Home cooking Read online

  To my sister, Leslie Friedman

  (a great cook),

  and to Juris and Rosa

  (great eaters)

  This edition

  dedicated to the

  Memory of Bill Whitehead,

  colleague and friend

  Bitter Greens 109

  Soup 114

  English Food 119

  Without Salt 125

  Stuffing: A Confession 130

  Flank Steak: The Neglected Cut 134

  Kitchen Horrors 138

  About Salad 143

  Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir 147

  Chicken Salad 153

  Easy Cooking for Exhausted People 158

  How to Give a Party 162

  Hov^ to Make Gingerbread 169

  Stuffed Breast of Veal: A Bad Idea 174

  Black Cake 178

  Index 185

  FOREWORD

  Unless you live alone in a cave or hermitage, cooking and eating are social activities: even hermit monks have one communal meal a month. The sharing of food is the basis

  of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.

  No one who cooks cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers. In my kitchen 1 rely on Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, the numerous contributors to The Charleston Receipts, and Margaret Costa (author of an English book entitled The Four Seasons Cookery Book).

  One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends. People who like to cook like to talk about food. Plain old cooks (as opposed to the geniuses in fancy restaurants) tend to be friendly. After all, without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.

  For their inspiration and companionship, past and present, I would like to thank the following people with and for whom 1 have cooked, who have fed me delicious meals, and with whom I have talked endlessly about cooking, and whose recipes and menus I have shamelessly cribbed all these years.

  Ann Arensberg, the ultimate home cook and menu planner without peer; Juliet Annan, a brilliant and fearless cook who knows that next to eating, the best thing is talking about eating; Frances Taliaferro whose every meal includes the major food groups plus brownies; Jeannette Kossuth who blends new age with Old Hungarian; Linda Faulhaber, a secret cook and great eater; Jeannie Heifetz, a bold experimenter, and Cinda Graham, both of whom will test-drive a recipe for a pal; Rob Wynne, artist and food genius whose meals are like birthday parties; Bonnie Maslin who proves that it is possible to be a great kosher cook; Willa Gelber and Rennis Garner, two generous caterers who share recipes; Alice Quinn who unites the elegant with the old-fashioned and will always make a popover for a friend; Carole Shookoff, friend, grammarian and cook; and my mother-in-law, Elza Jurjevics, a peerless baker. And, most of all, my mother, Estelle Colwin Snellenberg, who taught me and my sister all we know about good food, and how to make it look beautiful.

  Thanks to Judith Jones, the true godmother of this book; Gail Zweigenthal of Gourmet magazine; Jane Biberman of Inside magazine; Liz Logan of 7 Days; and last of all, to Victoria Wilson, the Escoffier of editors.

  HOME COOKING: AN INTRODUCTION

  Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home. This may be caused by laziness, anxiety or xeno- 1 phobia, and in the days when my friends were happily

  traveling to Bolivia and Nepal, 1 was ashamed to admit that what I liked best was hanging around the house.

  I am probably not much fun as a traveler, either. My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone's house and hang out, poking into their cupboards if they will let me. One summer I spent some time in a farmhouse on the island of Minorca. This was my idea of bliss: a vacation at home (even if it wasn't my home). I could wake up in the morning, make the coffee and wander outside to pick apricots for breakfast. I could wander around the markets figuring out that night's dinner. In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses. I explain this by reminding my friends that, as I was taught in Introduction to Anthropology, it is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

  dinner party I ever went to was a black-tie affair to celebrate a book, catered by the author's sister. When we sat down in our long dresses and tuxedos, my heart failed. What sort of fancy something or other were we going to get? I remembered the sad story told to me by a colleague who went to a white-tie dinner and received, for the main course, one half of a flounder fillet. When the food appeared at this party I could scarcely contain my delight. It was home food! The most delicious kind: a savory beef stew with olives and buttered noodles, a plain green salad with a wonderful dressing, and some runny cheese and chocolate mousse for dessert. Heaven!

  When people enter the kitchen, they often drag their childhood in with them. I was brought up on English children's books, in which teatime and cottage life play an important role. These formed my earliest idea of comfort: a tea table in a cozy cottage. As an adult I have reinforced these childhood notions by reading English cookbooks as if they were novels and rereading such classics as Consuming Passions by Philippa Pullar, An Englishman's Food by Drummond and Wilbraham, as well as Food in England and Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley.

  The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people. Since I am a writer by profession, it was inevitable that I would be inclined to write about food. Now that these essays have been collected into a book I feel it is only fair to explain a few biases.

  This book abounds in recipes for chicken. Nowadays, almost everyone I know has either given up red meat or restricts it severely. Furthermore, 1 began to cook for myself at a time when beef prices skyrocketed and people on tiny salaries simply ceased to think about it. But chicken was and still is cheap.

  I myself prefer an organic chicken. They are not easy to find, but they are worth looking for. Organic eggs from free-range chickens really and truly do taste better than anything you will find in the supermarket. These are available at health food stores and farmers' markets. These days most people have cut

  down on eggs, but the few eggs you do eat ought to taste like eggs. As far as meat is concerned, if you have a source for organic beef or veal, go for it. Not only is it tastier (and frequently leaner), but you also do not have to worry about feeding anabolic steroids to friends and loved ones.

  It is a depressing fact of life that we must now be so vigilant about what we eat. Not a day goes by that we are not told that something else is bad for us: butter, coffee, chocolate, tap water, wheat. When my daughter was a toddler and beginning to drink large quantities of apple juice, I (and the rest of the mothers in this country) learned that the apple crop was universally sprayed, year after year, with a known carcinogen and mutagen. Thereafter I began to order apple juice by the case from Walnut Acres, an organic farm in Penns Creek, Pennsylvania. 1 also routinely order organic applesauce, preservative-free yeast, and a remarkable organic bread flour. I have also invested in a high-tech water filter that removes just about everything (including fluoride—but this is not much of a problem since most children will eat toothpaste as if it were candy) from your water and makes it taste as if it came from a mountain spring.

  We live in an age of convenience foods and household appliances. We do not have to slaughter pigs, pluck chickens, or make soap and candles. We do not hand-wash clothes. Machines often wash our dishes for us—and still ev
eryone complains that they hardly have any time. The American family, we are told, is falling apart. It does not dine: it grazes from snack to snack.

  I have no idea whether or not the American family is falling apart. I do know that many people still like to cook for their family, but that when they rush home after a day at the office they may not have a lot of time and energy to spend on cooking.

  I am no superwoman, but I like to cook and I am lucky that I work at home. On the other hand, while I like a nice meal, I do not want to be made a nervous wreck in the process of producing one. I like dishes that are easy, savory, and frequently cook themselves (or cook quickly). I like to feel a little more ambitious

  on a weekend, when I have time to cook without too much interruption.

  I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato. But there are things it is worth spending money on. These are the accessories of cooking, the culinary equivalent of the beautiful handbag or wonderful shoes that make everything else look better. Sweet butter and really good olive oil are worth the money. So are high-quality vinegar (my own favorite is sherry wine vinegar from Spain), sea salt, fresh pepper and fresh herbs. For everyday use I like raw sugar, which tastes like sugar to me and not like some supersweet chemical. At holiday time I like to spring for a few fancy things—a little smoked salmon, some fancy biscuits or chocolate pastilles.

  These essays were written at a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that many of our fellow citizens are going hungry in the streets of our richest cities, it is impossible to write about food and not think about that.

  I hope that those who are lucky to be well fed will find this book useful in feeding family and friends.

  Laurie Colwin New York City, 1987

  STARTING OUT IN THE KITCHEN

  Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing and I some learn from books.

  The best way to feel at ease in the kitchen is to learn at someone's knee. Years ago a child (usually a girl) would learn from her parent (usually her mother) by standing on a chair next to the stove and watching intently, or by wandering into the kitchen and begging to help. I was once given an amazing lunch by a young woman whose mother had been unable to boil water but was quite able to employ expensive Chinese help. Everyone should have the good fortune either to be Chinese or to be rich. Either way, you can end up learning how to make homemade won tons and duck stuffed with cherries and fresh lichee nuts.

  For those who come to cooking late in life—by this I mean after the age of eighteen—many are the pitfalls in store. For instance, if you ask an experienced cook what dish is foolproof, scrambled eggs is often the answer. But the way toward perfect scrambled eggs is full of lumps, it is no easy thing to make perfect scrambled eggs, although almost anyone can turn out

  fairly decent ones, and with a little work, really disgusting ones can be provided.

  I was once romantically aligned with a young man who I now realize was crazy, but at the time he seemed . . . romantic. It was on the subject of scrambled eggs that I began to have my first suspicions. He claimed his scrambled eggs resembled one of those asbestos mats you put over the burner to diffuse the flame. I asked him what his method of making them was.

  "Well," he said, 'i mash them together—^you know what I mean—and then I add whatever spice is around."

  I asked him what was usually around. Mace, he said, and ground thyme. He produced two very old-looking tins. I did not understand why a person would want to have mace in his eggs or ground thyme, which tastes like a kind of bitter, powdered sawdust and is not good for anything unless you need weird green powder for a prop. Well, then what? I wanted to know.

  "I heat up a little vegetable oil in a pan and go and take a shower. When I come back, I put in the eggs and then 1 go and shave. By the time I'm finished shaving, they're done."

  This should have been enough to make me flee, but love, aside from being blind, is also often deaf.

  The loveliest scrambled eggs I have ever had were given to me by a not crazy young man, an Englishman who insisted that scrambled eggs should be made in a double boiler. The result is a cross between a scrambled egg and a savory custard, and if you happen to have about forty minutes of free time some day it is certainly worth the effort.

  You scramble the eggs and add a tablespoon of cream. You then put a lump of butter into the top of a double boiler and when it melts, add the eggs. Stir constantly, remembering to have your blood cholesterol checked at the soonest possible moment. Stir as in boiled custard until you feel either that your arm is going to fall off or that you are going to start to scream uncontrollably. It is wise to have someone you adore talking to in the kitchen while you make these eggs, or to be listening to something very compelling on the radio. If you have truly mas-

  tered the art of keeping a telephone under your chin without its falling to the floor, a telephone visit always makes the time go faster.

  The resulting eggs are satiny and creamy and do not need anything at all, although if your palate is jaded, these eggs can be made with cheese. I would recommend this dish, known to me as English Scrambled Eggs (although no one else 1 have ever met in England has ever heard of them), only to supervised beginners.

  Or take beef stew, that favorite of Brownie and Girl Scout leaders for cooking projects. People are always messing it up, mostly men. A good cook 1 know was given something really awful by a fellow. It was stew all right, but the meat had the texture of jerky. She was curious and, after almost breaking a tooth, asked how he had achieved this strange leatherlike substance.

  "The recipe said to saute until brown," said the fellow. "So I did."

  "And how long did you do it for?" she asked.

  "Oh, an hour or so," he replied.

  My own husband confessed to me that he was flummoxed by the instruction "Add liquid to cover." The result was a kind of gray water—rather like the gray-green, greasy Limpopo River in "The Elephant's Child" by Rudyard Kipling.

  So much for the idea that if you can read you can cook.

  Let's say you have never cooked a thing in your life but have made the mad, foolhardy gesture of inviting someone to dinner. Many years ago I worked with a girl whose fiance did not know that she was unable to cook. They had a very proper courtship— separate apartments, theater dates and so on. Once a week he came for dinner and she could be heard on the telephone confabulating with a place called Casserole Kitchen, or Casserole Cottage, which sent over a homely-looking something or other and you sent back the empty pot. Years later I read her marriage announcement in the Times and wondered if Casse-

  role Bungalow was still around or if she had learned to cook. More interesting, had she ever confessed to her husband?

  Of course now that there is a fancy takeout shop on every corner, not knowing how to cook is no longer so problematic. My cousin's wife, a hardworking and elegant person, claimed for years that she did not apply heat to food, but she knew how to shop and, what is more, she knew where. Brunch at my cousin's is the only meal 1 have ever had at which everyone gets as much smoked salmon as they want.

  My cousin's wife is an interesting case in point. She is an Italophile and decided that since she ought to learn to cook, Italian food was what she wanted to learn. She started rather simply with a combination of cooking and shopping. That is, she would apply heat to one dish and buy the rest. Little by little she has expanded her repertoire and it is now possible to get an amazingly good four-course dinner at her house.

  One of her first attempts was lasagna, something notoriously difficult to concoct. Hers was a success, but she was in a state of nerves, which gives backbone to my theory that novices go for the elaborate.

  The novice cook goes to the kitchen armed with a chinoise and a copy of Edwardian Glamour Cooking Without Tears in order to produce a lobster bisque made of pounded lobster shells, or invites a loved one for a dinner that begi
ns with seviche and ends with a fruit souffle.

  The fact is, those nice simple things—a grilled steak or lamb chops, boiled potatoes, and steamed string beans—are quite formidable enough. The steak is either raw or grilled into shoe leather. The potatoes turn out crunchy in the center, never a good thing in a boiled potato, or mushy. The string beans are either underdone or they are overdone and have turned a limp olive green.

  So what is the novice, quivering with anxiety and expecting some nice person to turn up hungry in a number of hours, to do? The novice should try some fairly easy dish that requires long cooking. The novice should consult several recipes and

  read them over a few times until he or she has gotten the parts straight in his or her mind. And the novice should call up the best cook he or she knows and listen to what that person says. And then the novice should stick to it.

  I had a friend whose experience in the kitchen centered around opening cans of Irish potatoes and putting a hamburger into a pan while the frozen French-cut string beans were boiling. She got engaged to a very sociable fellow who liked to entertain, and she needed a party dish. I gave her my tried and true recipe for chili (which I got from the best cook 1 know) and explained every detail carefully. This is why a friend beats a cookbook hands down: you can't cross-examine a cookbook.

  The day after the dinner party she called to say that the chili was kind of weird.

  'Weird?" I said. "How could it be weird?"

  "Well," she said, "as I was putting it together this guy called. He lives in Nebraska and I used to go out with him. He told me that he always put some cinnamon and turmeric in his chili, so 1 did."

  My lessons in cooking came from my mother, a wonderful cook who makes, among other things, a savory, never-fail straightforward beef stew. As you gather courage, after cooking it a dozen times, you can begin to experiment and refine your technique. In no time at all you will be making true daube cooked between two sheets of pork rind with a calf's foot thrown in, but that is for later. This is for now.