How to Eat (16 page)

Add the garlic to the chickpea mixture and pour in half the oil. Cover the pot tightly and bring to the boil. You will have to gauge this by ear without peeping in. Lower the heat and cook over the lowest simmer until the chickpeas are tender, 2–4 hours. Take a look after 1½ hours.

When the chickpeas are tender, remove the garlic and the rosemary bundle, which should be floating on the surface. Purée the tomatoes in a food mill or in a food processor and add to the soup with their juice. Stir well, add salt and pepper to taste, and cook for 10 minutes further or so. This is the point at which you should stop when you’re cooking the soup in advance.

When you want to eat it, put the soup back on the burner and reheat it, so that you can proceed to the final step, which is to cook the pasta. Before you add the pasta to the soup, check that there is enough liquid in the pot. If not, add some boiling water. Now, to the boiling soup, add the pasta and cook till al dente. At this point, I like to add chopped parsley, but the glory of this soup will be undiminished if you prefer not to. But do pour some of the remaining olive oil into the pot of soup, and drizzle some more into each bowl after you’ve ladled the soup in. Or just pour some into the big pot and let people add what they want as they eat. I put good extra-virgin olive oil on the table as well as a bottle of chili oil for those who like some heat—and it does work. Serve, too, the Parmesan, on a plate with a grater, so people can add their own.

SPLIT PEA SOUPS

Split pea soups don’t need to be cooked in advance, since the peas don’t need soaking, but it is a rare soup—or stew, for that matter—that doesn’t improve with a few days’ hanging around. The only thing to remember is that you will need to add more liquid when you reheat it, as legumes seem to drink up their cooking liquid for ages. I love all split pea soups and remember wonderful grainy, tobacco-tinted purées eaten in Amsterdam—thick, puddingy soups, smelling of sausage. But green split peas are the ones I tend to cook the most. Whenever I’ve boiled a ham, I save the salty stock. Into this I throw some green split peas and sliced leeks, maybe a potato or two, for a near-enough instant supper. When the weather is relentlessly, intrusively windy and cold, then a thick, pale green sludge of split peas is perfect. Recently, though, I’ve begun to think that the ham stock is even better used as a base for a pea soup with fresh (or frozen) peas on a spring or summer’s day.

Cooking ahead is the only way to keep sane when you’re cooking for a lot of people. Thick soups will do, as you don’t need to add too much to fill people up: good bread, good cheese, good wine. I was never particularly keen on black bean soup till I had a bowlful in a small Cuban place in South Beach, Miami; I loved its spice-foggy muddiness. The recipe that follows attempts to evoke it. It serves about 8 people, but obviously the quantities can be boosted without requiring a doctorate in higher mathematics on the part of the cook.

SOUTH BEACH BLACK BEAN SOUP

2 1/3 cups dried black beans

2 bay leaves

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

2 large red peppers, cored, seeded, and chopped

2 shallots, chopped

2 medium onions, chopped

8 garlic cloves, minced

1 tablespoon ground cumin

2 tablespoons ground dried oregano

zest of 1 lime, plus 4 limes, quartered, for serving

½ tablespoon light or dark muscovado sugar, or light or dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon salt, or to taste

2 tablespoons dry sherry

2–3 tablespoons chopped fresh coriander

1 medium red onion, diced, for serving

1 cup sour cream, for serving (optional)

Tabasco sauce, for serving

Place the beans in a large pot and cover with 2 quarts water. There is no need to soak. Add the bay leaves and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer the beans for 1½–2 hours till soft but not squishy, stirring frequently and adding more water if necessary to keep them well covered.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large, deep frying pan and sauté the peppers, shallots, and onions over medium heat until the onions are translucent, about 15 minutes. Add the garlic, cumin, oregano, and lime zest and sauté for an additional 5 minutes. Transfer to a blender and purée until smooth.

When the beans are almost tender, add the puréed mixture, sugar, and salt, or salt to taste, to the beans and cook until just tender, 20–30 minutes. Adjust the seasonings and add the sherry if you’re serving straightaway, but otherwise season and sherry the soup when you’re reheating it later, and you will also need to add water as the soup thickens on cooling. Put the coriander, red onion, quartered limes, and sour cream, if using, in separate bowls and bring these to the table with the Tabasco so that people can add as much of each as they want.

But
the
soup you have to make in advance, and a soup unjustifiably ignored today, is consommé. There is, for most people, a ring of
bon viveur
about the word consommé; it conjures up a world of napkin-arranged gentility and brisk effortfulness. Well, then, call it
brodo.
A beautiful, clear, flavor-infused liquid that is unsurpassable. And it’s strange that, in our gush and lust for all things Italian, that amber broth, which is such an ordinary and integral part of the Italian diet, gets routinely ignored.

I’ve come to the conclusion that our disdain is twofold. It is fueled in the first part by fear and the second by insecurity. The fear is culinary, the insecurity social. There are certain words that immediately make people feel the recipe they are reading is not for them. Stock, pestle and mortar, bain marie are just some such. And stock is, I think, the most terror-laden. But more than that, people are afraid that a plain consommé will be boring. For all our modern talk about valuing simplicity, we balk when faced with something truly, perfectly simple. We want the vibrant, the robust, the instant, the simplified—that’s different. A consommé strikes us—correctly—as a dish that belongs to a formal dinner. We are afraid that borrowing from the earlier canon of the elaborately arranged dinner party will mark us out as infra dig, out of touch, or just plain suburban.

A clear soup, made properly, is not at all without personality. It is uplifting, delicately but insistently flavored. But even chefs, with their splendid stockpots, are rarely sufficiently confident to serve an unadorned broth. Too often, these days, it comes fashionably spiked with lemongrass or pebbled with beans. I love all variations—and I do willingly admit that the point of a good broth is that it is a wonderfully deep-toned base for the bits you can float in it—and am happy with just about any innovation that has integrity, but an ordinary, straightforward consommé or
brodo,
golden poolfuls of the stuff, is a joy and a restorative—bracingly elegant.

It is time-consuming to make but not difficult, and a wonderfully mood-enhancing way of putskying around in a kitchen. You need to get started a good day before you’re planning to eat it—in order to let it cool and skim off the fat—but you can leave it in the fridge for 3 or so days and not worry.

The recipe here is from a book that should never have been allowed to go out of print: Arabella Boxer’s
Book of English Food—
subtitled
A Rediscovery of British Food from Before the War—
which was published in 1991. You don’t read cookbooks just for culinary instruction—I don’t—but also for comment, for history, for talk. And it is for all these that I want Arabella Boxer’s literary company. Here she is on the fashionable emergence of the consommé in the 1920s:

Roughly speaking, the more elegant the occasion, the smoother, or clearer, the soup. A consommé was considered the ultimate test of a good cook, and the ideal start to an exquisite meal. It might be served quite plain, or with some small garnish floating in it: small vegetable dice, a few grains of rice, or minuscule soup pasta. In a less conventional household a more elaborate garnish might be served separately: round croûtons piled high with whipped cream, or a bowl of saffron-flavoured rice, or even a jug of beetroot juice for adding, with cream, to a consommé made with duck and beef stock. This practice of handing round a number of elaborate garnishes separately amused the English. Part of its appeal was that by enabling the guests to assemble their own dishes it pandered to their distrust of what they described as “mucky food.”

CONSOMMÉ

Arabella Boxer adapted this recipe from June Platt’s
Vogue
column in the 1930s and prefaces it with the remark—pertinent here—that it is best made over 2 days, adding that “the original recipe calls for 12 pints of water, but few of us have pans that large. I use half that amount, filling up the pan from time to time with more cold water.” Stewing hens, which are most desirable for making the consommé, are difficult to come by but not impossible to find. Kosher or halal butchers usually sell them, or you may find frozen stewing hens. I don’t want to be too prissy, but I like to feel confident about the origin of the birds. I don’t want to eat some miserable fowl raised on fish pellets in squalor somewhere. Poussins can also provide wonderful stock, as I’ve found (see
page 10
).

The idea of cooking anything for 7 hours seems incredible these days. Consider using a heat diffuser—you want a gentle simmer, the odd bubble rising up. Avoid, at all costs, all the precious liquid’s ungovernable evaporation.

1 stewing hen or large chicken (about 6 pounds)

2½ pounds beef stew meat, cubed

2 large carrots, peeled and sliced thickly

2 medium onions, sliced thickly

2 leeks, sliced thickly

3 parsley sprigs

3 thyme sprigs

1 large garlic clove, peeled

salt and freshly milled black pepper

2 cloves

Wash the hen and put it in a large soup pot, add the beef, and cover well with 4 quarts cold water. Let stand for ½ hour, then put on the heat and bring slowly to the boil. Remove the scum, add ½ cup cold water, and bring to the boil again. Repeat this process twice. (The added water stops the boiling; each time it recommences, the action draws more flavor from the hen and beef.) Simmer very slowly for 1 hour, then add the carrots, onions, leeks, parsley sprigs, thyme, and garlic. Season with the salt and pepper, add the cloves, and let simmer for 7 hours.

Strain through a fine sieve, then through wet cheesecloth. You can also use a clean reusable kitchen wipe or a paper funnel-shaped coffee filter. Paper towels won’t work; they’re too absorbent and end up not straining anything.

Chill overnight and, when cold, carefully remove grease. Makes 3–4 quarts; serves 12.

A basic
brodo
of an Italian sort provides a fragrant liquid base for tortellini or gnocchetti di semolino (see below) or any other manner of culinary punctuation. This broth is cooked for less time than the one above and so one would expect it to be lighter, more delicate, and less suited to being served just as it is. It is also, preeminently, designed to make divine risotti.

ITALIAN BROTH

1 pound piece of beef flank

2 pieces veal shank cut 1–1½ inches thick

1 pound chicken wings, 1 chicken carcass, or 1 poussin

1 medium onion, halved, each half stuck with 1 clove

2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced chunkily

2 celery stalks, sliced chunkily

2 leeks, white part only, sliced

1 ripe tomato, halved, or 1 canned plum tomato, drained of juice

1 garlic clove, peeled

1 bay leaf

6 parsley sprigs

6 black peppercorns

1 teaspoon salt

Put all the ingredients into a stockpot or large saucepan and cover with water by about 2 inches. Bring to the boil slowly—over medium heat—then turn down the heat so that it simmers gently. Skim the scum from the surface and keep an eye on it so that you can see when more scum rises to the surface and needs to be skimmed off again. Do this about 3 times in quick succession, then every hour. Let simmer—always very gently, and you may well need a heat diffuser if even at the lowest heat the broth bubbles overexuberantly—for 3 hours.

Remove the large pieces of meat and vegetable with a slotted spoon and then pour the broth into a large bowl (a wide one makes it easier to remove the fat later) through a sieve lined with cheesecloth or a clean, single-thickness reusable kitchen wipe. When cool, put in the fridge. When it’s set (overnight or after about 8 hours), skim the fat off the surface. I find wiping the top, firmly but not so brutally you break into the jelly below, with paper towels the easiest way of degreasing it. It keeps in the fridge for up to 3 days. Makes about 3 quarts.