The Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. These stylish, entertaining little books explore the whole spectrum of life – from birth to death, and everything in between. Which means there’s something here for everyone, whatever your story.

vintageminis.co.uk

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781473548497

Version 1.0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

VINTAGE

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Extracts from How To Eat copyright © Nigella Lawson 1998

Extracts from Kitchen copyright © Nigella Lawson 2010

Nigella Lawson has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

How To Eat was first published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 1998

Kitchen was first published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 2010

This edition published by Vintage in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Eating

NIGELLA LAWSON

Preface

COOKING IS NOT about just joining the dots, following one recipe slavishly and then moving on to the next. It’s about developing an understanding of food, a sense of assurance in the kitchen, about the simple desire to make yourself something to eat. And in cooking, as in writing, you must please yourself to please others. Strangely it can take enormous confidence to trust your own palate, follow your own instincts. Without habit, which itself is just trial and error, this can be harder than following the most elaborate of recipes. But it’s what works, what’s important.

There is a reason why this volume is called Eating rather than Cooking. It’s a simple one: although it’s possible to love eating without being able to cook, I don’t believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating. Such love, of course, is not something which can be taught, but it can be conveyed – and maybe that’s the point. In writing this book, I wanted to make food and my slavering passion for it the starting point; indeed for me it was the starting point. I have nothing to declare but my greed.

The French, who’ve lost something of their culinary confidence in recent years, remain solid on this front. Some years ago in France, in response to the gastronomic apathy and consequent lowering of standards nationally – what is known as la crise – Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, initiated la semaine du goût. He set up a body expressly to go into schools and other institutions not to teach anyone how to cook, but how to eat. This group might take with it a perfect baguette, an exquisite cheese, some local speciality cooked comme il faut, some fruit and vegetables grown properly and picked when ripe, in the belief that if the pupils, if people generally, tasted what was good, what was right, they would respect these traditions; by eating good food, they would want to cook it. And so the cycle continues.

I suppose you could say that we, over here, have had our own unofficial version of this. Our gastronomic awakening – or however, and with whatever degree of irony, you want to describe it – has been to a huge extent restaurant-led. It is, you might argue, by tasting food that we have become interested in cooking it. I do not necessarily disparage the influence of the restaurant: I spent twelve years as a restaurant critic, after all. But restaurant food and home food are not the same thing. Or, more accurately, eating in restaurants is not the same thing as eating at home. Which is not to say, of course, that you can’t borrow from restaurant menus and adapt their chefs’ recipes – and I do. This leads me to the other reason this book is about How to Eat.

I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater. I cook what I want to eat – within limits. I have a job – another job, that is, as an ordinary working journalist – and two children, one of whom was born during the writing of this book. And during the book’s gestation, I would sometimes plan to cook some wonderful something or other, then work out a recipe, apply myself in anticipatory fantasy to it, write out the shopping list, plan the dinner – and then find that when it came down to it I just didn’t have the energy. Anything that was too hard, too fiddly, filled me with dread and panic or, even if attempted, didn’t work or was unreasonably demanding, has not found its way in here. And the recipes I do include have all been cooked in what television people call Real Time: menus have been made with all their component parts, together; that way, I know whether the oven settings correspond, whether you’ll have enough hob space, how to make the timings work and how not to have a nervous breakdown about it. I wanted food that can be made and eaten in a real life, not in perfect, isolated laboratory conditions.

Much of this is touched upon throughout the book, but I want to make it clear, here and now, that you need to acquire your own individual sense of what food is about, rather than just a vast collection of recipes.

What I am not talking about, however, is strenuous originality. The innovative in cooking all too often turns out to be inedible. The great Modernist dictum, Make It New, is not a helpful precept in the kitchen. ‘Too often,’ wrote the great society hostess and arch foodwriter Ruth Lowinsky, as early as 1935, ‘the inexperienced think that if food is odd it must be a success. An indifferently roasted leg of mutton is not transformed by a sauce of hot raspberry jam, nor a plate of watery consommé improved by the addition of three glacé cherries.’ With food, authenticity is not the same thing as originality; indeed they are often at odds. So while much is my own here – insofar as anything can be – many of the recipes included are derived from other writers. From the outset I wanted this book to be, in part, an anthology of the food I love eating and a way of paying my respects to the foodwriters I’ve loved reading. Throughout I’ve wanted, on principle as well as to show my gratitude, to credit honestly wherever appropriate, but I certainly wish to signal my thanks here as well. And if at any time a recipe has found its way onto these pages without having its source properly documented, I assure you and the putative unnamed originator that this is due to ignorance rather than villainy.

But if I question the tyranny of the recipe, that isn’t to say I take a cavalier attitude. A recipe has to work. Even the great abstract painters have first to learn figure drawing. If many of my recipes seem to stretch out for a daunting number of pages, it is because brevity is no guarantee of simplicity. The easiest way to learn how to cook is by watching; and bearing that in mind I have tried more to talk you through a recipe than bark out instructions. As much as possible, I have wanted to make you feel that I’m there with you, in the kitchen, as you cook. The book that follows is the conversation we might be having.

Basics etc.

THE GREAT CULINARY Renaissance we hear so much about has done many things – given us extra virgin olive oil, better restaurants and gastroporn – but it hasn’t taught us how to cook.

Of course standards have improved. Better ingredients are available to us now, and more people know about them. Food and cookery have become more than respectable: they are fashionable. But the renaissance of British cookery, as it was relentlessly tagged in the late 1980s, started in the restaurant and filtered its way into the home. This is the wrong way round. Cooking is best learned at your own stove: you learn by watching and by doing. Chefs themselves know this. The great chefs of France and Italy learn about food at home: what they do later, in the restaurants that make them famous, is use what they have learnt. They build on it, they start elaborating. They take home cooking to the restaurant, not the restaurant school of cookery to the home. Inverting the process is like learning a vocabulary without any grammar. The analogy is pertinent. In years as a restaurant critic, I couldn’t help noticing that however fine the menu, some chefs, for all that they seem to have mastered the idiom, have no authentic language of their own. We are at risk, here, of becoming a land of culinary mimics. There are some things you just cannot learn from a professional chef. I am not talking of home economics – the rules that govern what food does when you apply heat or introduce air or whatever – but of home cooking, and of how experience builds organically. For there is more to cooking than being able to put on a good show. Of course there are advantages in an increased awareness of and enthusiasm for food, but the danger is that it excites an appetite for new recipes, new ingredients: follow a recipe once and then – on to the next. Cooking isn’t like that. The point about real-life cooking is that your proficiency grows exponentially. You cook something once, then again, and again. Each time you add something different (leftovers from the fridge, whatever might be in the kitchen or in season) and what you end up with differs also.

You can learn how to cook fancy food from the colour supplements, but you need the basics. And anyway, it is better to be able to roast a chicken than to be a dab hand with focaccia. I would be exhausted if the cooking I did every day was recipe-index food. I don’t want to cook like that all the time, and I certainly don’t want to eat like that.

Nor do I want to go back to some notional golden age of nursery food. I wasn’t brought up on shepherd’s pie and bread-and-butter pudding and I’m not going to start living on them now. It is interesting, though, that these homely foods have not been revived in our homes – they have been rediscovered by restaurants. And, even if I don’t wish to eat this sort of thing all the time, isn’t it more appropriate to learn how to cook it at home than to have to go to a restaurant to eat it?

By invoking the basics I certainly don’t mean to evoke a grim, puritanical self-sufficiency, with austere recipes for home-made bread and stern admonishments against buying any form of food ready cooked. I have no wish to go on a crusade. I doubt I will ever become someone who habitually bakes her own bread – after all, shopping for good food is just as much of a pleasure as cooking it can be. But there is something between grinding your own flour and cooking only for special occasions. Cooking has become too much of a device by which to impress people rather than simply to feed them pleasurably.

IN LITERATURE, TEACHERS talk about key texts: they exist, too, in cooking. That’s what I mean by basics.

Everyone’s list of basics is, of course, different. Your idea of home cooking, your whole experience of eating, colours your sense of what foods should be included in the culinary canon. Cooking, indeed, is not so very different from literature: what you have read previously shapes how you read now. And so we eat; and so we cook.

If I don’t include your nostalgic favourite in this chapter, you may find a recipe for it in How to Eat. And it is impossible to write a list without being painfully aware of what has been missed out: cooking is not an exclusive art, whatever its grander exponents might lead you to think. Being familiar with making certain dishes – so familiar that you don’t need to look in a book to make them (and much of this chapter should eventually make itself redundant) – doesn’t preclude you from cooking other things.

So what are basic dishes? Everyone has to know how to roast chicken, pork, beef, game, lamb: what to do with slabs of meat. This is not abstruse knowledge, but general information so basic that many books don’t bother to mention it. I am often telephoned by friends at whose houses I have eaten something more elaborate than I would ever cook, to be asked how long their leg of lamb needs to be in the oven and at what temperature.

The key texts constitute the framework of your repertoire: stews, roasts, white sauce, mayonnaise, stocks, soups. You might also think of tackling pastry.

Because the English don’t any longer have a firmly based culinary tradition – and, even at its solid best, English cookery never had anything like the range and variation of, say, regional French cooking – we tend to lack an enduring respect for particular dishes. It’s not so much that we hunger to eat whatever is fashionable as that we drop anything that is no longer of the moment. The tendency is not exclusively English – if you were to go to a grand dinner party in France or Italy, you might be served whatever was considered the culinary dernier cri – but what makes our behaviour more emphatic, more ultimately sterile, is that we don’t seem to cook any food other than style-conscious dinner-party food.

I think it is true, too, that we are quick to despise what once we looked at so breathlessly in colour supplements and delicatessens. Just because a food is no longer flavour of the month, it shouldn’t follow that it is evermore to be spoken of as a shameful aberration. It is important always to judge honestly and independently. This can be harder than it sounds. Fashion has a curious but compelling urgency. Even those of us who feel we are free of fashion’s diktats are, despite ourselves, influenced by them. As what is seemingly desirable changes, so our eye changes. It doesn’t have to be wholesale conversion for this effect to take place: we just begin to look at things differently.

Of course, fashion may lead us to excesses. It is easy to ascribe the one-time popularity of nouvelle cuisine – which fashion decrees we must now treat as hootingly risible – to just such an excess. And to some extent that would be correct. But what some people forget is that the most ludicrous excesses of nouvelle cuisine were not follies committed by its most talented exponents but by the second and third rank. It is important to distinguish between what is fashionable and good and what is fashionable and bad.

With food it should be easier to maintain your integrity: you must, after all, always know whether you enjoy the taste of something or not. And in cooking as in eating, you just have to let your real likes and desires guide you.

MY LIST OF basics – and the recipes that constitute it – are dotted throughout this book. The list is eclectic. And in this chapter I have tried, in the main, to stay with the sort of food most of us anyway presume we can cook; it’s only when we get started that we realise we need to look something up, check times, remind ourselves of the quantities. I want to satisfy those very basic demands without in any way wishing to make you feel as if there were some actual list of recipes which you needed to master before acquiring some notional and wholly goal-oriented culinary expertise. My aim is not to promote notions of uniformity or consistency – or even to imply that either might be desirable – but to suggest a way of cooking which isn’t simply notching up recipes. In short, cooking in context.

First, you have to know how to do certain things, things that years ago it was taken for granted would be learned at home. These are ordinary kitchen skills, such as how to make pastry or a white sauce.

I learned some of these things with my mother in the kitchen when I was a child, but not all of them. So I understand the fearfulness that grips you just as you anticipate rolling out some shortcrust, say. We ate no puddings at home, my mother didn’t bake and nor did my grandmothers. I didn’t acquire early in life that lazy confidence, that instinct. When I cook a stew I have a sense, automatically, of whether I want to use red or white wine, of what will happen if I add anchovies or bacon. But when I bake I feel I lack that instinct, though I hope I am beginning to acquire it.

And of course I have faltered, made mistakes, cooked disasters. I know what it’s like to panic in the kitchen, to feel flustered by a recipe which lists too many ingredients or takes for granted too much expertise or dexterity.

I don’t think the answer, though, is to avoid anything that seems, on first view, complicated or involves elaborate procedures. That just makes you feel more fearful. But what is extraordinarily liberating is trying something – say, pastry – and finding out that, left quietly to your own devices, you can actually do it. What once seemed an arcane skill becomes second nature. It does happen.

And how it happens is by repetition. If you haven’t made pastry before, follow the recipe for shortcrust here. Make a flan. Don’t leave it too long to make another one. Or a pie or a savoury tart. The point is to get used gradually to cooking something in the ordinary run of things. I concede that it might mean having to make more of a conscious effort in the beginning, but the time and concentration needed will recede naturally, and the effort will soon cease altogether to be conscious. It will just become part of what you do.

Basic roast chicken

You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to?