Nourish Me

sardine gratin

Elizabeth David's anchovy gratin from Summer Cooking - a book I carry in my handbag all summer long - made with fresh butterflied sardine fillets in their (elusive) place is what I would eat for the rest of this summer if I could get my hands on them more easily. A simple, impressive dish to swoon over with its heatwave-friendly preparation time. It's fishy, but not over-poweringly so, coaxing out the best in an oily, tricky little fish that divides like few others. As with all Elizabeth David recipes attention to detail matters: the recipes are, generally, brief, but every word - every single comma - is chosen for its impact. The key is to prep the breadcrumbs early. The recipe below is hers, word for word, with my additions and thoughts added where appropriate. A stunner of a dish. 

Elizabeth David's sardine gratin

"Several hours before they are to be cooked prepare a cupful of [fresh] breadcrumbs mixed with a cupful of chopped parsley, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, salt, pepper and enough olive oil to moisten."

(With a garage full of garlic I upped it considerably and I'd recommend this heavy-handed approach. I also added a teaspoon of fennel seeds, some pine nuts, currants, and sliced green olives then doused the crumbs with white wine and lemon juice as well as oil, just to lighten the whole. The fennel seeds are, I think, essential but all else can be left by the wayside.)

"Arrange the boned [and butterflied] anchovies [sardines] in a shallow oiled fireproof dish. Put the breadcrumb mixture on the top, add more oil, and then cook them [for 30 mins] in a fairly hot oven."

(We criss-crossed anchovies over the sardines before scattering the crumbs and, served with freshly dug then boiled teeny tiny potatoes on the side, it was superb. Superb.)

 

 

a sorrel and lentil soup

A weekend of very good eating: a barley risotto, one made with the properly pearled stuff, stirred slowly while dancing (as best one can) to Van Morrison at the stovetop. Almost better the next day made into almond-crusted croquettes with quick-pickled radishes and steamed carrots on the side. Salads straight from the garden each lunchtime, and a tray of tiny jam tarts, some filled with the incredible lime curd that mum brought from her kitchen to mine, for afters.  

While mum and dad were here last week I cooked a dish not dissimilar to this, consequently ending up with too many lentils. Long ago I'd bookmarked a recipe from Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking, a soup of lentils, properly seasoned and made into a thin purée then simmered, for about 10 minutes, with a handful of finely chopped - not sliced - sorrel leaves. A spoonful of cream goes in just before serving, but I often think it optional with soup. There's something to be said, from time to time, for restraint. David says, "This is one of the best of the sorrel soups" and I couldn't agree more. Simple, restorative, and rather a nice, somewhat ascetic, beginning to the weekend.

elizabeth david

Years ago Cath told me how she'd devoured Elizabeth David one holiday and I remember thinking, later, how I longed to feel that way about a serious cook's cook, felt disappointed that I somehow hadn't quite got David, having started French Provincial Cooking on four separate occasions and put it back each time. It didn't speak a food language I was familiar with, but the seed of something, in that conversation, was sown. We agreed more David was needed on the shelves but never got around to ordering any. Good bookshops are like that. Busy busy.

These days David is totally my cup of tea, a beautiful writer full-stop, just the kind of food writing I crave. I particularly like that she's actually a bit of a nutter, a very scholarly one mind you, drawn to ranting about the impracticality of brightly coloured porcelain, making bold statements about taste, but with a definite, slightly nutty edge. Most super-smart folk are thus cut in my experience. That fine line between genius and mad.

Dreaming of warmer days, I ordered a copy of her 1955 classic Summer Cooking recently. This, from the chapter titled "Improvised Cooking For Holidays and Week-Ends", is pure E.D. gold:

The kitchens of holiday houses, whether cramped and larderless, or vast, bare, with a day's march between sink and stove, usually have a stony bleakness in common. However adequate the beds or satisfactory the view, the kitchen equipment will probably consist of a tin frying pan, a chipped enamel saucepan, one Pyrex casserole without a lid, and a rusty knife with a loose handle.       

She then goes on to suggest some surprisingly practical solutions. Highly recommended.  

the pear and the kitchen crock

"...Proust says, 'Chardin has taught us that a pear is as living as a woman, a kitchen crock as beautiful as an emerald.' Since Proust wrote these words painters and writers have revealed other beauties to us - they have made us see the poetry of factory canteens and metro stations, the romance of cog-wheels, iron girders, bombed buildings, dustbins and pylons. But in the excitement of discovering these wondrous things we shall be poorer if we don't give a thought now and again to the pear and the kitchen crock."  

Elizabeth David, writing for Vogue in 1960

Still doesn't make me want to actually read Proust, but I love this ED quote.

Agrodolce

Sunday. A hot afternoon to wade home through, too hot, surely, for this stage of December. Grab the bag (second off the carousel), heft it through the gathering crowd, ring Peter - we're still a little way off - and decide, instead, to take a taxi. Windows wound right down, air rushed into the back seat as we hurtled along the freeway, smacking against my forehead, blowing away the dull ache that had persisted all morning. Home. Ring the bell, a leaping terrier to placate - hi baby, did you miss me? - a kiss, then into the shower. Later, fireworks filled our ears and the sky, Chanukah celebrations in the park. We stood on our porch, watching with that giddy, giggly awe cracker night induced when I was small.

Felt good to be home.

Christmas is hot, hot, hot on our heels, something one cannot, however hard one tries, escape. Searching the aisles of a West Gosford supermarket for bottles of ginger beer, a non-alcoholic drink for my heavily-pregnant sister-in-law, a woman in black was screeching at her son, "Put that f--ken full-sugar coke back on the f--ken shelf. Ya caarn't have it 'cos of them f--kers that come at Christmas."

Charming. I'll bet their place on the 25th is a riot.

In my own polite, middle class, university-educated way, there's something of that very spirit creeping into my world, some sort of humbug, more meh- than banshee-style bah- perhaps, but a humbug of some variety for certain, and I felt that woman's pain. In a small way I'm looking forward to cooking for just Peter and I this year. A Christmas break without travel for once may do us both good.

But what to cook?

This has been quite a year; revealing, sometimes distressing, encouraging, creative, all of which is good. The learning curve that is life is just that; a curve, replete with ups and downs, highs and lows, but somewhere during our moves my once inexhaustible interest in cooking was misplaced. In fact, it turns out that the damned thing has upped and left, and I've been bereft of it for a solid three months now. Thinking about putting up one of those Lost Dog - Reward posters you often see taped to telegraph poles, a fringe of scissored, tearable slips with my telephone number below an image of, I dunno, maybe some perky bulbs of fennel? A bowl or two of ripe tomatoes perhaps?

Or maybe some zucchini. I found this recipe in Maggie Beer's Harvest a few weekends ago. Maggie got it from Elizabeth David's Italian Food, using verjuice (constantly flogging that stuff, our Maggie) for David's mixture of wine vinegar and sugar. This is about as adventurous as my cooking's been of late, but please don't let that put you off. It's wonderful, wonderful, quite unexpectedly so. Besides, we all need as many simple zucchini recipes as possible given it's practically Christmas already.

Summer, here we come.  

Agrodolce zucchini

Slice 4 or 5 small, crisp zucchini into thick rounds. Pour olive oil, 2 tablespoons should do it, into a wide frying pan and tip in the zucchini. Shuffle them around so as they sit in one layer as comfortably as possible, cover the pan and cook on a medium heat, untouched, for 5 minutes. Lift the lid, grate in a little cinnamon and add some pepper. Salt if you like, but try it without first and see. Dissolve 1 tablespoon of sugar with 3 tablespoons of cider vinegar in a small dish, up the heat beneath the pan and pour in the sweetened vinegar. Simmer - fast - until the sauce is syrupy, and serve at once.

I stirred through some torn basil leaves and roughly chopped green olives, but go nuts. Add anything or nothing. Seriously good.    

50 Best

Jo, fellow Guardian- AND list-lover, emailed me this morning with a link to The Observer Food Monthly's 50 best cookbooks list. Thank you. I love these sort of things, and the top 10 is, I think, interesting.

Thoughts:

There's very little Elizabeth David on the list, which I find curious given it has such a very british bent to it and only one (really?) Nigel Slater. Kitchen Diaries is, for me, the best food book ever published - beautiful words; beautiful to hold; beautiful, beautiful photographs by Jonathan Lovekin printed on (beautiful) matt paper. Farking gorgeous. Easily my number one. 

Pleased to see Madhur Jaffrey make an appearance. Her Eastern Vegetarian Cooking is one of the most useful books I own. I love the Book of Jewish Food (# 3) by Claudia Roden because she offers an eloquent, sephardic, way into understanding the culture of the blokes around me, and her shakshouka is why I'll be planting lots of peppers and tomatoes in the next garden. 

Deborah Madison's 'Greens' is there, but Local Flavors is, I reckon, better. The Savory Way has my all-time favourite dish of zucchini cooked with cloves, crushed basil leaves and fresh, early-summer organic cream. Simmered with new garlic and super fresh corn. Jesus, it's early summer on a plate, that dish.

Madison is the sexiest seasonal eating gets, especially if you have a garden. Olney, at # 1, means that we are living in an age of vegetable-loving and that's a very good thing in my opinion.

I love peasant food and always have.  

I remember unpacking Fushia Dunlop's Sichuan Cooking in the shop and thinking, this is a keeper. Too much pork for us, but it's still a keeper. Australian David Thompson's book Thai Food came in at # 7 and is, I think, a glaring omission from my own shelf but again, I wonder how useful it is to someone who cooks neither pork or shellfish? David Tanis - a true artist - deserves to be there, but as much for the stunning photographs by Christopher Hirschimer as Tanis' lovely words.

Next on my list? An original (g'ah) 1965 copy of Len Deighton's Action Cook Book is something I want very, very badly now, and that's what a good list offers, you see. My current reading includes Kingsley Amis' Everyday Drinking which I am enjoying immensely. What are you enjoying?

Harvest months

Slow to start, our beans became prolific during a cooler than expected February. Blue Lakes and Purple Kings were pushed, without much thought, into earthy, revamped beds of soil, straw and manure late in October, trussed (slightly clumsily) a month later and subsequently burnt to a crisp in our January holidaying absence. Some water, some love, a chat about pulling up their socks – keep calm and carry on - and back they came. Pods dangled heavily and seemingly grew overnight; picking beans each morning, barefoot in long grass, became late summer ritual.

Most days, we’ve had them dressed with oil and lemon - a simple side dish for a zucchini and tomato gratin or bowls of pasta or braised baby carrots or Peter’s stellar omelettes. The recipe that follows, earmarked last winter, was the single most useful recipe of summer, its minimal method belying its moreishness. 

There’s a school of thought that suggests that green beans, being fresh and snappy creatures, should remain so with only the very quickest of cooking times. Having never actually liked crisp beans, when Anna Del Conte pointed out that all beans need to be thoroughly cooked in order to be properly digested, I found myself nodding in agreement. Sensible advice. A green bean is simply the young, still-podded version of the dried ones that, as winter creeps in, you’ll soak and slowly coax to softness in soups and stews. A certain limpness is desirable.

 A recipe for the harvest months.

Elizabeth David’s French Bean Salad
One of those occasions when a rewrite - the re-wording of a recipe to comply with copyright rules - would betray the precision, elegance and simplicity that makes David’s recipe so perfect. Frankly, I cannot say it any better and won't even try. Besides, "Is There a Nutmeg in the House" is worth owning. Seek a copy out - Elizabeth David is as good as food writing gets.

Top and tail (and string if need be) your beans and, if yours are a not "bootlace thin", cut each in half through its middle, to make two shorter lengths.

“Allow 125g (4oz) beans per person. Cook them for not more than 7 minutes in boiling salted water. Drain them, and while still warm, mix them in a bowl with olive oil, lemon juice and more salt if necessary. Do not be tempted to add anything else. It is the simplicity of the seasoning and the fresh flavour of the beans which make the dish.”