How to Eat (29 page)

Put the oil in a heavy-bottomed, deepish frying pan and cook the chorizo pieces for a few minutes, stirring and pressing with a wooden spoon or spatula so that the paprika-red fat oozes out as the sausage cooks, 3 or so minutes. While all this is going on you should, as well as keeping an eye on the kale, be putting a small frying pan of water on to poach the egg. I use that much despised thing, a store-bought egg poaching pan with molds. Drain the kale well and then stir into the chorizo. Put the egg in to poach and when it is ready, turn the orange-spliced kale onto a plate and turn out the poached egg on top.

Serves 1.

CHICKPEAS WITH SORREL

A comparable, desirable pungency is evoked by this bowl of chickpeas and sorrel. If I’ve got some dried, cooked, and soaked chickpeas in a container in the fridge (and I might have), I use them, but canned, preferably organic (better textured) ones are fine. I first did this for the age-old reason that I needed to use something up, in this case some sorrel. There’s a Middle Eastern way with chickpeas that I like, sour with lemon juice and thick with spinach. It occurred to me that using sorrel would provide the leafiness and the acidity—it does. For a can (about 14 ounces) of chickpeas, drained, put 1 tablespoon olive oil in a pan and fry in it a small chopped onion with 2 finely sliced garlic cloves and a good pinch of dried cumin. Crumble in ½ dried red chili pepper, sprinkle over a pinch of salt, and cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes. Shred or chop a good handful, about 2⁄3 cup, of sorrel and throw into the onion pan. Throw in the drained chickpeas after it and stir well till the sorrel’s wilted and the chickpeas are warm. I eat this from a large bowl with some more oil drizzled over it and warmed pita. If this is supper, not lunch, I might make a cold plate of tomato salad to eat alongside, too.

INDULGENT DINNERS

I wouldn’t want to suggest all cooking for one or two must necessarily be of the impromptu, quickly-thrown-together kind (and I say this as someone who is eating a Laughing Cow cheese and plastic bread sandwich as she writes; very delicious it is, too). I don’t mean it should be elaborate and minutely organized, but that cooking for two can be out of the ordinary in a way that a dinner party, unless you really are fabulously extravagant or very rich, just can’t. The solitary diner can sometimes, if not often, eat lobster alone. I buy it cooked and cold and I fry some bacon to eat with it. I might make mayonnaise. I don’t mind what I have to do to it or how I eat my lobster—salad, club sandwich (toast some brioche, just see), as it is in my fingers. The pleasure lies in the solitary indulgence.

My most intense solitary indulgence, without question, is grouse; its season figures strongly in my diary (see
page 459
). Plain roast grouse is wonderful enough; this is dreamlike. I’d never have thought of messing about with the perfect simplicity of the bird, but when we all went to the River Café, London’s hottest Italian restaurant, on the eve of my sister Horatia and Inigo’s wedding, we ate quail stuffed with mascarpone and thyme, and it was so deeply fabulous that I thought I’d try it with grouse. The rest is culinary history—or it is in my house. As good as this is, don’t turn the page if you can’t manage grouse; try it instead with squab, poussin, or small cornish hens.

GROUSE WITH MASCARPONE AND THYME

1 grouse (12–14 ounces)

2 slices bacon or 1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

About ¼ cup mascarpone

3 tablespoons red wine

zest of ¼ lemon

salt and freshly milled black pepper

10 sprigs fresh thyme

Wrap the grouse in the bacon or smear the breast thickly with butter to keep it from drying out.

Heat the oven to 400°F. Put in a small roasting pan with the oil in it to heat. Remove the innards from the grouse and chop finely (I use my mezzaluna). Put the offally mess into a small bowl. Add 3 heaping tablespoons of the mascarpone, 1 tablespoon of the wine, the zest of lemon, and a vigorous amount of salt and pepper; mix well. You should now have a bowl of divinely pungent dusty-pink cream. Remove the thyme leaves from the sprigs—you want a good tablespoonful—and chop them finely. Again, I use my mezzaluna, but whatever you use make sure the thyme is well chopped—otherwise it will be woody and ruin the smooth aromatic creaminess of the sauce-stuffing.

Put the mascarpone mixture into the cavity of the grouse and put it in the roasting pan in the oven. Cook for 30–45 minutes; you want the breast to be medium-rare and the legs done through.

When it’s ready, remove the grouse to a plate and put the roasting pan on a burner. Some of the mascarpone stuffing will have oozed out into the pan. This will form the basis for your sauce. Add to this grunge another tablespoon of mascarpone and the remaining wine, and stir well, scraping it all up. Let it bubble and then pour the sauce onto a warmed plate. Put the grouse on top and dive in. (If you’re going to share the grouse with someone else, you will need to double the final bit of wine and mascarpone to make enough sauce for the two of you.) I eat this with a big bowl of tender young kale with some butter stirred in and some nutmeg grated; mashed potatoes—for obvious reasons—are a pretty wonderful accompaniment, too.

Serves 1.

What, though, is in the back of my mind when I talk about the allowable and elegant excesses of eating for two is caviar. It would head my list of perfect dinners
à deux.
And this brings me to the subject of the seduction dinner. I am at the stage in my life when cooking for two is just about the shape of every day rather than the occasional lusty stab at culinary and extraculinary conquest. But the seduction dinner is just a dinner party in miniature; the same constraints apply, and I advise those interested to turn to the Dinner chapter (page 297) with their calculator for ease of downsizing. For what it’s worth, I still think (as I always do) that you can’t go wrong with roast chicken. And I would be predisposed to respond warmly to anyone who had the cool grace to give me caviar to start. But, of course, I would prefer to buy my own caviar rather than be given it as part of the trade off for a wearyingly unwelcome lunge.

And if a girl wants to eat caviar, a girl’s got to know how to make blini. Sister, read on.

BLINI

SMOKED SALMON, CURED HERRING

Though you can use a griddle to make these, it’s best to acquire a blini pan or platar, a flat pan with seven 3-inch circular indentations. In the context of caviar, this is not a big expense. I use my blini pan for much else besides; it happens to be the perfect size for a single, Cyclopean fried egg. Anyway, proper caviar is not obligatory with blini; I’m not sure they’re not actually better with smoked salmon and salmon roe, pickled or cured herring, sour cream and a makeshift salsa of red onions chopped with capers. Really good caviar—and I like osetra much better than beluga—needs nothing else but good, lightly toasted, heavily buttered sandwich bread. But if you’re going with the blini, provide some butter (unsalted, of course, and either soft enough to be spread or, as the Russians do, poured in a little jug already melted) and either crème fraîche or sour cream; whichever you choose, use it in the blini batter.

The one difficulty with blini is not the yeast (though everyone seems phobically obsessed with that). Now that we have instant or easy-blend yeast, all you need to do is add it to the flour and proceed as normal—no proofing or any of that. And as all batters need to stand for a while, what does it matter that there’s some yeast in it? I have tried, in the pursuit of science and reader-friendliness, to substitute baking powder, but without the yeast you lose that moussy lightness. You just have buckwheat pancakes, which are fine enough, but they’re not blini.

The real awkwardness is, I admit, to do with the yeast factor; you don’t necessarily have a couple of hours to let the batter rise. So I tried making up the batter in the morning and left it, not in a warm place for 2 hours, but in my fridge all day. It rose beautifully; they were the best blini ever. Which means that you can get back from work and take the batter out of the fridge, whisk up and add the egg white, and you’re ready to roll.

Before you start, preheat the oven to 300°F and put in a large ovenproof plate. I like to make these when I’ve got a friend over. I make him or her sit on some steps near my stove, talking to me with a drink while I fry the blini and stash them, one by one, under a foil tent on the plate in the oven. I may throw one to my friend while I’m making them, but the rest we eat at the table later—the perfect, companiable dinner.

This amount makes about 12 blini, which in my book (as this is) is just right for an entire meal, with additions, admittedly, for two; you need to feel at the end that you couldn’t eat another. Remember that, as with all pancakes, the first one is often a complete disaster. Once you’ve got the heat right and the feel of the pan, the rest will follow perfectly.

2/3 cup buckwheat flour

½ cup all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons instant or easy-blend yeast

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon sugar

½ cup milk

2 tablespoons crème fraîche or sour cream

1 tablespoon butter, plus more,
for frying

1 egg, separated

drop oil

Mix the flours, yeast, salt, and sugar in a warm bowl (I let it sit, empty, in a sink of hottish water for a few minutes first). Pour the milk into a measuring cup and add the crème fraîche. Stir with a fork to combine well and then add water so that the liquid comes up to the 1-cup mark. Pour this liquid into a saucepan, add the tablespoon of butter, and warm up till the butter melts. You don’t want this actually hot, so leave it to cool slightly if, when you dip a finger in, it feels more than about blood heat.

Beat the egg yolk into the liquid and then pour this liquid into the flours and leave in a warmish place, covered with a damp tea-towel, for 2 hours (or all day in the fridge). Whisk the egg white till stiff but not dry and fold into the batter.

Preheat the oven (and see above). Melt a dab of butter and the drop oil in a 4-inch blini pan and, when hot, pour the butter mixture out. For each blini you’ll need a couple of tablespoonfuls or so of batter. I dunk in my ¼-cup measure, fill it about halfway, and transfer the batter evenly to the pan. Fry each blini on the first side for a minute or two, until the batter starts bubbling on top, then flip it over with a spatula or palette knife and give about another minute. Don’t, whatever you do, press down on the blini while it cooks. You want maximum fluffage here.

Of course, you can, without loss, make these in advance and keep them in fridge or freezer before reheating wrapped in foil in a 325°F oven, but nothing feels quite the same as making or eating blini hot from the pan.

If I had to choose a perfect, dream dessert, after the caviar and the roast chicken, it would have to be zabaglione. It’s not comfortable to make for any number larger than two.

Celestial though it is, it is not suitable for a seduction dinner. You don’t want to have to stand up and start whirring away at a double boiler on the stove for a quarter of an hour at the end of dinner. Those of us who don’t have such nervily romantic considerations to constrain us can plug ourselves into our electric mixers without embarrassment and for as long as it takes.

ZABAGLIONE

I use a stainless-steel, round-bottomed bowl that I suspend over (without touching) bubbling water in a saucepan, but a double boiler will be fine. If you haven’t got a hand-held electric beater, then just use a whisk; zabaglione does, after all, predate the invention of mixers, and I dare say it predates the discovery of electricity.

2 egg yolks

2 tablespoons superfine sugar

4 tablespoons Marsala

Put warm water in the bottom of a double boiler to heat, insert the top, and into it put the egg yolks and sugar. Start whisking them and continue whisking while the water heats up and starts to simmer. The egg mixture should become as thick as heavy cream and pale as butter; by the very end it should have tripled in volume. Continue whisking and slowly, slowly add the Marsala as you do so. When you have a soft, foaming, bulkily billowing mass—in short, when you have zabaglione—you can stop whisking and spoon into a couple of glasses. This may be after a good quarter-hour’s pneumatic whisking. Langue de chat are the cookies to serve with it or, failing that, savoiardi.

Serves 2.

COMFORT FOOD

BREAD AND MILK

If you’ve got that lust for something soft and sweet, for babyfied comfort food, you might as well go flat out for it. Eating alone, I make what I remember my mother making for herself, bread and milk, in a large, cream china pudding basin. Put some torn-up pieces of white bread in a bowl, sprinkle over some sugar, and then pour in some hot milk. Eat, in an armchair, bowl on lap. If you keep vanilla sugar in the house, use that, but fiddle no further; this is not a dish that lends itself to great refinements.

BAKED SEMOLINA

For all the fashionable enthusiasm for polenta, one related product tends to be snubbed, if not forgotten: semolina. With its comforting wheaty taste, its ability to warm and fill, it deserves to be better known. I like to heat the semolina with vanilla and milk, adding sugar after it’s thick and grainy and set, and dollop in jam once it’s in the bowl.