How to Eat (50 page)

Preheat the oven to 400°F and put a baking sheet in to warm up, too.

For the filling, put the syrup in a saucepan on the stove and, when warm and runny, add the bread crumbs, lemon juice, and zest and heat until warm and runny-ish. Leave for 5 minutes, then stir in the cream. Pour or spoon this mixture into the prepared pastry, place on the baking sheet, and bake for about 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350°F and bake for another 15–20 minutes or until the pastry is golden and the filling is slightly firmed on top.

I like this best hot, with cold, cold vanilla ice cream.

ELEGANTLY SUBSTANTIAL TRADITIONAL ENGLISH LUNCH FOR 8

ENGLISH ROAST CHICKEN WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS PLUS SOME

TRIFLE

When you speak to English ladies of a certain generation, you will notice that they use “meat” to mean “beef.” Thus “We ate meat only once a week” doesn’t preclude the consumption of vast and daily, or twice daily, platefuls of ham, pork, chicken, and lamb. A fine English Sunday lunch was roast chicken as it always used to be done, with parsley and thyme stuffing, bread or onion sauce, roast potatoes and sausages, and honey-roast parsnips, rather than the modern take (lemon, garlic, onions, olive oil—see
page 7
), much as I love it.

A traditional English “pudding,” meaning dessert, is what you want after; of course, any pie or crumble or indeed steamed sponge pudding would be just fine, but a trifle would be perfect.

ENGLISH ROAST CHICKEN WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS

If you want the stuffing to be a stiff rather than dense and crumbly mass, add a beaten egg to combine before stuffing the birds.

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter

drop oil

1 medium onion, minced

6 slices bacon, minced

1 pound button mushrooms, minced

salt and freshly milled black pepper

2 cups fresh bread crumbs

leaves from about 8 sprigs fresh thyme or 3 teaspoons dried

6 tablespoons chopped parsley

zest of 1 lemon

2 chickens, about 3½ pounds each

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Put 2 tablespoons of the butter with oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and, when melted, add the onion and bacon. Fry together, over medium heat, for about 10 minutes or until onions are soft. Remove the bacon mixture and, in the same pan, melt the remaining butter and cook the mushrooms, covered, with some salt and pepper, for about 5 minutes. Remove to a plate to cool. Put the bread crumbs in a large bowl and mix in the thyme, parsley, and lemon zest, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste. Stuff the birds and roast 15 minutes per pound, adding 10 minutes to the chickens’ cooking time, or until the juices run clear when the chickens are pierced between a thigh and the body.

SAUSAGES

As for the sausages, what I do is get 3–4 little sausages, pork and as plain as possible, per head, then I cook them slightly in advance for 30–40 minutes in a 400°F oven. Then, just about 15 minutes or so before eating, I put them back in the oven the chickens have just been taken out of to heat up.

POTATOES

The potatoes really need a hotter oven—turn to
page 253
for the method for making them—but if you haven’t got a double oven, you will just have to let the chickens stand for a while and turn up the oven to 425°F. Roast about 3 pounds of potatoes for 20 minutes or so (in which case cover the reheating sausages with foil). If you like living dangerously, you can brown the potatoes by putting them, hot fat, baking pan, and all, on the stove. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The recipe for bread sauce can be found on
page 58
. The following onion sauce, however, was what my mother more often cooked to go with roast chicken, whether it was stuffed as above, or just with a squeezed-out lemon half.

ONION SAUCE

Many people like a Frenchified onion sauce, with the onions almost minced and disappearing into a velvety mush. I love this sauce as we ate it at home, the onions boiled, drained, and some of the water added to the milk to make the white sauce. Three things: I don’t bother to fish out the cloves and bay from the milk. If you don’t want to add cream, and I often don’t, just make the initial milk up to 3 cups instead. And you may substitute 6 leeks, each cut into 3 pieces, for the onions. We nearly always ate leeks cooked like this in white sauce, at home, and they are particularly good, too, with roast pork or ham.

2½ cups milk

2 cloves

1 bay leaf

6 small or medium onions, halved

salt

6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter

¾ cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

½ cup heavy cream

freshly milled white or black pepper

whole nutmeg

Pour the milk into a saucepan, add the cloves and bay leaf, and bring to boiling point. Just before it boils, remove from heat, cover, and let steep for 20 minutes or so while you cook the onions.

Put the onions into a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, add salt, and cook, covered, at a gentle but insistent simmer until the onions are soft—20 minutes should do it. Onions retain heat ferociously (which is why an onion, boiled and wrapped in a tea towel, was always used as a remedy for earache, staying warm for hours as it was pressed against a throbbing head). Pour the onions into a colander suspended over a wide-necked measuring cup or other saucepan. Let them drip in for a good 5 minutes. Then add 2 cups of the oniony water to the milk. If you haven’t got that much, just make up the extra with more milk.

Now make the sauce: put the butter in a saucepan over a low to moderate heat and, when it’s melted, stir in the flour and cook, stirring, while the roux turns nutty, for 2 minutes. Make sure it doesn’t brown, though.

Off the heat, slowly pour in the milk and onion water, stirring all the time. I use a plastic whisk for this. Do it gradually, so the liquid is smoothly incorporated into the roux. Put back on a low heat for about 15 minutes until the sauce is cooked; it should be smooth, very thick (the onions and cream will thin it in a minute), and velvety.

Stir in the onions and leave covered with a piece of buttered or wax paper until you want to eat it, at which time reheat and then stir in the cream. Season with salt and pepper and add a grating of nutmeg.

Serve not in a gravy boat (it’s too thick) but in a bowl with a spoon.

PEAS AND PARSNIPS

I like peas with this as well as the parsnips. Normally I’d allocate a medium-sized parsnip per person but—with so many sausages—it’s probably more sensible to work along the lines of 3 parsnips per 2 people. Peel them, cut them into 4—that’s to say, cut them in half crossways and then cut each half lengthways—and parboil them in boiling, salted water for 3–5 minutes. In a baking dish in which they will fit in one layer, melt some fat—good dripping or lard is best; however, if you blanch at the very idea, do use oil. Put in the parsnips, toss well so that they’re coated, and drizzle about 3 tablespoons runny honey over them. Roast them in the oven for about 30 minutes at 425°F or 40 at 400°F. And give them a blast, the oven turned to very high, at the end of cooking while the chicken is resting. When they’re ready they should be tender at the prod of a fork within but brown and shiny and crisp without. If you can’t find room to roast the potatoes and the parsnips separately, then throw them all in together, but you will then have to forget the honey over the parsnips. It’s not ideal for the parsnips to be cooked at the high heat the potatoes require (you will end up with perhaps more burnt and crusty exterior than you’d like and rather less sweet and creamy interior), but it’s not the end of the world.

GREENS

I think as a third vegetable, if you’re willing to go the extra mile, you need something grassy and unsweet, and for that reason I’d choose kale or greens of some sort rather than white cabbage. Spinach is not at all a bad idea either—I am quite equable about the idea of frozen whole leaf spinach. If you do fresh spinach for 8 people, you will have to be carting pounds of the stuff back from the store.

TRIFLE

For the proper English trifle, see
page 109
. The rhubarb, muscat, and mascarpone one (
page 107
) has an awful lot going for it here too.

SPRING-SCENTED LUNCH FOR 8

TARRAGON FRENCH ROAST CHICKEN

GERMAN LEEKS AND WINE, RICE, PEAS, AND SNOW PEAS

LEMON PIE

GERMAN LEEKS AND WINE

With tarragon chicken, I like rice or mashed potatoes, to mop up the chickeny juices. And I’d adapt Jane Grigson’s recipe for German leeks and wine. You cut clean leeks into pieces 2½–3½ inches long, depending on the overall size of leek. (And work on the principle of 3 logs, that’s to say probably 1 leek, per person.) Stew these logs slowly in butter in a covered pan for about 5 minutes, turning them occasionally—they should all be buttery. Then, pour in 3⁄4–1 cup dry white wine (more if the arrangement of the pan seems to demand it) and keep cooking over a low heat, lid on. After about 10 minutes, when the leeks are ready (tender but not squishy), remove them to a dish and, if there’s too much liquid left, boil down the juices. Whisk in a knob of butter and pour over the leeks. Use white pepper, not black, or it’ll just look as if you haven’t cleaned them properly.

TARRAGON FRENCH ROAST CHICKEN

Don’t go mad with the tarragon for this; it’s wonderful used with a light hand but suddenly whiffy when thrown in with too much exuberance. A straggly bunch comprising about 10 sprigs should be more than enough, which is about as much as is contained in those irritating see-through plastic envelopes you find at the supermarket.

This should also give you wonderful leftovers for salad or sandwiches.

6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter

small bunch tarragon, leaves chopped, stalks reserved

1 scant teaspoon sherry

freshly milled white pepper

2 large chickens, 4–5 pounds each

2 cups chicken stock, homemade or from a well-diluted cube

salt

Mix the butter well with the tarragon leaves. Add the sherry and a good grinding of white pepper. Push your fingers underneath the skin of the chicken so that you’ve got a pocket between breast and skin. Be careful not to break the skin, so proceed slowly. Smear most of the tarragony butter onto the breast, pat the skin back over, and dot the rest in the space between leg and body.

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Heat up the chicken stock and pour it into the bottom half of a roasting pan fitted with a rack. Add to the hot stock the stalks of the freshly chopped tarragon. Sit the chickens on the rack. If you’re not sure about the quality of your chickens, make a domed lid with foil to retain moisture; it should be baggy over the chickens, fastened around the pan’s edges. Keep the foil on for just 1 hour, though. Otherwise, just let the chicken sit on its rack over the hot stock, untended.

Roast the chicken for 15 minutes per pound plus 10 minutes. (If you’re cooking a lemon pie at the same time—and the sour-sweet intensity of the lemons and the old-fashioned comfort of the pie are just right after the herbal hit of the buttery tarragon—you can have the oven on at 375°F and just make sure the chicken has 15 minutes or so longer in the slightly cooler oven, or cook the lemon pie in advance.)

When the chickens are ready—golden, and the juices run clear when pierced between a thigh and the body—take them out of the oven and switch it off. Pour off the pan juices and either put the chickens in their pan back in the oven to keep them warm or let them wait on their carving board. I don’t mind what temperature chicken is when I eat it, and actually, there’s a lot to be said for that puffed-breath warmth.

Pour the chicken-tarragon juices into a measuring cup. Pour some off into a small saucepan to boil down into a gravy-ish sauce. Obviously, taste for salt and pepper, too.

FOOLPROOF RICE

For 8 people, you need 4 cups of basmati rice and 4 cups of water. Pour the rice into a large strainer and hold it under the cold running water for a while to soak and rinse the rice. Shake well to drain. Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan (which has a lid that fits) and stir in the rice till it’s all coated. Then add the water, bring to the boil, add a good pinch of salt, then cover and turn down the heat to absolute minimum. For preference, use a heat-diffuser. Cook for 30–40 minutes or until all the water is absorbed and the rice is cooked. You can leave it with the lid on but the pan off the heat for 10 minutes or so without harm. You might consider, too, siphoning off some of the chicken stock from the chicken’s roasting pan to add to the water and lend flavor to the rice while it’s cooking.

All I want else with this are some snow peas, possibly with some buttery young peas stirred in.

LEMON PIE

I first came across a recipe for lemon pie (as distinct, very, from lemon meringue pie and lemon tart) in Norma MacMillan’s In a Shaker Kitchen, a book I curl up with and read in a metaphorical fog of home baking after another stressed-out urban day. Reading recipes for chicken pot pie and maple wheat loaves is a wonderful antidote to modern life. The Shaker version of lemon pie takes lemons, slices them, macerates them in sugar, and then adds beaten egg yolks to this viscous sherbety mix and cooks it in an old-fashioned double crust. For me, it has the edge on both lemon meringue pie (the least impressive example of the type—and, if you want a meringue-topped pie, please just turn to the rhubarb-filled, meringue-topped, orange-fragrant pastry based version on
page 234
) and tarte au citron. I noticed that when I made it with sliced lemons, most people left pithy piles of politely regurgitated rubble on their plates. So I now cut off the pith after zesting and before slicing them. The easiest way to do this, I find, is by standing a lemon on a chopping board and then cutting thin slices off downwards. Don’t worry that you’re carving the lemons into interesting geometric forms; you can afford to lose some of the flesh along with the pith anyway, and besides, it doesn’t matter what they look like. And don’t worry, either, about this being a bit of a sweat—it doesn’t take longer than a few clumsy swipes of a knife.