How to Eat (36 page)

All you need after are raspberries and cream (see below).

STEAK MIRABEAU

Buy good-quality anchovy fillets in olive oil and drain well. You could soak them for a few minutes in milk before draining well again, if you’re worried that the fillets you’ve got are just too unbearably salty, but do remember that the particular fierce rasp of the anchovy is what’s wanted here, so don’t attempt to drown it out. I love anchovies with meat (see
pages 100
and
344
) and, if you wanted, you could just as easily use some lamb steaks here. You could leave out the olives and the criss-crossing business, too. A tablespoon or so of cream at the end will make for a mellower concoction, but still a pleasurably bracing one.

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

4 boneless strip steaks (about 8 ounces each)

freshly milled black pepper

20 anchovy fillets

18 pitted black olives, halved

1 glass red wine

Heat the oil and butter in a large frying pan or pans and, when it’s foaming, add the steaks. Cook as preferred—I like mine bloody, for which do them 3 or so minutes a side—and season with the pepper. When ready, remove to a large, warmed plate. Criss-cross the steaks with 4 anchovy fillets each and place the olive halves in the squares. (This doesn’t look as dinky-do as it sounds.) Mash the remaining 4 anchovy fillets in the pan juices, add the red wine, and reduce rapidly until a glaze appears on the sauce. Pour the sauce over the steaks and serve at once.

RASPBERRIES AND CREAM

Perfect, sweet, waxy new potatoes are what you want with this; I love, too, the iron tang of some leaf spinach just buttered and nutmegged, soaking up the wine and olive brine of the steak.

I suggest raspberries and cream for dessert: a mound of the fruit, a bowl of thick yellow cream. If raspberries aren’t absolutely as they should be at the moment, then stick to the same ingredients but treat them with less respect. Mash 2½ cups raspberries (bar a couple of tablespoons which you’ve removed for later), tired fresh or just thawed frozen, sprinkled with a little confectioners’ sugar, in a bowl with a fork. Whisk 1 cup, or thereabouts, heavy cream with 1–2 further tablespoons of confectioners’ sugar. Fold in the raspberries and spoon this rough fool into a bowl (or individual glasses, if you prefer) and scatter the unmashed ones over the top. And you can always crumble in some shop-bought meringues, too.

Weekend Lunch

AN INDOOR PICNIC

Although the dinner party remains the symbol
of social eating, most eating in company among my friends actually takes place at weekend lunch. After a long day at work, many of us are, frankly, too tired to go out and eat dinner, let alone cook it. And there is, as well, the baby factor. For many people of my generation, having to get food ready after the children have gone to bed explains the popularity of the takeout menu. And even those who haven’t got children are affected by the baby-sitting arrangements of their friends who have. When I was younger we stayed in bed on weekends until two in the afternoon; now that most of us are awakened at six in the morning, there is a gap in the day where lunch can go. We have got into the habit of filling it.

Lunch is more forgiving than dinner; there isn’t the dread engendered by perceived but not-quite-formulated expectations; there’s no agenda, no aspirational model to follow, no socioculinary challenge to which to rise—in short, no pressure. Lunch is just lunch.

And if you don’t want to cook it, you don’t have to. A weekend lunch can be at its most relaxed and pleasurable when it is just an indoor picnic. What matters, then, is what you buy. These days shopping is nobly recast as “sourcing”—and clever you for finding the best chili-marinated olives, French sourdough bread, or air-dried beef; there’s certainly no shame in not clattering about with your own pots and pans instead.

Shopping is not necessarily the easy option. It’s certainly not the cheap one. But discerning extravagance (rather than mere feckless vulgarity) can be immensely pleasurable. Indeed, I can find it positively uplifting—not for nothing is shopping known as retail therapy. Shopping for food is better than any other form of shopping. There’s no trying-on, for a start. Choosing the right cheese, the best and ripest tomato, the pinkest, sweetest ham can be intensely gratifying. And in shopping for food that you are then going to prepare (even if that preparation involves no more than de-bagging and unwrapping) there is also the glorious self-indulgence of knowing that you are giving pleasure to others.

Shopping is not a quick activity—you need to be prepared to proceed slowly, haltingly. Compromise can be ruinous. Of course, some of the time we all eat food that is less than perfect, less than enjoyable even, but you can’t set out to buy inferior produce—what would be the point?

Good food doesn’t have to be difficult to cook, and it certainly doesn’t need to be difficult to buy. But you must know what you’re after. The important thing is to be greedy enough to get what’s good, but not so restlessly greedy that you get too much of it. Restrict your choices, so that you provide lots of a few things rather than small amounts of many. This is partly an aesthetic dictate, partly a practical one. If you buy 4-ounce pieces of six different cheeses, everyone is going to feel inhibited about cutting some off; however generous you have been, it is only the meagerness of each portion that will be apparent. Provide, instead, a semblance—indeed the reality—of voluptuous abundance. You don’t need to buy more than three different cheeses, but get great big fat wedges of each. You want munificence, you want plenty, you want people to feel they can eat as much as they want and there’ll still be some left over afterwards. Start by thinking along the lines of one hard cheese, one soft cheese, and maybe a blue cheese or chèvre. You needn’t stick to this rigidly; sometimes it’s good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter. Keep your head, though; without ruling out whim entirely, don’t be immoderately ensnared by fanciful names or the provocatively unfamiliar. One type of cheese no one has heard of might well be interesting, but not three. Anyway, the desire to be interesting is possibly the most damaging impulse in cooking. Never worry about what your guests will think of you. Just think of the food. What will taste good?

And you don’t have to go through the ridiculous pantomime of pretending everything is homespun. If you’re still getting your shopping out and unwrapping your packages when everyone arrives, who cares? Your kitchen doesn’t have to look like a set from a 1950s sitcom. It is curiously relaxing to be slowly creating the canvas—arranging the table, putting flowers in a vase, chopping up herbs, and putting water on for potatoes—while talking and drinking unhurriedly with friends.

The shops nearest you will probably govern what sort of food you buy for your indoor picnic. I stick to the plainest basics: meat, cheese, bread, with tomatoes, a green salad, maybe some robustly salted, herb-speckled potatoes, the waxy-fleshed, puce-skinned ones, cooked till sweet and soft then doused in oil, scarcely dribbled with vinegar or spritzed with lemon, and with a few feathery pieces of chopped zest on them, left to sit around to be eaten at room temperature.

HAM

PROSCIUTTO

If you’re buying ham, get enough to cover a huge great plate with densely meaty pink slices. Choose baked ham and the cured Italian stuff. I like imported prosciutto di San Daniele better than prosciutto di Parma (the glorious, requisite, honeyed saltiness is more intense), but as long as it’s well cut—and obviously freshly cut—so that each white-rimmed silky slice can be removed without sticking or tearing, that’s fine—more than fine.

TERRINE EN CROûTE

SALAMI

ANCHOVIES

OLIVES

There is internal pressure in my home to buy bresaola—dried, salted, and aged beef fillet—too, but although I like eating it well enough, I never mind if I don’t. I’d rather buy a big terrine en croûte. Salami, too, is good. I don’t think you need both salami and the terrine, so choose which you prefer. If you buy a whole little salami, as with the large terrine, you can introduce an all-important Do-It-Yourself element into the proceedings. Put the salami on a wooden board with a sharp knife and let people carve off for themselves thick, fat-pearled slices of spicy sausage. This way, the individual act of cutting, slicing, serving yourself, becomes almost a conversational tool. It makes people feel at home when they’re around your kitchen table. Allow yourself a few saucer-sized plates of extras—maybe some fresh, marinated anchovies, olives steeped with shards of garlic and crumbled red chilies, astringent little cornichons, those ones that look like cartoon crocodiles in embryo, a soft, moussy slab of pâté—but, again, don’t go overboard. I sometimes succumb to those Italian olive-oil-soused blackened globes of chargrilled onions, sometimes available at Italian delis, sweet and smoky and wonderful with meat or cheese or a plain plate of bitter leaves.

SMOKED SALMON

TUNA AND BEANS

If you prefer fish to meat, go for the old-fashioned traditional option: a huge plate of smoked salmon—mild, satiny, and softly fleshy—with cornichons, lemon, and maybe a pile of blinis (see
page 152
to make them) or potato pancakes (see
page 220
), thinly sliced bagels with cream cheese and/or already buttered black bread. If you have a shop or fish seller near you that sells a good-enough version of the stuff, then maybe you should get a tentacled mess of Italianish seafood salad. I quite like, too, that old-fashioned pairing of tuna and beans. My great-aunt Myra, who was a wonderful cook, always used lima beans (just out of the can, as was, of course, the olive-oil-preserved tuna) and would gently mix the two, squeeze lemon over, and cover with a fine net of wafer-thin onion rings. Yes, proper dried then soaked and cooked and drained real beans are always better, but there’s something comforting and familiar for me in that quick and effort-free assembly. It tastes of my childhood.

BREAD

Smoked salmon calls for black bread, but there’s something reassuring about a thick wedge of white bread, heavy with cold unsalted butter and curved over a tranche of quickly grabbed ham to make a casual sandwich. But all that matters is that the bread is good: sliced chewy sourdough, a crusty peasant loaf, or French bread—which could be a just-bought baguette or, my favorite, the slender ficelle. I sometimes think if I see another ciabatta I’ll scream.

TOMATOES

Frankly, if you can get good enough tomatoes, I’d just leave them as they are, whole, with a knife nearby (a good, sharp, serrated one, suitable for the job) so that people can eat them in juicy red wedges with their bread and cheese, or cut them thinly and sprinkle with oil and salt to make their own private pools of tomato salad.

SALAD

A green salad needn’t comprise anything other than lettuce. All you need for dressing is good oil, a quick squeeze of lemon, and a confident hand with the salt, tossed with your own bare hands. You can, of course, supplement the torn leaves (and let’s be frank, most of us will be opening one of those cellophane packets) with some thin tongues of zucchini (the slivers stripped off with the vegetable peeler), chopped scallions, or a handful of not-even-blanched sugar snap peas or whatever you want. There’s one proviso: keep it green. There is something depressingly institutional about cheerfully mixed salads. I was brought up like this. My mother was fanatical, and her aesthetic has seeped into my bloodstream; my father takes the same line. Do not even think of adding your tomatoes—keep them separate. Cucumber tends to make the salad weepy. Give it its own plate, and dress it with peppery, mint-thick, or dill-soused yogurt or an old-fashioned sweet-sour vinaigrette.

In the same way, I am fanatical about keeping fruit separate. There is, for me, something so boarding-housey about the capacious bowl filled with waxy, dusty bananas, a few oranges, some pears and the odd shrunken apple. I want a plate of oranges, another of bananas, of apples, of pears. I even put black and white grapes on separate plates.

An unfussy, sprawled-out weekend lunch definitely doesn’t demand culinary highjinks. Don’t worry about dessert. You just need some tubs of good ice cream—Ben and Jerry’s or whichever make you like most. Or buy a tart from a good French pâtisserie.

I like just picking at food laid out in front of me, although I am alarmed at how much I can eat, and go on eating, that way. But somehow it can be good to have a full stop put on it. Sometimes, after a deli-to-table picnicky lunch, I feel I want to eat something, well, puddingy for dessert. An English treacle tart (
page 266
) or sponge (created in the food processor), a chocolate pudding or apple crumble, is a proper focus, reassuring after all that ambling about and fidgety grazing.

We all have our own fallback dishes—recipes we know so well that we don’t even consider them recipes any more. I often cook the same thing for close friends at weekend lunch. In order of frequency these are roast chicken, cooked in butter, with a lemon up its bottom and garlic littered around the pan; the effortless chicken with green chili and herb yogurt on
page 187
; linguine with lemon cream sauce (
page 230
); and sausages and mashed potatoes (
page 245
).