some sent to you.

Nothing is as good as a bacon sandwich made with white bread. There are times when you just need to have that salty-sweet curl of seared flesh pressed between fat-softened, lean-stained, spongy supermarket-white-bread slices. My guiding rule is that I always have the wherewithal for a bacon sandwich in the house. I aim to keep all the ingredients for spaghetti carbonara at hand, too.

BREAD

Bread is worth keeping in the freezer. It freezes well, and I keep good bread in loaves and plastic white bread (such as is needed for bacon sandwiches) in pairs of slices. It’s when I have to go shopping for basics such as bread and milk that I come back having spent far too much on absolute unnecessities.

MILK

Most varieties of milk freeze all right, too. For various reasons, all of them good ones, I try to keep visits to a supermarket to a minimum; I use my freezer to help keep me away.

STOCK

You must keep stock in your freezer, and also the bones you have saved to make it. Turn your freezer into your very own Golgotha by throwing in lamb bones, chicken carcasses, and any other bones at hand. I have been known to take home the carcasses with me after a dinner party once I’ve found out that (a) they have come from my butcher and (b) they were going to be thrown away. Keep ham bones or leftover trimmings from cooked hams, too, to flavor pea and bean soups at some later date.

Freeze your own, consequent, homemade stock in manageable portions (see
page 9
). I also keep a couple of tubs of good commercial stock or demi-glace in my freezer. Certainly, good commercial fish stock is very useful to have on hand; making a good fish fumet is rather more serious work than making a chicken stock, and I feel guiltless about having someone else do it for me, especially if it’s done better than I would myself.

PARMESAN

Parmesan rinds can be stowed away for future use. Every time you come to the end of a wedge of Parmesan, or if you’ve left it out unwrapped for so long that it has become rebarbatively hard, don’t throw the piece away but chuck it in the freezer (preferably in a marked bag) to use whenever you make a minestrone or other soup which would benefit from that smoky, salty depth of flavoring.

FRUITS

As for desserts, other than the obvious ones that are meant to be frozen, such as ice cream, you don’t need to do more than keep a package or so of frozen fruits, which can be made to serve in most eventualities. Remember that defrosted strawberries take on the texture of soft, cold slugs. Remove them from the packages of mixed fruits, and chuck them out.

WINE

EGG WHITES

If, like me, you’re not much of a drinker, then you can stop yourself from wasting leftover wine after dinner parties by measuring out glassfuls and freezing them, well labeled (or you’ll mistake white wine for egg whites, and see below) to use for cooking later on. And as for egg whites, I’ve got so many frozen my freezer is beginning to look like a sperm bank.

PANTRY

Unless you want to spend your every waking free hour buying food, you need to have at home basic ingredients that you can use to make something good when you haven’t had time to shop or plan for a particular meal. But don’t believe what you are told about essentials; all it means is that you’ll have a pantry full of lost bottles of Indonesian soy sauce with a use-by date of November 1994. There is a compromise. Buy those few ingredients that really do provide a meal quickly and easily, and don’t weigh yourself down with various tempting bits and pieces that you think you may get round to using one day.

I don’t want to be too dictatorial, though. Apart from anything else, so much depends on the amount of space you’ve got. I am the Imelda Marcos—she who had a cushion with “Nouveau Riche Is Better than No Riche at All” embroidered on it—of the food shop world. I am not safe in food stores. No wonder I can’t move on account of food I’ve bankrupted myself to buy. You have to avoid finding yourself in the same position. For there is no such thing as having food to cover most eventualities that doesn’t also involve regularly throwing away food that goes bad before you eat it.

It’s not easy to hold back. Nothing is as good as buying food. Buying pantry food is highly seductive because it doesn’t go bad and you don’t have the stress of actual, imminent here-and-now cooking. It’s fantasy shopping—and that’s why it gets out of hand. Food bought on these expeditions lingers on for years, untouched. Partly this is because items you buy to store away are so often expensive, rarefied delicacies that having been bought, you then feel you have to save for something special. If you can get out of that frame of mind—which is the same mindset that leads you to buy an extremely expensive piece of clothing that you then leave hanging in the closet rather than allow it to be sullied by being worn around the house—then food shopping isn’t quite such a dangerous pastime.

But it isn’t the pattern of extravagance followed by austerity, nor the habit of saving things for best, that argues against intensive stockpiling. There is a hardheaded, practical reason for being modest in your supplies: the food that people buy bags and bags of—flour, spices, rice, lentils—doesn’t actually keep forever. The chances are that you will end up with a pantry full of stale beans. It’s not that this food goes bad, necessarily, but it becomes less good to eat. It’s comforting to know that you’ve got a bag of chickpeas, but you must be strict with yourself and use it, not just keep it there for some rainy day when you fondly think you’ll stay in and cook
pasta e ceci.
After a few years, they won’t be dried, they’ll be fossilized—and tasteless.

Anyway, unless you live in very remote parts, the chances are that it won’t be too difficult to go shopping for any special items you need for a specific recipe. A pantry is much more useful for keeping stuff in that you know you’ll want regularly. This sort of food is likely to be the food you eat alone or with your family. You want to be able to cook something in the evening after work without having to go shopping, and you don’t want to have to start thinking about it before you get home. (I always want to think about what I’m going to eat, not in any elaborate organizational way, but because the speculation gives me pleasure. But there are many times when idly, greedily speculating is indeed the most energetic thing I can manage to do in advance. So what I need to know is that I have some food at home that won’t take long to cook and won’t demand too much of me.)

PASTA

The most important ingredient to keep in your larder, or food cupboard, or whatever it might be, is pasta. Stick to a few different shapes only; if you try to cover too many bases, you will simply end up with about ten opened, almost finished, packages and you will never be able to make a decent plateful of any of them. It’s useful to have rather a lot of spaghetti so that you can suddenly cook a huge plateful of something for a kitchen load of people if need be. Linguine is sufficiently different to be worth having as well. Short pasta is quick and easier to cook for children; choose fusilli or penne, for example. Some kinds of eggy pasta need little cooking and are therefore wonderful for when you feel like Elizabeth Taylor shouting “Hurry!” to the microwave, as Joan Rivers’s cruel joke had it.

GOOD TOMATO SAUCE

PESTO

You need some pasta sauces in your pantry too. A good tomato sauce is indispensable. What you want to avoid is having your fridge full of large opened jars and bottles that have been half used up. I buy a whole case of smallish bottles of tomato sauce at a time, so that I know there’s always some on hand. With jars and cans, it is worth getting as much as you have room for, as anything heavy is a nightmare to buy; better to get it over and done with in one exhausting go. (For this reason, I also buy baked beans, the 8-ounce size, in bulk.) I would never be without two containers of good commercial pesto—one in use, the other in the pantry. If you can have pasta with tomato sauce or pasta with pesto in an everyday emergency, then you have all you need in your larder.

I do keep, though, a mixture of canned foods (soup, baked beans) so that there’s something there for when I don’t want to cook at all.