How to Eat (23 page)

I am not normally the sort of person who bakes, bottles, or otherwise prepares or preserves fruit; I like it ripe, fresh, as it is. I make a couple of exceptions: one for quinces, about which I can grow somewhat obsessive during November, the other for plums. We have a few trees in the garden and from them more fruit than we can eat. Even in a bad year, when the dusty blue, grape-black skins enclose disappointingly unyielding Pucci-green fruit, baking them like this transforms them. You can bake the plums a few days in advance, and they freeze very well in their aromatic syrup. This is a favorite dessert in my house.

2 pounds plums, halved and pitted

1 cup red wine

2 bay leaves

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 cloves

1 star anise

seeds from 4 cardomom pods or scant ¼ teaspoon ground cardomom

½ cup honey

Set oven to 325°F. Choose a baking dish that will hold the plums, halved, in one layer; if you haven’t got one big enough you could use a couple, but make sure you fill whichever dishes you’re using or there won’t be enough syrup.

Put the plums in the dish, cut side down. Then put all the other ingredients into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Pour over the plums, cover the dish tightly with foil (or a lid, of course, if you’ve got one that fits), and bake for about 1 hour or until the plums are tender.

Keep the cooled, covered fruit in the fridge for 3 or so days or freeze them with impunity until you need them. I find them easier to reheat, gently, on the stove.

Serves 6–8.

Opinions are divided in my household as to what goes best with these spicy, wine-dark plums. There is a custard contingent, but I veer more toward ice cream or crème fraîche. But what I really love—and not just with this but with plain, uncooked blueberries (which you can now get all the year round, it seems) and most other berries—is something my grandmother used to make, called Barbados cream.

BARBADOS CREAM

It’s difficult to be precise about measurements here; the idea is to stir together more or less equal quantities of yogurt and heavy cream and then sprinkle over a good covering of brown sugar.

These are the quantities I use to fill a shallow bowl (and it must be a shallow bowl) measuring about 8 inches in diameter. If you’re having the Barbados cream as an accompaniment to fruit, then this will provide enough for about 6, maybe more; it is delectably rich.

1¼ cups heavy cream

1 1/3 cup plain yogurt

about 1/3 cup light brown sugar

Mix everything together and beat till fairly but not too stiffly thick. Pour into the bowl. Sprinkle over it a thick carpet of brown sugar, cover with plastic, and leave somewhere cool for at least 12 hours or, better still, 24 hours.

One and Two

“Don’t knock masturbation,”
Woody Allen once said: “it’s sex with someone I love.” Most people can’t help finding something embarrassingly onanistic about taking pleasure in eating alone. Even those who claim to love food think that cooking just for yourself is either extravagantly self-indulgent or a plain waste of time and effort. But you don’t have to belong to the drearily narcissistic learn-to-love-yourself school of thought to grasp that it might be a good thing to consider yourself worth cooking for. And the sort of food you cook for yourself will be different from the food you might lay on for tablefuls of people: it will be better.

I don’t say that for effect. You’ll feel less nervous about cooking it and that translates to the food itself. It’ll be simpler, more straightforward, the sort of food you want to eat.

I don’t deny that food, its preparation as much as its consumption, is about sharing, about connectedness. But that’s not all that it’s about. There seems to me to be something robustly affirmative about taking trouble to feed yourself—enjoying life on purpose rather than by default.

Even in culinary terms alone there are grounds for satisfaction. Real cooking, if it is to have any authenticity, any integrity, has to be part of how you are, a function of your personality, your temperament. There’s too much culinary ventriloquism about as it is; cooking for yourself is a way of countering that. It’s how you’re going to find your own voice.

One of the greatest hindrances to enjoying cooking is that tense-necked desire to impress others. It’s virtually impossible to be innocent of this. Even if this is not your motivation, it’s hard, if you’re being honest, to be insensible to the reactions of others. As cooking for other people is about trying to please them, it would be strange to be indifferent to their pleasure, and I don’t think you should be. But you can try too hard. When you’re cooking for yourself, the stakes simply aren’t as high. You don’t mind as much. Consequently, it’s much less likely to go wrong. And the process is more enjoyable in itself.

When I cook for myself, I find it easier to trust my instinct—I am sufficiently relaxed to listen to it in the first place—and, contrariwise, I feel freer to overturn a judgment, to take a risk. If I want to see what will happen if I add yogurt or stir in some chopped tarragon instead of parsley, I can do so without worrying that I am about to ruin everything. If the sauce breaks or the tarragon infuses everything with an invasive farmyard grassiness, I can live with it. I might feel cross with myself, but I won’t be panicked. It could be that the yogurt makes the sauce or that the tarragon revitalizes it. I’m not saying that cooking for seven other people would make it impossible for me to respond spontaneously, but I do think it’s cooking for myself that has made it possible.

NOODLES

GARLIC, SCALLIONS, CHILI, SOY

SESAME OIL

Far too much cooking now is about the tyranny of the recipe on the one hand and the absence of slowly acquired experience on the other. Cooking for yourself is a way of finding out what you want to cook and eat, rather than simply joining up the dots. Crucially, it’s a way of seeing which things work, which don’t, and how ingredients, heat, implements, vessels, all have their part to play. When I feel like a bowl of thick, jellied white rice noodles, not soupy but barely bound in a sweet and salty sauce, I’m not going to look up a recipe for them. I know that if I soak the noodles in boiling water until they dislodge themselves from the solid clump I’ve bought them in, fry 2 cloves of garlic with some knife-flattened scallions and tiny square beads of chopped red chili in a pan before wilting some greens and adding the noodles with a steam-provoking gush of soy and mirin, with maybe a teaspoon of black bean sauce grittily dissolved in it, it will taste wonderful, comforting, with or without chopped coriander or a slow-oozing drop or two of sesame oil. I can pay attention to texture and to taste. I know what sort of thing I’m going to end up with, but I’m not aiming to replicate any particular dish. Sometimes it goes wrong: I’m too heavy-handed with the soy and drench everything in brown brine, so that the sweet stickiness of the rice sticks is done for, and there’s no contrast; I might feel, when eating, that the chili interrupts too much when I’m in the mood to eat something altogether gentler. These aren’t tragedies, however. And, frankly, most often I get satisfaction simply from the quiet putting together of a meal. It calms me, which in turn makes me enjoy eating it more.

But cooking for yourself isn’t simply therapy and training. It also happens to be a pleasure in itself. As most women don’t have lives now whereby we’re plunged into three family meals a day from the age of nineteen, we’re not forced to learn how to cook from the ground up. I don’t complain. Nor do I wish to make it sound as if cooking for yourself were some sort of checklisted culinary foundation course. The reason why you learn so much from the sort of food you casually throw together for yourself is that you’re learning by accident, by osmosis. This has nothing to do with the culinary supremacism of the great chefs or those who’d ape them. Too many people cook only when they’re giving a dinner party. And it’s very hard to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour. How can you learn to feel at ease around food, relaxed about cooking, if every time you go into the kitchen it’s to cook at competition level?

I love the open-ended freedom of just puttering about in the kitchen, of opening the fridge door and deciding what to cook. But I like, too, the smaller special project, the sort of indulgent eating that has something almost ceremonial about it when done alone. I’m not saying I don’t often end up with the au pair special, a bowl of cereal, or its street-princess equivalent, the phone-in pizza. But I believe in the rule of “Tonight Lucullus is dining with Lucullus.”

BREAD AND CHEESE

Eating alone, for me, is most often a prompt to shop. This is where self-absorption and consumerism meet—a rapt, satisfyingly convoluted pleasure. The food I want most to buy is the food I most often try not to eat—a swollen-bellied tranche of cheese, a loaf of bread. These constitute the perfect meal. A slither of gorgonzola or coulommiers sacrificed on the intrusive and unyielding surface of a cracker at the end of dinner is food out of kilter. Just bread and cheese is fine to give others if you’ve shown the consideration of providing variety. But I want for myself the obsessive focus of the one huge, heady
baveuse
soft cheese, or else a wedge of the palate-burning hard stuff, a vintage Cheddar or strong blue—too much, too strong. If I’m eating a salty blue cheese, its texture somewhere between creamy and crumbly, I want baguette or a bitter, fudge-colored
pain au levain;
with Cheddar, real Cheddar, I want doughier white bread—whichever, it must be a whole loaf. I might eat tomatoes with the bread and cheese, but the tomatoes mustn’t be in a salad, but left whole on the plate, to be sliced or chopped,
à la minute.
But, then, I love the takeout-shop equivalent of the TV dinner.

MUSHROOM SANDWICH

I am pretty keen on the culinary ethos of the Greasy Spoon, too—bacon sandwiches, fried-egg sandwiches, egg and bacon sandwiches, sausage sandwiches; none requires much in the way of attention and certainly nothing in the way of expertise. Even easier is a sandwich that on paper sounds fancier, a fab merging of diner and gourmet-store cultures. Get a large portobello mushroom, put it in a preheated 400°F oven stemmed and covered with softened butter, chopped garlic, and parsley for about 20 minutes; when ready, and garlicky, buttery juices are oozing with black, cut open a soft roll, small ciabatta, or chunk of baguette even, and wipe the cut side all over the pan to soak up the pungent juices. Smear with Dijon mustard, top with the mushroom, squeeze with lemon juice, sprinkle some salt, and add some chopped lettuce or parsley as you like; think of this as a fungoid—but, strangely, hardly less meaty—version of a steak sandwich. Bite in, with the juices dripping down your arm as you eat.

SOUP

FRANKFURTERS

There are other memorable, more or less noncooking solitary suppers: one is a bowl of good canned tomato soup with some pale, undercooked, but overbuttered toast (crusts off for full nostalgic effect); another, microwave-zapped, mustard-dunked frankfurters (proper frankfurters, from a delicatessen, not those flabby, adulterated things from the supermarket). The difficulty is that if I have them in the house, I end up eating them while I wait for whatever I’m actually cooking for dinner to be ready. And my portions are not small to start off with. Two defenses, other than pure greed: I hate meagerness, the scant, sensible serving, and if I long to eat a particular thing, I want lots of it. I don’t want course upon course, and I don’t want excess every day. But when it comes to a feast, I don’t know the meaning of enough.

Cooking for two is just an amplification of cooking for one (rather than the former being a diminution of the latter). To tell the truth, with my cooking and portion sizes, there isn’t often a lot to choose between them. Many of the impulses that inform or inspire this sort of cooking are the same: the desire to eat food that is relaxed but at times culinarily elevated without loss of spontaneity; the pleasures of fiddling about with what happens to be in the fridge; and, as with any form of eating, the need to make food part of the civilized context in which we live.

LINGUINE WITH CLAMS

My absolutely favorite dinner to cook for myself is linguine with clams. I have a purely personal reason for thinking of fish, of any sort, as the ideal solitary food because I live with someone who’s allergic to it. But my principle has wider application: fish doesn’t take long to cook and tastes best dealt with simply, but because it has to be bought fresh needs enough planning to have something of the ceremonial about it. I don’t know why
spaghetti alle vongole
(I use linguine because I prefer, here, the more substantial, more resistant, and, at the same time, more sauce-absorbent tangle they make in the mouth) is thought of as restaurant food, especially as so many restaurants ruin it by adding tomatoes. I have to have my sauce bianco.

The whole dish is easy to make. It is, for me, along with a steak béarnaise, unchallengeable contender for that great, fantasy Last Meal on Earth.

15 littleneck clams, well rinsed and scrubbed

1/3 pound linguine

salt

1 garlic clove, minced or finely sliced

2 tablespoons olive oil

½ dried red chili pepper or pinch dried red pepper flakes