How to Eat (25 page)

½ cup white wine

salt, if needed

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

Pour the olive oil into a wide, heavy-bottomed frying pan. Then add the chili and garlic and, over moderate to low heat, to infuse rather than to color, fry for 2 minutes, stirring all the time. Then turn the heat to high, add the shrimp, and stir-fry them for another 2 minutes or until they turn pink and are just, delicately, cooked; you want the flesh to stay tender. Pour in the white wine and let it bubble up. You don’t want a liquid puddle around the shrimp, just enough wine to let the juices ooze into a winy sauce. Another minute or so should do it. Season with the salt, if necessary, and then turn into your bowl and sprinkle with the parsley. Eat with some good hunks of baguette. I eat these carapace, head, and all: one of the reasons I designate them for solitary dinner.

If you want, and you keep some to hand anyway, you can add a tablespoonful or so of brandy before throwing in the wine.

Serves 1.

I have a growing collection of Australian cookery books. The following recipe—for shrimp again—comes from Leonie Palmer’s
Noosa Cook Book,
which is by way of being the food eaten at a small, paradisiacal-looking resort village on Australia’s Queensland coast. The chief drawback to anything deep fried is that it has to be eaten right away. If there’s you at the stove cooking, sending plate by plate out to your friends waiting at the table, then life’s not going to be much fun. If there are only two of you, you can both stand by the stove and eat as the food comes hot and crunchy out of the pan. The quantities below make about 12 little patties.

FRIED SHRIMP CAKES

½ pound shrimp, minced

1 garlic clove, minced

2 scallions (white and green parts), minced

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup all-purpose flour

4 teaspoons sherry

olive oil

Process or blend the shrimp with the garlic, scallions, salt, flour, sherry, and enough water to make a thick batter. Let stand, covered with plastic film, for 1 hour. Then fry, in drops of 1 teaspoon, in the oil poured to a depth of 2 inches in a pan, for about a minute each side, or until golden brown. Drain on paper towels.

These are delicious with a fierce mayonnaise (see
page 12
for method) made by substituting lime juice for the lemon, and with a handful of fresh chopped coriander added at the end. But if the shrimp cakes have exhausted your cooking capacity, then add some lime juice and chopped coriander to a bowlful of Hellman’s. (Normally, I can’t see why everyone is so keen on the stuff, but it lends itself well to this kind of adulteration; anyway, fried fish cakes of this sort seem to be able to handle the peculiar emulsification of factory-made mayo.) Or just squeeze the shrimp patties with fresh lime as you eat them.

One of the great advantages of eating alone or with one other person is that you don’t have to take into account the squeamishness of the average, unknown eater. By this I don’t mean that you might otherwise be inviting strangers to dinner, but that there are always going to be some people (someone’s boyfriend, a newish friend) whose tastes you can’t test with strange bits of internal organs or the spookier meats. The fewer people you’re cooking for, the more permissive and inclusive you can be.

Ever since a friend of mine told me about a wittily conceived warm rabbit salad with baby radishes and carrots she’d eaten at The French House restaurant in London’s Soho, I’ve wanted to appropriate it. I’ve made up my own version here. If you know someone who likes rabbit and who will appreciate the joke, you’re lucky.

Have your butcher cut up a rabbit and bone two pieces; save the remaining for another use. Yes, this is very much an arranged salad, and normally I shun such restauranty displays of food. But when eating
à deux,
or indeed solo, you can generally get away with a greater level of cheffiness, if that’s your secret desire, without losing your culinary integrity. Indeed, it’s probably the best way to get it out of your system.

If you put the rabbit in the fridge to marinate when you get up in the morning, you won’t have much to do when you get back from work in the evening.

PETER RABBIT IN MR. MCGREGOR’S SALAD

½ cup yogurt

1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons wine vinegar

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

4 garlic cloves, crushed with flat of knife

½ teaspoon dried thyme

2 pieces boned rabbit (about 2/3 pound meat)

2 tablespoons olive oil, for frying

1 package (5 ounces) mixed
lettuce leaves

1 handful radishes, whole, quartered, or halved, depending on size, or sliced

1 handful baby carrots, halved lengthwise and across

FOR THE DRESSING

½ teaspoon Dijon mustard

scant tablespoon wine vinegar

salt and freshly milled black pepper

4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Make the marinade by mixing together the yogurt, oil, vinegar, mustard, garlic, and thyme. Add the rabbit meat, turn to make sure it’s marinated on all sides, cover, and leave for 12 hours, or thereabouts, in the fridge.

At about the time you want to eat, preheat the oven to 400°F. Take the rabbit out of its marinade and wipe it dry with paper towels. On the stove, in a frying pan (preferably one that will go in the oven), pour the oil for frying and, when hot, sear the rabbit a minute or so each side till golden, then transfer the pan to the oven and bake for 25 minutes or until tender. Remove and let cool a bit; you want this to remain warm.

Divide the lettuce between the two plates. Arrange the radishes and carrots over the lettuces in any way that gives you pleasure. Make an emulsified dressing by putting the mustard and vinegar in a bowl, seasoning with the salt and pepper, and whisking. Continue whisking while you add the oil. Dribble over the salad. Put the warm rabbit pieces in the middle of each plate and serve. Serves 2.

LIVER WITH MARSALA

Liver in general, and calves’ liver in hands-up-in-horror particular, also belong to that genre of foodstuffs that cannot be served up confidently to a tableful of average eaters. But as I eat, so I write, and we often eat liver for lunch or dinner. To fry liver, melt a knob of butter in a frying pan with a drop of oil in it and fry 2–3 pieces of thinly sliced calves’ liver (I estimate just over ¼ pound per person) in it, a minute or so a side, till still pink within, then remove to a plate, throw 2 tablespoons Marsala into the pan, let it bubble away until syrupy, and pour over the liver. The mashed potatoes we eat with this need more planning, but if I’m feeling lazy—and have the time—I just put 3 large baking potatoes in a 425°F oven for about 1½ hours before we count on eating and then, when they’re thoroughly cooked inside, I scrape out the flesh and mash it with some butter and warmed milk to which I’ve added a good grating of fresh nutmeg and some salt and pepper.

The last time we ate this, I see from my notebooks, we had some damson plum purée (made with ½ pound damsons, cooked with ½ cup sugar and ¼ cup water) and custard afterwards—just perfect.

LIVER WITH SWEET ONIONS

I can’t remember what I’d been reading—some Italian recipe for duck, I think, with a sauce of pomegranate juice thickened with the mashed liver from the duck. But it made me want to try to use pomegranate in a low-key way in my cooking. You get pomegranate juice the same way you get orange or lemon juice—use a juicer. I use one pomegranate here with an electric juicer, but I suspect if I were using a normal hand juicer, I’d need a couple to provide the same amount of juice. In place of fresh pomegranates, which have a short season, you could get some of the divinely, darkly syrupy Middle Eastern pomegranate molasses—which is sold in Middle Eastern and Greek shops and at some specialty food stores (or see
page 459
)—in which case, I’d dilute a tablespoon of the molasses in the same amount of wine or vermouth and add a bit of water (to taste), otherwise you’ll have something much too sticky and strong. The extraordinary thing about the fresh pomegranate juice is how delicate and modestly fragrant it is.

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium onion, sliced very finely

juice from 1 pomegranate

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

salt and freshly milled black pepper

½ pound calves’ liver

In a heavy-bottomed frying pan over medium to low heat, heat 1 tablespoon each of the butter and oil. Add the onions and cook until they’re soft, about 10 minutes. Pour over half the pomegranate juice and a little water, 1–2 tablespoons, and cook for another 10 minutes or so until the liquid’s absorbed and you have a soft, sweet, and bronzy-puce tangle of onions in the pan. Remove to warmed plates and tent over with foil to stop them cooling.

Add the remaining tablespoons of butter and oil to the frying pan. Mix the flour with the salt and pepper to taste and dredge the liver lightly in this mixture, and fry in the butter and oil for a minute or so on each side. Remove from the pan and put on the waiting plates with the onions. To the remaining pomegranate juice, add half its volume in water. Add this to the hot pan and deglaze. Correct the seasoning, if necessary, and pour over the liver and onions. I like this with plain boiled potatoes.

Serves 2.

DUCK WITH POMEGRANATE

Roast a duck and baste it with reduced pomegranate juice. To make the sauce, sauté and purée the duck liver with 1 teaspoon rosemary leaves sautéed with 1 minced onion in 1–2 teaspoons butter until soft and fragrant, some more pomegranate juice, and the well-skimmed juices from the pan. And duck is perfect for two; there just isn’t enough meat to feed four, as is often, shockingly, recommended. Magrets (duck breasts), fried and with a bare sauce made from the pan juices deglazed with pomegranate juice and sprinkled with a few pomegranate seeds, is a lower-effort take on the same theme.

The difficulty with giving quail to large numbers of people is that the scale’s wrong—too many little bits. When there’s just two of you, it suits somehow; less itsy-bitsy and failed nouvelle. I have a special fondness for the marinated quail below because I remember cooking it with my sister Thomasina. Not that the cooking is so involved that it needs two people, but chopping and cooking, the companionability of the kitchen, is always sustaining. She adored this, and I suppose it just became incorporated into our comfortingly repetitive, private culinary repertoire. Together, we ate bowls of chicken broth with leeks and boiled potatoes; roast chicken and leeks in white sauce with boiled potatoes; spaghettini with tomato sauce and lots of fresh basil on top. On the evening of her arrival, at the beginning of any weekend she stayed with me, we always shared taramasalata eaten with warm pita with, alongside on the table, a plate of hot crisp grilled bacon and a bunch of scallions.

You can use good-quality beef and chicken bouillon to make the stock for this.

MARINATED, FLATTENED QUAIL

4 quails

1 tablespoon olive oil

½ tablespoon fresh rosemary leaves, minced

2 bay leaves, crumbled

1 fat garlic clove, minced

salt and freshly milled black pepper

2 tablespoons red wine or Marsala

½ cup meat or chicken stock or water

You have to start this well before you want to eat. If you don’t mind fiddling about with meat first thing in the morning (and I don’t), do it before going to work; otherwise, do it before you go to bed the previous night. With kitchen shears or any good scissors, trim the wing tips from the quails. Then cut along both sides of the backbone and remove the backbone, so the quails lie flat, or flattish. I do love a bit of surgery. Give the quails a wipe all over with paper towels. Mix together the oil, rosemary, bay leaves, and garlic. Sprinkle the quails, both sides, with the salt and pepper, then rub the herb mixture into the flesh. It looks as if there’s not a lot of the herb mixture, I know, but what you have is enough. Remember, I said rub, not smear. Arrange in a single layer in a baking pan or something flat that will fit in the fridge, cover with foil or plastic film, and leave in the fridge for at least 6 hours, preferably twice as long.

When you want to eat, heat a large, heavy-bottomed frying pan (if you’ve got the wrists for it, a cast iron affair is ideal here)—or two if you don’t think you can fit all four quail, flat out as they are, in one. If you don’t feel safe using the pans you’ve got without adding oil first, then do so, otherwise just wipe off the marinade and put the quails, skin side down, in the hot pan for about 5 minutes. Prod or move with a spatula every now and again to make sure they don’t stick; you may want to turn the heat down after the first searing minute. When the skin’s dark and meat juices start appearing on the upper side of the quails, turn them over for a moment, just to sear the bone side. Remove to a large warmed plate and cover with foil.