How to Eat (3 page)

My mother could make the stringiest, toughest flesh—a bird that had been intensively farmed and frozen since the last Ice Age—taste as if it were a lovingly reared poulet de Bresse. She, you see, was a product of her age, which believed that cooking lay in what you did to inferior products (and I expect she did no more in this case than use much more butter than anyone would now); I, however, am a product of mine, which believes that you always use the best, the freshest produce of the highest quality you can afford—and then do as little as possible to it. So I buy organic free-range chickens and anoint them with the tiniest amount of extra virgin olive oil or butter—as if I were putting on very expensive hand cream—before putting them in the oven. I retain the lemon out of habit—and to make my kitchen smell like my mother’s, with its aromatic, oily-sharp fog.

I can’t honestly say that my roast chicken tastes better than hers, but I don’t like eating intensively farmed, industrially reared meat. However, if you know you’ve got an inferior bird in front of you, cook it for the first hour breast-side down. This means you don’t, at the end, have quite that glorious effect of the swelling, burnished breast—the chicken will have more of a flapper’s bosom, flat but fleshy—but the white meat will be more tender because all the fats and juices will have oozed their way into it.

If you want to make a good gravy—and I use the term to indicate a meat-thick golden juice or, risking pretentiousness here, jus—then put 1 tablespoon of olive oil in the roasting dish when you anoint the bird before putting it in the oven; about half an hour before the end, add another tablespoon of oil and a spritz from the lemon half that isn’t stuffed up the chicken. By all means, use butter if you prefer, but make sure there’s some oil in the pan, too, to stop the butter from burning.

When you remove the chicken, let it stand for 5 or 10 minutes before carving it, and make gravy by putting the roasting dish on the burner (remove, if you want, any excess fat with a spoon, though I tend to leave it as it is). Add a little white wine and boiling water or chicken stock, letting it all bubble away till it’s syrupy and chickeny. If you don’t have at hand any homemade stock, a good-quality chicken bouillon cube, or portion thereof, would be fine. In fact, Italians sometimes put a bouillon cube inside the chicken along with or instead of the lemon half before roasting it.

ROASTED GARLIC AND SHALLOTS

My basic chicken recipe also includes garlic and shallots; this is the easy way to have dinner on the table without doing much. About 50 minutes before the end of the cooking time, pour 2 tablespoons olive oil either into the same pan or another one and add, per 4-pound chicken (which is for 4 people), the unpeeled cloves of 2 heads of garlic and about 20 unpeeled shallots. They don’t roast, really, but steam inside their skins. Eat them by pressing on them with a fork and letting the soft, mild—that’s to say intensely flavored and yet wholly without pungency—creamy interior squeeze out on to your plate. Put some plates on the table for the discarded skins and, if not finger bowls, then napkins or a roll of paper towels. My children adore garlic and shallots cooked like this and sometimes, when I don’t want to cook a whole chicken for them, I roast a poussin instead and put the shallots and garlic and poussin in all at the same time. And if you want to make this basic recipe feel a little less basic, then you can sprinkle some toasted pine nuts and flat-leaf parsley, chopped at the last minute, over the food before serving.

If you’ve managed to fit the garlic and shallots in the pan with the chicken, you can roast a pan of potatoes in the same oven at the same time. Dice the potatoes, also unpeeled, into approximately ½-inch cubes, or just cut new potatoes in half lengthways and anoint them with oil (or melted lard, which fries them fabulously crisp). Sprinkle them with a little dried thyme (or freshly chopped rosemary) before cooking them for about 1 hour.

All of which leads us to the next basic recipe:

STOCK

Do not throw away the chicken carcass after eating the chicken. Go so far, I’d say, as to scavenge from everyone’s plate, picking up the bones they’ve left. I’m afraid I even do this in other people’s houses. You don’t need to make stock now—and indeed you couldn’t make anything very useful from the amount of bones from one bird—but freeze them. Indeed, freeze whatever bones you can, whenever you can, in order to make stock at some later date (see
page 69
for further, passionate, adumbration of this thesis).

An actual recipe for stock would be hard to give with a straight face; boiling remains to make stock is as far from being a precise art as you can get. Look at the recipes for broth and consommé (see
pages 83–84
) if you want something highfalutin’, but if you’re looking for what I call chicken stock (but which classically trained French chefs, who would use fresh meat and raw bones, boiled up specifically to make stock, would most definitely not), then follow my general instructions. At home, I would use the carcasses of 3 medium, cooked chickens.

Break or cut the bones up roughly and put them in a big pot. Add a stalk of celery broken in two or a few lovage leaves, 1 or 2 carrots, depending on size, peeled and halved, 1 onion stuck with a clove, 5 peppercorns, a bouquet garni (see
page xx
), some parsley stalks, and the white of a leek. Often I have more or less everything at hand without trying, except for that leek; in which case I just leave it out. (I sometimes add a couple of discs of veal shin if I want a deeper-toned broth of almost unctuous mellowness.) Cover with cold water, add 1 teaspoon of salt, and bring to the boil, skimming off the froth and scum that rises to the surface. Lower the heat and let the stock bubble very, very gently, uncovered, for about 3 hours. Allow to cool a little, then strain into a wide, large bowl or another pot. When cold, put in the fridge without decanting. I like to let it chill in the fridge so that I can remove any fat that rises to the surface, and the wider that surface is, the easier.

When I’ve removed the fat, I taste the stock and consider whether I’d prefer it more strongly flavored. If so, I put it back in a pan on the burner and boil it down till I’ve got a smaller amount of rich, intensely flavored stock.

I then store it in differing quantities in the freezer. On the whole, I find packages of ½ cup and 1 cup the most useful. For the smaller amount, I just ladle 8 tablespoons into a freezer bag or small tub with a lid; for the larger, I line a measuring cup with a freezer bag and pour it in till I’ve got, give or take, 1 cup (it’s difficult, because of the baggy lining, to judge with super-calibrated accuracy). I then close the bag and put the whole thing, cup and all, into the freezer. This is why I own so many plastic measuring cups. I am constantly forgetting about them once they’re buried in the freezer. But, in principle, what you should do is leave the stock till solid, then whisk away the cup, leaving the cup-shaped cylinder of frozen liquid, which you slot back into the freezer. You may need to run hot water over the cup for a minute in order to let the stock in its bag just slip out. This is a useful way to freeze any liquid. Although it’s a bore, it pays to measure accurately and to label clearly at the time of freezing. Later you can take out exactly the quantity you need.

Poussins make wonderful, strong, easily jellied stock; it must be the amount of zip and gelatin in their poor young bones. So if ever you need to make a stock from scratch, with fresh meat, not cooked bones (in other words, the way you’re supposed to), and you can’t find a boiling fowl, then buy some poussins, about 4, cut each in half, use vegetables as above, cover with cold water, and proceed as normal.

I do not disapprove of bouillon cubes or other commercial stocks if they’re good, not overly salty, and, of course, leave no chemical aftertaste.

CELERY AND LOVAGE

One of the most useful things an Italian friend once showed me was how important even half a stalk of celery is in providing basenote flavor not just to stocks but to tomato and meat sauces, to pies—in fact, to almost anything savory. The taste is not boorishly celerylike; it just provides an essential floor of flavor.

In Italy, when you buy vegetables from the greengrocer, you can ask for a bunch of odori, which is a bunch of those herbs that breathe their essential scent into sauces and is given, gratis. Included in it will be one stick of celery. And I wish we could buy the same in our markets, let alone get it for free. You need so little of it when cooking—still, I’m gratified to know that a reliable product is in the market year-round.

In summer or even from spring onward, if you’ve got a garden or bit of yard, you can grow some lovage, the leaves and stalks of which fabulously impart the scent of a grassy, slightly more aromatic celery. You just pick a bit as you need it. I often use lovage as a replacement for celery; if I’m chopping some onion, carrot, and garlic to make a base for a shepherd’s pie or a thick soup, I chop in some lovage leaves at the same time.

LETTUCE AND LOVAGE SOUP

Naturally, you can use more if you want the lovage to be the subject, the actual focus. To make a lettuce and lovage soup, soften a handful of finely chopped lovage leaves along with 4 finely chopped scallions in about 2 tablespoons of butter, then add 2 shredded heads of romaine and let them wilt in the buttery heat. Stir in ½ teaspoon sugar and some salt, if the stock you’re using is not very salty itself. Add about 4 cups of stock—a light chicken stock, possibly from your freezer, or vegetable stock, homemade or prepared from best-quality cubes—or half stock and the rest milk. Gently simmer, uncovered, for about 10 to 15 minutes, then either blend in a blender or food processor or push through a strainer or a food mill. Taste again for seasoning. Add a good grating of fresh nutmeg. If you want a velvety cream rather than a light, pale broth, stir an egg yolk beaten with ½ cup cream, heavy or light, into the soup over the heat, but make sure it doesn’t boil. Remove from the heat and serve, sprinkling over some more chopped lovage leaves.

You can grow lovage from seed, but I bought a little pot from a garden center some years back and planted it; now each spring it grows back huge, its bushy, long-stalked arms outstretched, magnificently architectural.

You should grow your own herbs if you can and want to, but don’t spread yourself, or your plants, too thin. It is counterproductive if you have so little of each herb that you never pick much of it for fear of totally denuding your stock. In my own garden, I stick to rosemary, flat-leaf parsley, arugula, and sorrel. I like to grow lots of parsley—at least two rows, the length of the whole bed—and even more arugula. Some years I’ve planted garlic so that I can use the gloriously infused leaves, as they grow, cut up freshly in a salad. In pots I keep bay, marjoram, and mint. This year I’m going to try some angelica—to flavor custards—and Thai basil, so that I don’t have to go to the Thai shop to buy huge bunches of the stuff, wonderfully aromatic though it is, only to see it go bad before I’ve had a chance to use it all. I have never had any success with coriander (from seed). I can manage basil easily, but then I suddenly feel overrun. And I have to say, I find watering pots excruciatingly effortful.

As with so much to do with food, a lot of a little rather than a little of a lot is the best, most comforting, and most useful rule. You can always buy herbs growing in pots, in season, at good supermarkets and garden centers, and herbs cut in big bunches in specialist shops and at good greengrocers.

MAYONNAISE

Stock is what you may make out of the bones of your roasted chicken, but mayonnaise, real mayonnaise, is what you might make to eat with the cold, leftover meat. There is one drawback: when you actually make mayonnaise you realize, beyond the point of insistent denial, how much oil goes into it. But because even the best bottled mayonnaise—and I don’t mean the one you think I mean, Hellman’s, but one manufactured by a company called Cottage Delight (see
page 461
)—bears little or no relation to real mayonnaise, you may as well know how to make it.

When I was in my teens, I loved Henry James. I read him with uncorrupted pleasure. Then, when I was eighteen or so and had just started
The Golden Bowl,
someone—older, cleverer, whose opinions were offered gravely—asked me whether I didn’t find James very difficult, as she always did. Until then, I had no idea that I might, and I didn’t. From that moment, I couldn’t read him but self-consciously; from then on, I did find him difficult. I do not wish to insult by the comparison, but I had a similar, Jamesian mayonnaise experience. My mother used to make mayonnaise weekly, twice weekly; we children would help. I had no idea it was meant to be difficult, or that it was thought to be such a nerve-racking ordeal. Then someone asked how I managed to be so breezy about it, how I stopped it from curdling. From then on, I scarcely made a mayonnaise that didn’t break. It’s not surprising; when confidence is undermined or ruptured, it can be difficult to do the simplest things, or to take any enjoyment even in trying.

I don’t deny that mayonnaises can break, but please don’t jinx yourself. Anyway, it’s not a catastrophe if it does. A small drop of boiling water can fix things and, if it doesn’t, you can start again with an egg yolk in a bowl. Beat it and slowly beat in the curdled mess of mayo you were previously working on. Later, add more oil and a little lemon juice. You should, this way, end up with the smoothly amalgamated yellow ointment you were after in the first place. I hate to say it, but you may have to do this twice. You may end up with rather more mayonnaise than you need, but getting it right in the end restores your confidence, and this is the important thing.

I make mayonnaise the way my mother did—I warm the eggs in the bowl (as explained more fully later), then beat and add oil just from the bottle, not measuring, until the texture feels right, feels like mayonnaise. I squeeze in lemon juice, also freehand, until the look and taste feel right. If you make a habit of making mayonnaise, you will inevitably come to judge it instinctively too. I don’t like too much olive oil in it; if it’s too strong, it rasps the back of the throat, becomes too invasive. I use a little over two-thirds peanut oil and a little under one-third olive oil, preferably that lovely mild stuff from Liguria. If you prefer, do use half and half and a mild French olive oil, which is probably more correct, anyway, than the Italian variety.