How to Eat (35 page)

What works here is the gentle balance between the sweet acidity of the vinegar and the meaty oiliness of the fish. But you could elaborate on this theme with other vinegars, or the juices of lime, lemon, or Seville orange.

If you’re using lemon juice, fry the salmon in a small amount of olive oil and add (off the heat, at the end) parsley, feathery green clumps of the stuff, vigorously chopped but not minced by machine (unless you’re using huge great quantities, the food processor is not the answer—you just end up with a damp green mess) in place of the chives.

If you want to deglaze the pan with lime, which makes for an intense and astringent dressing, cook the salmon first in a nut of butter. The sweetness of the butter counters the more invasively acid punch of the lime. Sprinkle over musky, pungent, freshly chopped coriander, but not much of it, just before serving. Or leave the salmon itself relatively unprinked and add the coriander, in relative abundance, to a couple of cans of drained, oil-dressed cannellini beans.

Before the cheese, you may want a green salad, or put all on the table together.

CINNAMON-HOT RACK OF LAMB WITH CHERRIED AND CHICKPEA’D COUSCOUS

BAKED FIGS

Lamb can be cooked very quickly indeed. Many people, however, stuff, prink, and generally fuss about rack of lamb, but the truth is you need do nothing providing you buy good meat. Applying a little oil and spice will not take very long. It will make the fat crisp up better, which is a consideration, but frankly it won’t matter if you don’t bother. The figs afterward offer sweet, plump, ripe fruitiness and appropriately exotic voluptuousness.

If you wanted, you could cook quail instead of lamb, in which case substitute 8 quail for the lamb and add some butter, also mixed with a little cinnamon, to put into the birds’ cavities.

CINNAMON-HOT RACK OF LAMB

1 scant tablespoon chili oil

½ tablespoon ground cinnamon

2 racks lamb (7–8 ribs each)

Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Mix the oil and cinnamon to a paste and rub over the meat. Place on a rack over a baking dish and cook for about 30 minutes. The skin should be shiny brown and the meat within pink and tender. Let stand for 5 minutes or so before serving. Turn the oven down to 350° for the figs.

CHERRIED AND CHICKPEA’D COUSCOUS

Couscous should, traditionally, be soaked and then steamed (see
page 207
), but you don’t have to; if you’re adding bits and pieces to it, you can get away with this incorrect procedure, although expect aficionados to be shocked. It is difficult to give precise details for the couscous, as different brands give slightly different instructions. I use precooked couscous; depending on the make, you may need to add a little more liquid if you think the grains are too heavy. Check package instructions.

Now, normally, I hate fruit in savory concoctions, but the sour cherries here really do work. There is an authenticity to the mixture of sweet dried fruit and waxy nut and fragrant buttery grain. But if you don’t like the idea of sour cherries, just leave them out.

The couscous will taste better if it has been steeped in stock rather than water, but by making stock I don’t mean anything more arduous than stirring half a stock cube into boiling water.

½ vegetable bouillon cube

salt

2 cups quick-cooking couscous

¼ cup dried sour cherries

½ teaspoon ground cumin

½ teaspoon cinnamon

½ cup pine nuts

1 can (14 ounces) chickpeas

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

3 scallions (white and green parts), cut into thin rings

harissa (page 208), for serving

Pour boiling water into a measuring cup to get 2 cups, add the half bouillon cube, crumbled, then pour into a saucepan and bring to the boil again. Add salt to taste. Put the couscous in a bowl, mix in the cherries, cumin, and cinnamon, and then turn into the saucepan of boiling water. Wait until it starts to boil again, put the lid on, and take the pan off the heat. Meanwhile, put a heavy frying pan on the stove and, when it’s hot, toast the pine nuts. When they are beginning to turn golden, remove them.

Heat the chickpeas with their liquid in a saucepan. When the couscous is tender and has absorbed the liquid, about 10 minutes, add the drained warm chickpeas, stir in the butter, then half the pine nuts, and turn out on to a large heated plate and sprinkle with the remaining pine nuts. You will probably have more couscous than you need here, but I feel that making less than this looks so miserable and unwelcoming. Anyway, it tastes good the next day. The best way of reheating it is either by steaming (a strainer suspended over a saucepan of boiling water will do it) or a quick burst in a microwave. Stir in the scallions and eat hot with the harissa to the side.

BAKED FIGS

8 black figs

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

4 heaping tablespoons honey

½ cup red wine

4 cardamom pods, lightly crushed, or
2 bay leaves, crumbled

1 cup yogurt, chilled, for serving

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Put the figs in an ovenproof dish in which they’ll fit pretty snugly. Cut each one as if in quarters, only leaving the base intact. In a saucepan put the butter, honey, wine, and cardamom and heat up. When the butter’s melted, the honey’s dissolved, and you have a smooth, hot, sweet gravy, pour over the figs and put in the oven for about a quarter of an hour. Remove and let sit for 5 minutes or so before eating; and when you eat, make sure it’s with dollops of the satiny, cold yogurt to the side.

CHICKEN WITH SCALLIONS, CHILI, AND YOGURT

SEVEN-MINUTE STEAMED CHOCOLATE PUDDING

During my time as a restaurant critic, I became obsessed with the insistent inanities of the fashionable menu. In the end, either someone can cook or they can’t, either the food tastes good or it doesn’t. I object, for example, to the term
pan-fried.
I mind because what are you going to fry something in, if not in a pan? But the thing about pan-fried is not so much that it is tautologous, as that it is a con-trick. Let me deconstruct: fried is greasy, heavy, fattening, old-style food that none of us eats any more; pan-fried is modern, light, clean-living, healthy. The distorted echoes of “stir-fried” help formulate that image-by-association. But food, whether fried or pan-fried, is cooked in the same way. It’s a brilliant wheeze. I could call it grilled (or even griddled) chicken and that would have been OK. But I have my doubts about the efficacy of the domestic broiler, in the first place; not everyone owns a griddle, in the second. I cannot, just cannot, bring myself to call it pan-fried chicken. So, just chicken it is.

CHICKEN WITH SCALLIONS, CHILI, AND YOGURT

The accompaniment borrows from the idea of tzatziki and all those Middle Eastern yogurt salads; I have my friends Lucy Heller and Charles Elton to thank for it. I haven’t put cucumber in this recipe, but sometimes I do. Coriander is, funnily enough, easier to come by than mint these days (although mint is certainly the traditional herb to use here), so you can use either of them. The point is to have a cool, pungent accompaniment to the tender, but not strongly flavored, poultry. You can fashion it as you wish. If I use cucumber, I don’t bother to salt and degorge it; it may, therefore, get watery if you leave it lying around—but, as this is a quick dinner, the tradeoff is worth it. Make sure to use whole-milk yogurt; you want this sauce to be astringent but voluptuous; and low-fat natural yogurt is too thin, sour, and depressing.

For this I would use the cut known as a suprême: a boned chicken breast half that has been skinned, usually called a cutlet. If it’s easier, just buy whole breast portions, but in either case preferably from a free-range bird, and leave the skin on if you wish. It will look glorious if you happen to have a ridged griddle or grill pan to cook the breast in, but a heavy-bottomed frying pan is more than fine. Don’t use a nonstick pan; you want a burnt-golden exterior and the nonstick pan pointedly can’t give you that.

I think it’s necessary to cook extra chicken, even if you have to fry it in two batches, just because I have never known people not to want more. And how could leftovers matter? The half cucumber used in this is optional; peel it or don’t peel it as you wish. I tend to use a potato peeler to shave off strips of peel so that there’s a stripey dark-green, light-green effect; this was how my mother always did it.

6 chicken cutlets (about 6 ounces each)

juice of 2 lemons

6 tablespoons olive oil, plus more,
if needed

salt and freshly milled black pepper

6 scallions (white and green parts) cut into thin rings

1 green chili, seeded and minced

2 garlic cloves, minced

½ cucumber, cut into small dice (see headnote; optional)

3–4 tablespoons chopped coriander

1–2 tablespoons chopped mint

1¾ cups yogurt

Marinate the chicken in the lemon juice and 3 tablespoons of the oil. Season with salt and pepper. If the cutlets look fat and plump—you want them to cook fairly speedily—put them between 2 sheets of wax paper or plastic film and bash them, using anything heavy you can lay your hands on—a can of baked beans, say—if you’re not the sort to keep a meat mallet in the top drawer in your kitchen.

To make the sauce, add the scallions, chili, garlic, cucumber, coriander, and mint to the yogurt. Stir, taste, and add salt as needed.

Remove the chicken from the marinade. Add the remaining oil to a large frying pan and, when it’s hot, fry the cutlets. Turn over after 5 minutes or so and cook the other side for about 5 minutes, or until just cooked through. It may be cooked, it may need more time. You may need to add a little more oil while cooking; you certainly will if you’re frying in two batches. If you want, when the chicken is cooked, you can throw the lemony marinade over it in the pan at the last minute. Arrange the cutlets on a large plate and serve the yogurt relish in a bowl with a spoon.

With this, I might give the couscous on page 186, minus the cinnamon and minus the dried cherries. A tomato salad, with or without black olives, is all you need otherwise. If you can’t find any tomatoes with flavor, then a crisp-leaved green salad will do.

SEVEN-MINUTE STEAMED CHOCOLATE PUDDING

I am not a particular fan of the microwave, except for defrosting baby meals and reheating cold roast potatoes (divine, though dangerously easy to eat; I wish my Aunt Fel hadn’t told me of this), but I had this chocolate pudding at the home of some friends one Saturday lunchtime and thought it was amazingly good—thick and rich and chocolatey. One thing, though—don’t hide the fact that you’re microwaving it; they do say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. This takes 2 minutes to prepare in the food processor, 5 minutes actually to cook in the microwave, and 10 minutes’ standing time after that. If you get everything ready in advance, just throw it in the microwave 15 minutes or so before you think you’ll want to eat it.

This recipe comes from Barbara Kafka’s
Microwave Gourmet
and I have kept to her quantities for 8 people because I am greedy. If you—unlike me—think 4 people won’t eat enough for 8, then halve the quantities and cooking time and use a 3-cup pudding basin.

10 tablespoons (1 stick plus 2 tablespoons) unsalted butter

8 ounces best-quality semisweet chocolate

½ cup light brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ cup heavy cream

1/3 cup all-purpose flour, sifted

½ teaspoon baking powder

3 eggs

crème fraîche or heavy cream,
for serving

Butter a 9 × 4-inch ceramic bowl or 4-cup pudding basin with 2 tablespoons of the butter.

Grate the chocolate in a food processor, then add the remaining butter, cut into
1-tablespoon pieces, and the sugar. Process until thoroughly combined. Add remaining ingredients except the crème fraîche and process to a smooth mixture.

Pour into a prepared bowl. Cover tightly with microwave plastic film. Cook at 100 percent (Barbara Kafka refers to a 600–700-watt microwave as the norm; mine is 750 watt but I leave cooking time as is) for 5 minutes, until set. Pierce the film with the tip of a sharp knife, remove from the oven, and cover the top of the bowl with a heavy plate; this will keep the pudding hot. Let stand for 10 minutes. Unmold onto a serving plate.

Put some crème fraîche or cream—I prefer crème fraîche, as the sourness sets off the palate-coating sweetness better—in a bowl on the table.

STEAK MIRABEAU

RASPBERRIES AND CREAM

The steak mirabeau is a recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, Ann and Franco Taruschio’s
Leaves from the Walnut Tree
(the Walnut Tree was Elizabeth David’s favorite restaurant), which is written with such love and quiet authority. You can trust this book; nothing is for effect and everything works. Innocent of illustration,
Leaves from the Walnut Tree
is far from being a chef book. Often, when I’m wondering what to cook and want to find something simple that won’t take too long, I turn to it. This is just such a recipe. And it shows, too, the Taruschios’ confident affection for the sort of food that glossier establishments with less secure foundations tend to eschew in a panic-stricken search for something ever new.