How to Eat (60 page)

1 heaping teaspoon salt, plus more, if desired

6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more, if desired

scant ½ teaspoon prepared English mustard

freshly milled black pepper, if desired

lemon juice, if desired

Put the lentils in a large saucepan; add the whole garlic cloves, the 2 medium onions, the 6 whole sage leaves, and the celery or lovage. Cover generously with cold water and bring to the boil. When it starts boiling, add the salt and then lower the heat to a firm simmer and let cook for 35–40 minutes, or until the lentils are just cooked. You want some texture to remain, so don’t overcook. Drain, and taste the lentils while they’re in the colander. If you think they need it, add more salt then and there, but remember that the ham is salty.

Put the pan back on the heat, add the olive oil, and, when hot, throw in the minced onion and the remaining sage leaves. Cook for 5–10 minutes (it will depend, among other things, on the diameter of your pan) until the onion has lost its rawness and then some. Stir in the minced garlic and cook for another minute or so. Add the mustard, then put the cooked lentils back. Turn the lentils well in the sage and onion mixture. Taste to see if you want to add anything else—more salt, more sage, more oil, or some pepper or lemon juice. Leave in the pan until you’re ready to eat them, and then turn the lentils onto a large, warmed plate and place the cooked cod on top. This looks wonderful—the pebbly, oil-wet khaki-blackness of the lentils like a cobbled street underneath the cat’s-tongue-pink slabs of ham-wrapped fish.

HAZELNUT CAKE

This cake happens to be a brilliant way to use up freezer-stored egg whites. It looks wonderful—a toasty, speckled brown, bulging-sided disc. And it tastes extraordinary: a nutty, tender sponge, with the almost-stickiness of meringue and the aromatic dampness of marzipan. The amount below will probably give you leftovers, but the cake stays all-too-eatable.

2 cups hazelnuts, toasted and skins removed

1½ cups superfine sugar

8 large egg whites

½ teaspoon salt

grated zest 1 lemon or ½ orange

2/3 cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 9-inch springform pan, and line the bottom with a disc of parchment.

Grind the nuts and sugar together in a food processor. Whisk the egg whites with the salt until you have stiff peaks; if you have a mixer to do this, so much the better. Fold in the sugar-nut mixture, to which you’ve added the lemon or orange zest, gradually and gently. Don’t get too nervous about this, though—I once tipped about half the bowl in at once and then folded it in far too vigorously, and although the cake was a mite flatter than it might have been, it was still fabulous. Anyone eating who hadn’t seen my characteristic act of clumsiness wouldn’t have known anything was other than it should be.

When the sugar, nuts, and zest are incorporated into the cloudy mountain of egg whites, sift over the flour. What I do is put the flour into a strainer that I hold over the bowl, giving the strainer a tap every now and again, folding in as I do so.

Pour this mixture into the prepared pan and put it in the preheated oven for 1 hour or until a fine skewer comes out clean. Take the cake out of the oven and let cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then release the springlock and remove to a wire rack to cool.

RED CURRANT AND PEACH SALAD

I had the idea of making a red currant salad, if that’s what we’re calling it, to go with the hazelnut cake, out of some vague not-quite-memory of ribiselkuchen, that Austrian pudding cake made of hazelnut-meringue sponge and red currants; there seems to be some special affinity between these nuts, this fruit. The peaches or nectarines used here lend a fleshy mellowness to balance and sweeten, which is needed, as the currants are, even with the sugar, undeniably sharp. Even though you’re going to be pouring mountains of sugar over the red currants, you don’t actually eat all the syrup it makes. Or not at this sitting. For I can’t bring myself to throw this away, but boil it down after and use it to glaze other fruits in open tarts, or to flavor apples in an otherwise plain two-crust pie or—much easier this—to pour over some vanilla ice cream sprinkled with a fresh lot of hazelnuts, this time roughly chopped.

It’s easy to be strict about quantities for baking, but I cannot quite bring myself to sound anything but vague when it comes to what you do to make a fruit salad, especially such a simple, two-fruit arrangement. But let me just say that for 6 people, I’d think along the lines of 3 pint baskets red currants and 3 peaches or nectarines. Remember, this is to be eaten with cake. Put the stemmed currants into a dish and pour ½ cup superfine sugar and the juice of an orange over them; in another hour do the same, and an hour later the same again, so that in total you’ve used 1½ cups sugar and 3 oranges, though taste as you go along to make sure you need the extra sugar. Turn the currants in the sugary juices every now and again—whenever you think about it. I think these are at their best—sticky, shiny, scarlet jewels, still sharp enough once you bite, but not so sharp that you wince—after 3½–4 hours’ sitting time, but we’re not talking precision timing here. It’s fine if you start when you get in; just turn the currants in their syrup more often.

Before you sit down to dinner, put a kettle on to boil and the peaches or nectarines in a bowl, then pour the boiling water over them. Leave for a few minutes, then drain and peel. Or leave them with their skins on. Cut each fruit into about 8 fine slices. Drain the currants and put on a big plate and add the peaches as pleases you. Dribble over the now coral-red sugary orange juices, tasting first to make sure they’re as you like them. Leave until the end of dinner, when the fruit can join forces on the table with the cake. I serve no cream of whatever sort; it would taste all wrong with this particular cake. Besides, we’re looking for a little uplift here.

A Rhone red, such as a Gigondas or Chateauneuf du Pape—something powerful, ripe, and opulent—will suit the ham and lentils, or a Pinot Noir from Oregon, such as Ponzi.

DEEPLY AUTUMNAL DINNER FOR 8

CHESTNUT AND PANCETTA SALAD

ROAST VENISON FILLET WITH APPLE PURÉE AND ROSEMARY SAUCE

Peas and celeriac mash

QUINCES POACHED IN MUSCAT WITH LEMON ICE CREAM MARSALA MUSCOVADO CUSTARD WITH OR WITHOUT MUSKILY SPICED PRUNES

I don’t think one needs to be putting on a theme park of the seasons quite, but autumn is a hard one to resist. One can get a little too taken with all those mists and mellow fruitfulness, become a little too parodically bosky and lost in shades of prune and plum, but this menu seems to me to stop just this side of all that. The chestnuts are coming into season (even if I do recommend the canned or bottled peeled ones) and, although venison is available all the year around now, it still feels autumnal, especially when paired with another seasonal—apples. And we have such a short time to take a stab at quinces, we may as well exploit it as we can. For those who don’t feel up to tackling this once commonly eaten, now almost exotically unfamiliar fruit, I suggest an eggy and creamy baked custard, buff-colored with Marsala and fudgy muscovado sugar. And if that’s too much to ask, then all you need to do is provide cheese (gorgonzola, Roquefort, or Stilton and maybe something blander for those who don’t know a good thing when they taste one) and a gorgeous plate of grapes, preferably those ambrosial fat and sepia-tinged muscat grapes, if you can get them.

CHESTNUT AND PANCETTA SALAD

I got the idea for this from two independently wonderful chestnut and pancetta soups I had, within a few weeks of one another, at the restaurant Moro and the River Café in London; these two ingredients seem to do something to one another when put together; they become more themselves—one salty, the other sweet—at the same time as fusing into something greater, transformed. This salad lets them do whatever it is they do even more baldly; there’s not just the contrast between salt and sweet, but between crisp and almost fudgily dense. But despite these rich textures and strong flavors, this manages to be a light, unclogging starter. I think the trick is to resist the temptation to boost the quantities of its main ingredients.

Use a slightly bitter leaf, such as escarole, though if that’s not to be found, frisée will be fine, and make sure you get good, proper Spanish sherry vinegar; otherwise you just get acidity, not intensity.

I’m not stopping you from buying, peeling, and preparing your own chestnuts (in which case double the quantities here), but I use those canned peeled and cooked whole chestnuts, which are available at many supermarkets.

1½ heads escarole

¼ cup plus 2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil

8 ounce pancetta, cut into fine dice or thin strips

2 cups canned whole chestnuts

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon sherry vinegar

Tear the escarole into manageable pieces and cover 2 large plates—mine are about 12 inches in diameter—with them. Put the 2 teaspoons oil in a frying pan and place on the heat. Toss the pancetta into the pan; in about 4 minutes it should have given off a lot of its fat and become crisp and dark golden in bits. Add the chestnuts and toss them in the hot fat with the pancetta. Don’t worry about these breaking, as inevitably they will. I actually prefer it if the chestnuts are slightly rubbly. When they are warmed through, a matter of a minute or so, remove them and the pancetta with a spatula or slotted spoon to the escarole-lined plates. Stir the mustard into the remaining olive oil and, off the heat, stir this into the bacony fat. Mix well and keep stirring and scraping as you add the sherry vinegar. Pour this over the salad, toss deftly, and serve.

ROAST VENISON FILLET

This venison dish has a mixed provenance, as most things do in the kitchen, but its chief inspiration is the recipe for saddle of roedeer, a small, agile Old World deer, from Inverlochy Castle in Fort William, Scotland, to be found in
The Gourmet Tour of Great Britain and Ireland
by Sir Clement Freud.

I know it might look fussy, but you can make the rosemary sauce part-way in advance, and the applesauce wholly in advance, so all you need to do on the night is cook the venison and reheat the sauces, adding juices from the marinade and the roasting pan to the rosemary sauce.

FOR THE MARINADE

1 bottle full-bodied red wine

1 celery stalk, diced

1 medium carrot, peeled and roughly chopped

1 medium onion, peeled and roughly chopped

3 juniper berries, crushed

12 black peppercorns

2 sprigs thyme, or ½ teaspoon dried

2 bay leaves

2 trimmed venison fillets (about 1 pound each), from the tenderloin

FOR THE SAUCE

3 cups beef stock

1 medium carrot, peeled and coarsely chopped

1 leek (white part only), coarsely chopped

2 shallots, coarsely chopped

1 celery stalk, coarsely chopped

2 cups red wine

8 rosemary sprigs

salt and freshly milled black pepper, if needed

3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold and cut into cubes

FOR THE APPLESAUCE

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

3 cooking apples, peeled, cored, and chunked or sliced

½ cup sugar, plus more, if needed

pinch salt

3 cloves

juice of ½ lemon, plus more, if needed

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 teaspoon olive oil

Heat the ingredients for the marinade in a saucepan. When it comes to the boil, remove from the heat and let cool. Marinate the venison fillets in this for 24 hours, preferably in a cool place, or else in the fridge.

To make the rosemary sauce, put the stock in a saucepan with the chopped vegetables, bring to the boil, and then cook furiously until reduced by half. Add the wine and rosemary and reduce to about 1 cup. If you’re doing this in advance, you can cook it till this point, reheating and resuming from here on the night. Add 8 tablespoons of the marinade and reduce, again, to 1 cup. Strain into a clean saucepan and, when about to serve, put back on the stove, taste, and season with the salt and pepper, if needed. Beat in the butter, 1 cube at a time, to make the sauce smooth and glossy.

To make the applesauce, put all the ingredients in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Cover and cook over medium heat for 10–15 minutes or until the apples are a soft, collapsed heap. Lift the lid every now and again to prod and stop from sticking. Pass the apple mixture through a fine strainer, tasting to see whether you need more sugar or lemon juice, and reserve till needed. If it’s too runny, boil down; if too stiff, add butter and liquid.

To cook the meat, preheat the oven to 450°F. On the stove, in a heavy frying pan that will go in the oven, melt the butter and oil and sear the fillets on all sides. Transfer to the hot oven and roast for 20–30 minutes. The venison should be browny-puce within (the game equivalent of
à point
pink), but not imperial purple.