How to Eat (47 page)

Traditionalists will insist on a sturdy pie or crumble for dessert, but really, after all that carbohydrate, have you got room? I am immensely greedy, but I don’t like that invasive and uncomfortable feeling of bloatedness that can make you regret eating much more than a hangover can ever make you regret drinking.

Now that we seem to be able to get blueberries all the year round, I often serve them with a large, shallow bowl of Barbados cream. This—yogurt and heavy cream stirred together, fudgy brown sugar sprinkled on top—has the advantage of having to be done the day before (see
page 117
). I love lemon ice cream after this (and it’s good with blueberries, or indeed any berries, too) and I sometimes make one that doesn’t need fiddling about with while freezing—you just stash it in the freezer (see
page 254
). Nothing is quite as good as proper ice cream, made with a custard base and then churned until solid, but home cooking is based on compromises, and a simple dessert is a compromise I am often grateful to make. You could consider a crumble (see
page 41
for a recipe and adjust quantities as necessary) if only because the crumble mixture can be made up earlier and just sprinkled on the fruit as you sit down, and cooked while you eat the beef. Remember, you are not trying to produce the definitive Sunday lunch to end all Sunday lunches. Nor are you a performance artist. The idea is to make a lunch that you want to eat and can imagine sitting down to do so without bursting into tears.

I’m sorry to sound bossy, but Sunday lunch, as I’ve said, has to be run like a military campaign. I find it easier to decide when I want to eat and then work backwards, writing every move down on a pad that I keep in a fixed place in the kitchen. This timetable is engineered toward having lunch ready to eat at 2
P.M.
exactly. I take it for granted that dessert’s been made already.

All quantities and timings have in mind a lunch for about 6 adults and perhaps some children and are based on having a 5-pound roast of any of the kinds mentioned above to cook.

TIMETABLE

11:20 Start gravy

11:30 Take beef out of fridge

11:50 Peel potatoes

12:05 Put the potatoes in their water in the pan, bring to the boil, and parboil. Preheat oven to 425°F.

12:15 Put roasting pan in oven with a knob of dripping or vegetable oil for beef

12:20 Put beef in oven

12:35 Prepare any vegetables that need chopping or cleaning, etc.

12:40 Put pan with dripping for potatoes in oven

12:50 Make Yorkshire pudding

1:00 Put potatoes in oven

1:25 Put vegetable water on to heat

1:35 Put pan with drippings for Yorkshire pudding in oven

1:40 Take out beef and put in Yorkshire pudding, turning oven up to 450°F as you do so. Let beef stand.

1:45 Cook vegetables

2:00 Take out Yorkshire pudding and potatoes

THE ROAST BEEF

I think many people underplay how much meat you need. For 6 people, I wouldn’t consider getting under 5 pounds—which, in other words, is about a pound per person. A roast is a sad prospect without the possibility of leftovers. For a rib you should add on about 2 pounds extra here.

For rare meat you can either cook the beef at 475°F for 15 minutes and then turn it down to 350°F and cook for about 15 minutes per pound, or cook at 425°F throughout for about 15 minutes per pound, which approach is what the timetable reflects. I usually do 15 minutes per pound and then add on an extra 5 minutes so that those who don’t like rare meat have a bit of slightly more cooked beef from the ends. Those who don’t like blood don’t have to get it; the rest of us gratifyingly do. Use a meat thermometer to determine doneness exactly. The internal temperature for rare beef is 120°F; for medium-rare, 125°–130°F; and for medium, 140°F.

All I do to the beef is massage it with dry mustard powder after I’ve taken it out of the fridge. I use a knob of dripping for the pan, but you could use whatever fat or oil you have at hand.

THE GRAVY

Gravy is one of my weaknesses, which is to say I find it hard to make a convincing light and thin juice. To overcome my deficiencies, I took to following Jane Grigson’s recipe for onion gravy (indeed, most of my Sunday is Grigson-based), adding a drop of Marsala to it. You don’t need to—you could use some Madeira or even some sweet sherry or just add a little bit more sugar—but the Marsala brings a wonderful aromatic muskiness to the gravy. If you don’t have any real beef stock, use bouillon cubes or the best beef stock you can buy. If you use a cube, dilute it well and taste before putting in salt.

You can start the gravy the day before if you want, just reheating and adding meat juices at the last minute.

1 tablespoon dripping or butter, plus a dribble of oil

1 medium onion, sliced very thinly

pinch brown sugar

2 tablespoons Marsala

1 teaspoon all-purpose flour

1¼ cup beef stock

Heat the dripping or melt the butter (with the oil to stop its burning) in a saucepan and cook the onion in it at a very low temperature, stirring often. When the onion is soft, add the sugar and Marsala and let it caramelize. Cover with foil, putting the foil as near to the bottom of the pan as possible, and continue to cook, still on a very low flame, for about 10 minutes. Then stir in the flour and cook, stirring, for about 2 minutes. Stir in the stock, bring to the boil (you can turn the heat up here), then reduce the heat to very low again and simmer gently for about 20 minutes. Purée in the food processor (or you can strain it, pushing the soft onion through the strainer). Pour back into the saucepan. At the last minute, reheat and add meat juices from roasting pan. This gravy is wonderfully stress-free, as you don’t have to be doing furious deglazing at the last minute.

THE ROAST POTATOES

I like roast potatoes fairly small, so I cut a medium-to-large one into about three pieces. For 6 people, I suppose, that’s about 4 pounds. Well, that may be overgenerous, but nothing is worse than too few.

Peel the potatoes and cut them into large chunks. Put them in cold salted water, bring to the boil, and parboil for 4–5 minutes. Drain, put back in the saucepan, put on the lid, and bang the whole thing about a bit so that the edges of the potatoes get blurred; the rough edges help them catch in the fat and so get crisp. Add 1 tablespoon or so of semolina and give the pan, with its lid on, another good shake. The semolina gives the potatoes a divinely sweet edge—not at all cloying or inappropriate, just an intensified caughtness, as it were. When my mother and aunts were young, they had an Italian au pair, Antonia, who, when required to make a British Sunday lunch (having never cooked anything other than Italian food), adopted, or rather invented, this practice. If you’re unconvinced, or don’t have any semolina at hand, just use flour and shake the warm potatoes around in it. The flour doesn’t give the same honey-toned depth as semolina, but it helps the potatoes catch and brown wonderfully.

Put 5–6 tablespoons fat or oil in a roasting pan that will hold the potatoes comfortably and transfer it to the oven to heat. I use tablespoon-sized lumps of goose fat or some truly superb beef dripping. If you can lay your hands on neither, of course you can use oil or even vegetable fat. The fat must be hot before the potatoes go in the pan, and they must not be taken out of the oven until you are absolutely ready to eat them. They will take approximately 1 hour to cook.

THE YORKSHIRE PUDDING

I always use Jane Grigson’s
English Food
for the Chinese Yorkshire pudding recipe, which is not as odd as it sounds. The story is that when a big competition was held in Leeds for the best Yorkshire pudding, the winner was a Chinese cook called Tin Sung Yang. For years it was held to have a mystery ingredient—tai luk sauce—until, Jane Grigson reports, a niece of hers found that this was a Chinese joke. Nevertheless, the recipe is different from normal—it works backwards. That’s to say, you mix the eggs and milk and then stir in the flour, rather than making a well in the flour and adding the eggs and milk, and it works triumphantly; it billows up into a gloriously copper crown of a cushion. I am able to cook this for the most die-hard, pudding-proud British northerners without inhibition or anxiety. I prefer Yorkshire pudding to be in one dish rather than in those depressing, cafeteria-style individual portions, so for this amount, I use an enamel dish about 12 by 7½ inches and 3 inches deep. Cook it on the top rack of the oven but make sure the rack isn’t too high up, as the Yorkshire pudding really does rise. I have had to prise it off the ceiling of the oven, which slightly dented its magnificence and my glory.

1¼ cups milk

4 eggs

scant ½ teaspoon salt

freshly milled black pepper

1½ cups all-purpose flour, sifted

1 tablespoon beef dripping or vegetable oil to taste

The oven should be heated to 450°F. Mix the milk, eggs, and salt, and add pepper, beating all well together. I use my freestanding mixer, the fabulous KitchenAid, but anything—hand-held electric mixer, rotary, or balloon whisk—would do. Let these ingredients stand for 15 minutes and then whisk in the flour. Meanwhile, add the dripping to the pan and put it in the oven to heat for about 10 minutes. Into this intensely hot pan you should pour the batter and cook for 20 minutes, or until well puffed and golden. Bring it, triumphant, to the table.

THE DESSERT

The recipe for Barbados cream is on
page 117
. Recipes for crumbles are on
pages 41
and 156; custard to go with is on
page 32
.

LEMON ICE CREAM

Years ago, when I bought my enormously expensive ice-cream maker, a friend of mine brought round her copy of Shona Crawford Poole’s
Iced Delights
for me to play with. Naturally, the recipe I fell upon was one that didn’t need an ice-cream maker. I include it here out of fondness—my sister Thomasina loved it and often made it herself.

It’s very quick and easy to make. Even though I have doubts about non-custard-based ices (they freeze very hard and then melt back into a runny creaminess, so you have to be very careful about ripening them in the fridge for a good 40 minutes before eating them, rather than letting them thaw in the kitchen and thus start dripping), it’s worth having this one under your belt, as it is good by itself and wonderful as an accompaniment to a tarte au citron (bought or made, but especially useful to zhuzz up a bought one), rhubarb pie, a plate of stewed rhubarb, wine-candied quinces (
page 329
), or any assortment of berries.

juice of 3 lemons, the zest of 2

1½ cups confectioners’ sugar

1¾ cups heavy cream

Pour the lemon juice into a bowl with the zest and sugar, stir to combine, and leave for 30 minutes, if you can, to let the flavor deepen.

Whip the cream with 3 tablespoons iced water until it holds soft peaks, then whisk in the sweetened lemon juice. Turn into a shallow container, cover, and freeze—no stirring, crystal-breaking-up, mixing, or anything needed—until firm, about 2 hours. Bear in mind my comments about thawing and melting, above, when you want to eat it.

LEMON MERINGUE ICE CREAM

This is an ice cream along much the same lines. I saw this recipe of Jane and Elizabeth Pelly’s in
The Women Chefs of Great Britain,
though I’ve changed it slightly here. The original version specified homemade meringues and homemade lemon curd, but I brazened it out with the bought stuff and suggest, for ease, that you do too. If you are using shop meringues and curd, you may have to add more lemon juice and zest or it will be too sweet. Taste to see; it needs an edge to it.

1¾ cups heavy cream

1 cup full-fat yogurt

1¼ cups lemon curd

juice and zest of 2 lemons

6 meringue nests (see headnote)

Whip the cream until fairly stiff and fold in the yogurt. Add the lemon curd, lemon juice and zest (you will find it easier to stir in the curd if you add the lemon juice to it first), and the meringues, broken up into small pieces, but not so small that they’ll dissolve into dust.

Put into a container—it should really be a shallow rather than tall one—and freeze. And that’s all there is to it. Ripen it in the fridge for 40 minutes before you want to eat it. You could dribble over it either some clear honey or some more lemon curd diluted to runniness with lemon juice.

A SUMMER LEMON MERINGUE PIE