How to Eat (40 page)

Now the potatoes. You can do either of two things: you can boil the potatoes in a saucepan of water while the ham is cooking, or you can cook them in the ham water itself. The advantage of cooking them separately is that they offer a distinct, appropriately plain, taste. And potatoes are really at their best when they are the bland but sweet bass note to sop up and support other, stronger, tastes. Added to which, you are left with a clear stock at the end; if you cook the potatoes in with the ham, all you can do with the stock, really, is make thick soup. And unless you have a very big pot, the ham, vegetables, and potatoes, all in together, will be a very tight squeeze.

Having said that, there is something wonderful about the sweet, grainy potatoes absorbing all that appley and salty stock. You decide. (I reckon on 1 potato, quartered, per person; I might even do 1½ per person.)

In the ham pot, or separately, simmer the potatoes until just tender, 35–40 minutes.

The recipes for both the plums and Barbados cream are in Cooking in Advance; see
pages 116
and
117
.

GOOD, THICK WINTER PEA SOUP

As for dishes using ham leftovers, there are pea-based soups, risotti, and the like mentioned throughout (check the Index, too), but for a good, thick winter pea soup, all you need to do is throw into the cold ham stock a couple of handfuls of split green peas and boil away until you have a sludgy purée. A bright green fresh-pea soup is obviously not a winter meal, but if you cheat and use frozen peas (I always do), then it can be. But the grainy potage produced by the split peas is wonderfully satisfying—and you can just as well use the yellow split peas. In fact, you can use just about any legume you want; it’s just that split peas need no soaking. But if you don’t feel like eating a ham-based pea soup immediately after lunch, then pour the stock (in labeled quantities) into containers or plastic bags and put them in the freezer. Don’t stick it in the fridge with the intention of doing something or other with it over the next few days. You won’t and you’ll end up throwing it away, which would be too much of a waste for me to bear even on your behalf.

You could thaw some of the stock to make my next suggestion for a kitchen-bound weekend lunch: minestrone. I haven’t actually ever used ham-cooking liquid for it, but I’ve used chicken, beef, and vegetable stocks and all have tasted wonderful. Strangely, the best minestrone I ever made was with a stock cube (a Knorr one made for the Italian market—gusto classico, which indicates a beef and chicken broth). I think a soup like this makes one of the best sorts of weekend lunch. I love it not hot hot but a flavor-deepening lukewarm. Yes, you could serve cheese after it if you’re worried that it isn’t enough as it is for a main course, but you’d be wrong. This is perfect for lunch; it’s so nice, apart from anything else, to be able to have bowlfuls and bowlfuls of it rather than only a politely small amount in order to make room for a main course you’re almost bound to like less. For dinner, fine—have something after the soup; but for lunch—and supper, indeed—you don’t need to make a multicoursed assault on people. To be frank, I’d be happy with just an orange afterwards, but I will suggest a more proper dessert in the knowledge that you don’t need a recipe for peeling an orange.

MOROCCAN ORANGE AND DATE SALAD

If you want to do something even simpler than the recipe that follows for Baked Sauternes Custard, you could think of doing my great-aunt Myra’s Moroccan orange and date salad. Oranges are peeled, their pith removed, and then cut into thin discs; dates are halved, stoned, and laid alongside. All you do is make an orangy syrup by boiling up some water, sugar, zest of the orange, and some juice, plus orange-redolent alcohol if you like, though it wouldn’t be very Moroccan. Still, I don’t know if there is anything really Moroccan about this salad anyway. Sprinkle a small amount of syrup over the salad and then scatter with slivered almonds. And I rather like it without the syrup, but just with orange juice and a bit of orange liqueur sprinkled over, as well as the blanched (toasted or not) and slivered nuts and maybe some ground cinnamon. I have to say, though, that I find the custard (which involves just gentle whisking and stirring) rather easier to make than the orange salad, with all that fiddly pithy business. No cooking should ever be undertaken with the single and vulgar aim of impressing anyone, but it’s worth remembering as you make your choice that most people will presume that slicing a few oranges is as close to doing nothing as you can get, whereas baking a fragrantly grapey and wine-resonant custard counts as making an effort.

I think of this following menu as being particularly suitable for a weekend away; chopping and preparing vegetables is ideal work to do with either a lot of people doing bits of it each or a lot of people sitting around to talk to while you do it. Don’t be put off by the formality of the term Country House Lunch. I mean no more by it than to evoke a lazy, long weekend with friends.

COUNTRY HOUSE LUNCH FOR 6

MINESTRONE

BAKED SAUTERNES CUSTARD

MINESTRONE

There was something of a fashion in Britain recently for season-specific minestrone—a spring one majoring in peas, an autumn one containing porcini, and so on—and while all these can be fabulous, the recipe here is for a plain, basic one (if such exists) that shouldn’t be too hard to throw together all the year round. I doubt, however, if you’d really want to cook this in high summer; it tends to be on the menu, as far as I’m concerned, any time between September and May. As ever, the list of ingredients is not meant to be interpreted too strictly; any vegetable, more or less, can argue its case here. I am, however, unpersuaded by tomatoes. Yes, it is normal to include them, but I resolutely (along with the Milanesi) prefer not to. The only drawback is that the soup, after all that cooking, turns out an undeniable khaki. But it tastes so good, with an almost honeyed savoriness, that it really doesn’t matter.

I have listed canned beans below, but if you want to use dried ones, then soak and cook them first. The added work is not burdensome in itself, but I do understand that activities-to-be-undertaken can take up psychological space, so to speak.

As for the work of chopping and preparing the vegetables, I like to chop the first one needed, then proceed to the next while the first is cooking, and so on. But most people want to be brisk and efficient, chop everything up in advance so that they’ve got an army of ingredients ready and facing them before they start, and I’ve followed this approach in setting the directions down.

I always freeze the rinds of old used-up chunks of Parmesan and throw one, or two if they’re only little, into the minestrone while it’s cooking; this brings a flavorsome unctuousness to the carroty-oniony liquor. (I sometimes toss a rind into pea soup, as well.) You should discard the cheese rind before serving the soup; I dredge it out and then chew on it as soon as it’s bearable—I love its elastic stickiness. Last, the oil. I use Ligurian oil, which is sweeter and milder than the peppery Tuscan variety.

8 tablespoons olive oil, preferably Ligurian

2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

3 large onions, sliced thinly

5 medium carrots, peeled and diced

2 celery stalks, chopped fairly small

10 ounces potatoes, peeled and diced

3 zucchini, diced

4 ounces young green beans, cut into ½-inch lengths

8 ounces Savoy cabbage, shredded

6 1/3 cups beef, chicken, or vegetable stock

rind of a finished piece of Parmesan cheese (optional)

salt, if needed

4 ounces dried white beans, soaked and cooked, or 1 can (15 ounces) cannellini beans

6 ounces small tubular pasta, such as ditalini

½ cup grated Parmesan, plus more, for serving

Get a big pot and put in the oil and butter and onions and cook until the onions are softened but not browned. Add the carrots and cook for about 3 minutes, stirring a couple of times. Do the same with the celery, potatoes, zucchini, and green beans, cooking each one for a few minutes, stirring a few times. Then add the cabbage and cook for 6–8 minutes, stirring now and then.

Add the stock. Put in the rind if you’re using it, give a good stir, and season with salt if needed. (The rind will give a small saline kick of its own, and remember, if you’re using bouillon cubes, that they can be very salty.) Cover the pan and cook at a gentle boil for 2–2½ hours. The soup should be thick, so you have to cook it for long enough to lose any wateriness, but it has to have enough liquid in it at this stage for the pasta to absorb while it’s cooking. If the soup is too thick when you’ve finished cooking it but before you put in the pasta, then add some water.

Now add the white beans and cook for 5 minutes, then turn up the heat slightly and put the pasta in. It should cook in about 15 minutes. When it’s ready, take out the rind, add the fresh Parmesan, and give the soup a good stir. Serve with more cheese.

First time around I love to eat this with a slug of soft, light Ligurian oil poured into it, but afterwards, when it’s been left to get thicker and sludgier in the fridge, I like it heated up so that it’s warm (just) but not hot and with some tube-clearing chili oil—known to the Italians as
olio santo—
to punctuate its satiny depths.

I don’t want to sound too fussy, but when you serve it, if you can, give people proper soup bowls (in other words, wide and shallow rather than deep and cupped); I don’t know why it should make a difference, but it does.

BAKED SAUTERNES CUSTARD

I first ate this custard at Sir Terence Conran’s restaurant Quaglino’s in London; it’s one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant, and I say that after about twelve years as a restaurant critic. There, it’s cooked in caramel-bottomed individual dariole molds and turned out, a golden-topped shivering tower of the stuff on the plate, and served with Armagnac-soaked prunes. My version, based on then-chef Martin Webb’s recipe, is somewhat simpler. I don’t know why I still call it Sauternes custard, except that it sounds so luxuriously evocative, as it is only if you’re feeling extravagant or generous (depending on how you look at it) that you will actually use Sauternes. Restaurants don’t have to worry about opening a bottle just for the odd cup of it. You can get a cheapish ordinary Sauternes, but then you will find it lacks distinction in general and in particular that musky, scented note of botrytis, which was the point of using Sauternes in the first place. If you’ve got guests who you can count on appreciating a bottle to go with the dessert, then it is worth it. You need a little for the custard, but the rest will get pleasurably and more or less immediately used.

I like this warm, spooned straight from the dish it’s cooked in (eaten about 45 minutes to 1 hour after it comes out of the oven), but it is also wonderful cold, as long as you remember to take it out of the fridge a good hour before eating it. The cold option has two things going for it: first, it makes more of a contrast with the warm soup; and second, you can do it all the day before. Of course, it would look better unmolded, but that’s something I can’t manage and wouldn’t advise trying. Yes, I know that the gleaming construct of an unblemished, unmolded mound of smooth custard is a wonderful thing, and a gloopy scoop of it from a large oval dish is at best homely. But this is partly because we have all been too much influenced by restaurant preparation. If a dish looks homely, well then, that’s how it should be when eaten at home. The taste is so wonderful, so subtle but resonant, that any amount of visual inelegance is irrelevant.

POACHED APRICOTS

Cold, especially, it would be wonderful with poached apricots. The apricots that are sold are generally in no fit condition to be eaten, but poaching will help. Otherwise, just soak and cook some good dried apricots. Then transfer fruits and soaking liquid to a pan, add water to cover (if necessary), bring to the boil, and then simmer until soft. Remove the apricots to a bowl and then boil down the liquid in the pan to a syrup. Pour over the syrup and leave till room temperature or cold (but not fridge-cold). Or you can prepare ordinary dried apricots along the lines of the eastern Mediterranean recipe for them on
page 320
, or indeed the poached peaches I suggest as an accompaniment to the Sauternes custard ice cream on
page 340
. If all this is sounding a little complicated, then fresh raspberries or strawberries doused in some of the wine you’re using for the custard would do as well. But don’t start thinking that you absolutely have to be doing anything; this custard is good enough alone. No, more than good enough—sublime. In some moods, any accompaniment is a distraction.

2 whole eggs

4 egg yolks

½ cup vanilla sugar (
page 72
) or superfine sugar

1½ cups heavy whipping cream

1 vanilla bean, if not using vanilla sugar

¾ cup Sauternes or other dessert wine

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Fill up the kettle and bring the water just to the boil. Whisk the eggs, egg yolks, and sugar in a large bowl. Put the cream and vanilla bean, if using, in a saucepan; put the wine in another. Bring the cream to just below boiling point and then remove from heat; if using the vanilla bean, cover and let infuse for 20 minutes or so. Meanwhile, bring the wine to just below boiling point. If you are using a vanilla bean, remove it after steeping.