How to Eat (49 page)

The rice pudding below cannot quite straddle all these oppositions—but, bearing in mind these proportions, you can alter the ingredients, adding cream, light or heavy, or melted butter, to make it as rich and softly fatty as you like. And if you want to add raisins, do; just don’t tell me about it.

3 tablespoons unsweetened butter, melted

4 tablespoons medium- or long-grained rice

2 tablespoons vanilla sugar (
page 72
) or superfine sugar

2 cups milk

½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract, if not using the vanilla sugar

whole nutmeg

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Use some of the melted butter, about half, to grease an ovenproof dish with a capacity slightly over 4 cups. I like to use an oval cream stoneware dish for this. In this dish put the rice, then the sugar, and then pour over the milk and vanilla, if using. Pour the rest of the melted butter on top of this (if you’re going to have a skin, the butter will ensure it) and then grate over some nutmeg. Put in the oven and bake for 2½ hours, giving a good stir after the first half hour and first hour. If you angle a wooden spoon in slightly aslant, you won’t disperse too much of the nutmeg on the top.

It’s British-traditional to eat this with jam, but I prefer the also-British golden syrup—with or without heavy cream.

The idea of a luncheon party is somehow vulnerably old-fashioned, but occasionally you want to invite people to a lunch with a more celebratory feel about it.

LUNCH-PARTY LUNCH FOR 8

SPINACH, BACON, AND RAW MUSHROOM SALAD

BAKED SEA BASS WITH ROSEMARY

BAKEWELL TART WITH FRESH RASPBERRIES

SPINACH, BACON, AND RAW MUSHROOM SALAD

Lazy as I am, I wouldn’t consider making this salad if I had to wash, drain, and stem everything. Instead, I buy spinach in packages. I think I’d get 3 10-ounce packages for this, although a wiser woman might stop at 2, and then 8 ounces or so of those firm but otherwise unexceptional button mushrooms. Wipe them if you must, but otherwise just slice them finely-finely, so that you have masses of wafer-thin mushroom-shaped slices. Get some bacon—about 8 thin slices of the best (unwatery) kind available—and fry or grill it till ochre-tipped and crisp, and then crumble it into the mixture of mushrooms and young spinach leaves. I like a garlicky dressing: peel 2 garlic cloves and fry them gently in about 4 tablespoons good olive oil. Don’t let the oil hiss and sizzle and don’t let the cloves burn. Take the pan off the heat and leave the oil to cool. Remove the cloves, squeeze some lemon juice into the pan, sprinkle in some salt, and grind in some pepper—and that’s your dressing.

I sometimes do a version of this salad with whole fried, peeled garlic cloves and/or croutons, too.

BAKED SEA BASS WITH ROSEMARY

Sea bass is such a wonderful fish and, cooked whole, has inevitably something festive, something important, about it. A sea bass, boned, with fistfuls of rosemary stuffed inside and baked, is easy to cook, looks beautiful, and has that perfect simplicity of taste that throws any amount of chi-chi food into a cocked hat. I take it for granted, while talking blithely of how easy it is to do, that you won’t be boning it yourself. But, as there’s no point buying fish like this unless you can be positive it’s the best and freshest possible, you will, anyway, be roping in a fish seller for this.

The advantage of stuffing a boned, whole fish with herbs (and if you haven’t got any rosemary growing in the garden, indeed haven’t got a garden, buy a small plant rather than masses of supermarket packets of the stuff) is that although it sounds like more work than just baking fillets, it isn’t, because the timing, although still crucial, isn’t quite as cut-throat. Also, you can keep the fish waiting in its foil package while you have the first course, whereas single pieces of fish really would be tricky to leave hanging around. And although you can’t make this really in advance, you can stuff the fish and wrap it in foil a good 1–2 hours before putting it in the oven.

I find it easier to serve 2 smaller rather than 1 larger fish, simply because it can be a tight squeeze fitting a fish over 4 pounds in my oven. But if you can, do—one enormous bass does look splendid. And if you prefer, you can buy small sea bream, using one per person. Ask your fish seller to bone the fish entirely for you. Explain that you want to serve the fish whole, stuffed, then cut into slices.

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, preferably Ligurian, plus more, for oiling baking foil

2 3-pound whole sea bass, boned

about 20 4-inch sprigs fresh rosemary

coarse salt and freshly milled black pepper

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Oil two pieces of foil big enough to wrap each fish in and lay the fish on top. Stuff the cavities with the rosemary sprigs, plonk the fish on the foil, dribble the 2 tablespoons of oil over, sprinkle with the salt, and grind over pepper. Make packages with the foil, twisting the ends very tightly but keeping the packages themselves baggy. You can leave in a cool place, or fridge if it’s a hot day, for an hour or so, then put in the oven for 20–25 minutes. Keep in unwrapped foil packages until you’ve eaten your first course, then remove to two oval plates (or one, if you can fit both fish on it) and serve by slicing after removing the rosemary to one side. Spoon over the oily, rosemary-scented juices.

New potatoes, either boiled or roasted, are wonderful with this, as are puy lentils, cooked, then tossed in an oil-softened dice of garlic, onion, celery, and carrot and sprinkled with parsley.

BAKEWELL TART WITH FRESH RASPBERRIES

Bakewell tart, or Bakewell pudding, is a traditional British almond-rich “pie,” usually made with jam. We had it at school: sweet, stodgy, dense and heavy, a rigid disc of pastry smeared with red jam and topped with a sandy paste that itself bore the weight of a hardened pool of graying white icing. It had its charms, but I don’t intend to emulate them here. This version is bold with almonds; the traditional frangipane topping is rich with them, of course, but here the pastry also has a good couple of tablespoons of them, which both lightens the texture and stops it from going soggy. This is important, as this version includes fresh raspberries, which create an altogether less stodgy, more elegant pie, but more seepage. If you can get really wonderful, sweet, and raspberry-tasting raspberries, then you can probably do without using jam. But I find that the raspberries that are in most shops tend to perform better with about 3 tablespoons of best- quality (even sugar-free—that is, additional-sugar-free) jam.

This is fabulous, the sort of dessert people who say “I don’t eat desserts” have second helpings of. Serve with more fresh raspberries and a pitcher of heavy cream or crème fraîche on the table alongside.

FOR THE PASTRY

1½ cups Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

pinch salt

¼ cup ground almonds

½ cup confectioners’ sugar

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, diced

1 egg yolk

FOR THE FILLING

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, very soft

1 cup superfine sugar

3 eggs

1 cup ground almonds

3 tablespoons raspberry jam (optional)

12 ounces (2 pint boxes) raspberries

2 tablespoons flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Make the pastry by hand, in the processor, or in a freestanding electric mixer as you like. If you’re making it by hand, sift the flour, salt, the ground almonds, and sugar into a mixing bowl. Add the diced butter and cut in the flour mixture using a round-bladed knife or pastry blender or as you do normally. When the butter has been reduced to flakes, use your fingertips to rub it into the flour. And then, when it looks like fine crumbs, stir in the egg yolk to make a soft but not sticky dough. You may need to add a few drops of ice water if some crumbs of pastry remain at the bottom of the bowl. Wrap the disc of dough—as usual—in plastic film or foil and let it rest in the fridge for 15–20 minutes.

Roll out the pastry and use it to line a deep 10-inch tart or quiche pan, prick the dough, and then put the pan in the fridge while you make the filling.

Melt the butter, then put it to one side for a moment. Beat the sugar and eggs together and then, still stirring, pour in the melted butter. When all’s mixed, stir in the ground almonds. That’s all there is to it.

Spread the jam, if using, on the base of the tart shell, then cover with the raspberries. Pour the egg mixture over that and then scatter with the flaked almonds.

Bake for 35–45 minutes until the tart looks golden and swollen. Remove and let stand until warm.

BEEF ONCE MORE STEWED, FOR 6

STEWED BEEF WITH THYME AND ANCHOVIES

FRESH HORSERADISH SAUCE WITH CHIVES

BAKED OR MASHED POTATOES AND CORNICHONS

TREACLE TART WITH VANILLA ICE CREAM

Sometimes a stew is just what you want for lunch. This is a particularly special one, elegant yet bolstering; turn to Cooking in Advance,
page 75
, for the recipe. As suggested there, I like this with baked potatoes and some cornichons, their vinegariness contrasting beautifully with the salty mellowness of the stew.

It may seem odd to suggest giving horseradish sauce with stew, but think of this as a raita, rather. Again, this is about contrasts—the rasp of the horseradish, the cold, sour creaminess of the sauce, provide both foil and balm. And it’s heavenly dolloped into the potatoes, too. The recipe for this comes from British food writer Arabella Boxer’s
Herb Book,
though I have to say when I couldn’t get any fromage frais for this once, I made this with crème fraîche and nonfat yogurt (well, that’s what I had in the fridge), half and half, as I suggest you do here, and it was wonderful, too. If you haven’t got oven space for the potatoes, though the treacle tart should leave room, consider mashed instead.

FRESH HORSERADISH SAUCE WITH CHIVES

I don’t normally make real horseradish sauce, as I’ve already confessed, but I give you an adaptation of Arabella Boxer’s recipe, which is staggeringly good. Some greengrocers have fresh horseradish root (and you can stash some in the freezer) but, if you can’t find any, use instead bottled prepared horseradish.

¾ cup crème fraîche

¾ cup yogurt

¼ cup grated fresh horseradish or bottled prepared horseradish

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

2 teaspoons white wine vinegar

salt

½ cup chopped chives

Beat the crème fraîche and yogurt together till smooth, then stir in the horseradish, mustard, vinegar (1 teaspoon only if using the bottled kind), and a good pinch of salt. Stir in the chopped chives. Turn into a clean bowl and serve.

TREACLE TART

Treacle tart, that traditional British pie of lemony, bready, caramel-dense syrup, should be thin and chewily crisp rather than deep and fat-bellied. It should be warm, too.

Some people will try to persuade you of the superiority for treacle tart of a buttery sweet pastry, the sort the French use for fruit flans and lemon tarts. I am not convinced. I think the intense sweetness of the filling is better served by a plainer crust and that the important thing is to get the pastry as thin as possible. Ordinary pastry dough (see
page 37
) is really a snap to make; even I, so undeft as to be embarrassing, can roll it out thinly and drape it silkily over a waiting 8-inch tart pan. You can use the crust recipe below or the one for jam tarts on
page 449
. Traditionally, a treacle tart is covered by a latticework of pastry. I like it plain, but if you want to you can cut out strips from the leftover pastry you’ll have and make a criss-cross design to cover before putting it in the oven. It isn’t traditional, but the cream gives a soft roundedness to the sweet filling and stops it from drying out.

If you don’t want to go in for baking, buy a pot of ice cream and make the butterscotch sauce on
page 275
.

FOR THE PASTRY

¾ cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons (¼ stick) cold unsalted butter, diced

2 tablespoons vegetable shortening, diced

1 tablespoon lemon juice

FOR THE FILLING

2/3 cup golden syrup

½ cup fresh bread crumbs (see
page 22
)

juice of 1 lemon plus the zest of half

3 generous tablespoons heavy cream

Make the pastry according to the instructions on
page 37
, using a few tablespoons ice water and the lemon juice to bind, and let rest in the fridge. Roll out to line an 8-inch tart pan and then put back in the fridge for about 30 minutes. You can do this a day or so ahead.