How to Eat (20 page)

Return the beef to the pan and then stir in the flour. After a couple of minutes or so, pour in the wine mixture and stir well, then stir in the tomato paste and then the mace and some pepper. Taste and add salt, if you want.

Put on a lid and then cook in the preheated oven for 3 hours. Remove, cool, and then keep in the fridge until needed. I tend to reheat in the casserole on the stove. Serves 6–8.

I love game birds roasted; I like them plain, with bread sauce, a port-fortified gravy perhaps, some salty bacon fried to a bronzy puce, with English mustard and nutty fried bread crumbs. But a girl’s got to have a casserole under her belt, too, if only because game birds tend quite often to be beyond roasting. This way of casseroling pheasant is a recipe—unfancy, reliable, and just what you need—of the estimable Anne Willan’s (from
Real Food: Fifty Years of Good Eating
) and is great with birds that have dwindled into toughness.

Ask the butcher to cut up the pheasants for you and try to get the bacon or pancetta from him at the same time. I like using half veal and half chicken stock (I tend to buy my veal stock), but if I’ve got some game stock in the freezer, I’ll use that. You will have lots of little bits of bird here, so each portion will be very small, of course; you should get enough for about 8 people out of 3 birds. If you want, substitute guinea fowl for the pheasant and white wine for the red.

BRAISED PHEASANT WITH MUSHROOMS AND BACON

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

2 tablespoons (¼ stick) unsalted butter

3 pheasants, about 1 pound each, cut into 6 pieces each

1 pound mushrooms, quartered

20–24 baby onions, peeled

½-pound piece pancetta, cut into lardons

¼ cup all-purpose flour

2½ cups red wine

2½ cups veal or chicken stock, or more if needed

2 garlic cloves, crushed

bouquet garni (see
page xx
)

salt and freshly milled black pepper

Heat the oil and butter in a casserole and brown the pheasant pieces, a few at a time. Take them out, add the mushrooms, and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Remove them with a slotted spoon, add the onions, and cook until brown, shaking the casserole so that they color evenly. Remove the onions, add the pancetta, and brown it too.

Discard all but 2 tablespoons fat, stir the flour into the pancetta, and cook gently, stirring until brown. Stir in the wine, bring to the boil, and simmer for 5 minutes. Add the stock, garlic, bouquet garni, and salt and pepper to taste, and return the mushrooms, onion, and the pheasant pieces to the casserole. Cover and simmer on the stove or cook in a 350°F oven until the meat is very tender when pierced with a fork. Cooking time varies from 1 to 2 hours, depending on the age of the pheasants. Stir from time to time, especially if cooking on the stove, and add more stock if the meat begins to stick. The wing and breast pieces may finish cooking before the legs; if so, take them out first.

Discard the bouquet garni and taste the sauce for seasoning. Now, you can let the casserole cool, then put it in the fridge and take it out when you need it, up to 3 days later. Reheat it on top of the stove or in a 350°F oven for about 30 minutes.

Instead of the usual mashed potatoes, this stew—and, indeed, any of them—is wonderful with bulghur, or cracked wheat, however you like to call it. This has the advantage of being quicker and much less laborious to make than mashed potatoes, too; you can get on with it while you reheat the stew.

For 8 people, you need 4 cups of bulghur and 4 cups of water. Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan (which has a lid that fits) and stir in the bulghur till all coated. Then add the water, bring to the boil, add a good pinch of salt, cover, and turn down the heat to the absolute minimum. Use a heat diffuser, preferably. Cook for about 30 minutes or until all the water is absorbed and the bulghur is cooked but not soft; it should still be nutty in texture. You can leave the bulghur, when it’s cooked, with the lid on but the pan off the heat, for 10 minutes or so without harm.

VEGETABLES

One could go on forever with stews, braises, casseroles; the permutations are enormous, and I can’t think of one that couldn’t be cooked in advance. Vegetables are a different matter. Few vegetables take long to cook, and now you can get most ready trimmed, chopped, even utterly prepared for you at many supermarkets. I make three exceptions to the “quickly cooked” list: ratatouille, moussaka, and petits pois à la française. Of course there are other vegetable braises that you could add to this list—fava beans with bacon, certainly, and stewed artichokes—but most vegetable dishes that can be left sitting around to be reheated later are variations (technically, at any rate) on this theme.

I know some would argue that you can’t cook and then reheat ratatouille, that it will go mushy and lose its vibrant, just-cooked freshness. But I like it softened slightly in the pan, the flavors still discrete but mingling into one another, everything sweet and steeped. But perhaps that’s because my mother always had a bowl of ratatouille in the fridge; I remember it beginning to go soggy in its garlicky syrup.

RATATOUILLE

I couldn’t remember exactly how my mother made ratatouille and didn’t know if she used 2 zucchini or 3, or how many minutes she fried them. Pinpoint accuracy disappears with recipes you do often, but somehow I felt even more at a loss in transcribing this one from memory. And so, working on the principle that my mother would have consulted her, I turned to Elizabeth David. I’m not sure what follows is something Mrs. David would be pleased with, if only because I have ignored something she is very firm about indeed: I never bother with salting and draining eggplant, and am not now going to start degorging zucchini, either. Neglecting this stage hasn’t resulted in a hopelessly soggy mess, otherwise I’m sure we,
mère et fille,
would have done as we were told in the first place. But if you feel it’s important, then by all means cut the eggplant and zucchini into unpeeled ¼-inch-thick rounds, sprinkle with salt, and put in a colander with a plate on top of them, a weight on top of the plate, and leave all that in place for an hour or so, then rinse the vegetables and wipe them dry with kitchen paper.

I have also boosted the number of zucchini in Elizabeth David’s recipe and decreased the amount of eggplant, simply because I like zucchini more than I like eggplant. She suggests 2 coffee cups of olive oil, which I reckon is about 10 tablespoons.

The vegetables in a ratatouille are cooked in this order—onions first, then eggplant, zucchini, garlic and peppers, and lastly tomatoes. You can either prepare all the vegetables before you start, as the recipe indicates, or one at a time, chucking them into the pan in the right order.

4 large flavorful tomatoes or 1 small can (14.5 ounces) plum tomatoes

6 tablespoons olive oil

2 medium onions, halved lengthwise and finely sliced

1 eggplant, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced

5 smallish zucchini, halved lengthwise and sliced ¼-inch thick

3 large red bell peppers, cored, seeded, and cut into thin strips or chunks

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 generous teaspoon coriander seed, pounded, or ½–1 teaspoon ground coriander

salt and freshly milled black pepper

2–3 tablespoons basil or parsley, chopped

Skin the tomatoes: plunge them into boiling water for a few minutes and slip the skins off. Then halve them, scoop out the seeds, and cut each hollowed half in two crosswise. Or if you’re using canned, just squeeze the seeds out of the tomatoes.

Heat the olive oil in a heavy-bottomed wide pot—a round Le Creuset casserole is good here, or I use my deep Calphalon frying pan as, even though it isn’t heavy-bottomed, it doesn’t stick on a low heat. Earthenware dishes look authentic—the perfect Sunday supplement picture—but they do tend to stick.

Put the onions into this pot, whichever one you’re using, and cook until they’re soft but not brown. Then add the eggplant, cook for a minute or so, then add the zucchini, stirring them into the oil for a few minutes. Carry on like this with the peppers and garlic. If you feel you need more oil, pour it in.

Cover the pot and cook gently for 40 minutes. Make sure, though, that it
is
gently. You don’t want the bottom burning and the top steaming. Now add the tomatoes and coriander and season with the salt and pepper. Cook for another 30–40 minutes until all the vegetables are soft but not mushy. Stir in the basil or parsley and eat hot or cold. I think that cold it is rather good with chopped fresh coriander, too. And it’s excellent as a side dish, served tepid, with cold roast chicken or pork, or hot roast lamb. It keeps in the fridge for 5 days, but remember to take it out of the fridge well before you eat it.

MOUSSAKA

Turning back to Elizabeth David reminded me of the smoky, satiny wonderfulness of eggplant stews.

This is a Lebanese recipe, very different from the traditional Greek one of the same name. Boldly, strongly flavored, but mellow, the spices and seasoning dovetail into a perfect, aromatic whole. The recipe is adapted from a wonderful book of Lebanese home cooking by Nada Saleh, called, evocatively enough,
Fragrance of the Earth.
The pomegranate molasses (or syrup) stipulated here is found in Middle-Eastern or specialty food stores. If you can’t get baby eggplant, use large ones, cut into ½-inch cubes.

1 pound baby eggplants

5 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium onion, sliced thinly

10–12 small garlic cloves, peeled and left whole or sliced thickly

¾ cup chickpeas, soaked, rinsed, drained, and precooked (see
page 78
)

1½ tablespoons pomegranate molasses (optional)

1 pound tomatoes, rinsed, peeled, seeded, and quartered

1½ teaspoons salt, or to taste

½ teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon allspice

¼ teaspoon freshly milled black pepper

1 cup water

2–3 tablespoons parsley, coriander, or mint, chopped

Trim the eggplant stems. Peel the eggplants partially to look like old-fashioned hot-air balloons, leaving alternating lengthwise strips of peel and flesh each about ½ inch wide. In a saucepan, heat 3 tablespoons of the oil over medium heat and sauté the eggplant for a few minutes or until golden brown. With a slotted spoon, remove to a side dish lined with paper towels and reserve. To the saucepan add the remaining oil, the onions, and the garlic and sauté, stirring constantly, until pale in color and soft, about 5 minutes, adding more oil if necessary. Add the chickpeas and stir occasionally for 5 minutes, then add the pomegranate molasses, if using. Return the reserved eggplant to the saucepan and add the tomatoes, sprinkle with the salt, cinnamon, allspice, and black pepper, and add the water; bring to the boil and quickly reduce the heat to moderately low. Cover and simmer for about an hour. If you’re using a large, shallow saucepan, you may find they are ready after 45 minutes.

Serve warm or cold, but either way, sprinkle with the parsley, coriander, or mint, even if Nada Saleh issues no such command. Eat with lots of bread. It keeps in the fridge easily for 3–5 days.

Cooking this sort of thing in advance enables you to make more of it later. You could cook this moussaka on the weekend and stash it away for a quick midweek supper by pairing it with some noisettes of lamb, cooked for a few minutes on each side. For vegetarians, sprinkle with feta cheese when reheating.

These dishes can be meals in themselves or served as a vegetable accompaniment alongside meat. But if you want to do an all-purpose vegetable accompaniment to meat or fish, plain or fancy, petits pois à la française are useful. Everyone loves peas cooked like this, fragrant with the lettuce and syrupy with the butter.

PETITS POIS à LA FRANçAISE

For the lettuce, I use part of a head of romaine, if I’m shopping specially for it, but otherwise I’m happy to make do with whatever I’ve got at hand. I use fresh peas when I’m in the mood to shell them and when they’re available; otherwise, I use a package of frozen young peas. Don’t bother to buy fresh peas ready shelled; there’s no advantage here over frozen. If you are using frozen peas, you won’t have to cook them for so long. I tend to thaw them first and cook them for about 10 minutes. I like using chicken stock in place of the water, but this is not classic.

3 tablespoons butter

3 1/3 pounds peas, in the pod, or 3 cups frozen young peas

1 small lettuce or 8–10 leaves of a larger lettuce, shredded roughly

6 scallions, white and green parts, chopped

salt and freshly milled black pepper

1 teaspoon sugar