EXTREMELY EASY OLD-FASHIONED BEEF STEW
serves 2-3 with leftovers
7 cup white flour
2V2 pounds stewing beef, cut in cubes
2 tablespoons paprika
black pepper
V4 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, cfiopped
2 carrots, scraped and cut in chunks
2 onions, quartered
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 medium Idaho potatoes, peeled or unpeeled,
cut in chunks
1 cup red wine
1 4-ounce can tomato sauce
2 tablespoons tomato paste
L For two people I suggest two and a half pounds of stewing beef, which will provide leftovers. Have the butcher cut the beef into cubes. After a while you will do this yourself to get the exact size you want.
2. Put flour into a paper bag with paprika and three or four twists of the pepper grinder. Shake gently. Beef stew does not require salt.
3. Put half the cubes in the bag, shake, remove with your hands or a slotted spoon, and then add the rest and shake.
4. Heat olive oil in a skillet, turn down the flame, and fry the meat gently until the flour begins to turn color. It does not have to be evenly done. The true purpose of this is to add color and depth to the sauce.
5. Put half the meat into a deep casserole and sprinkle with half of the chopped garlic. Add one carrot, one onion quartered
(one quarter stuck with two cloves of minced garlic), and one medium Idaho potato. Add the rest of the browned meat, another carrot, onion, potato and remaining chopped garlic.
6. Into the skillet pour wine, stir in tomato sauce and tomato paste. Cook down, stirring all the time (about four minutes), take off the fire and pour over the meat.
7. Cover the casserole and cook at 300"" for at least three hours. You can put this in the oven and go about your business. Cook for the last fifteen minutes with the cover off
You serve this with noodles, for which you follow the directions on the package. You can serve these noodles with butter, or with olive oil, or with grated cheese and chopped scallion.
As to the rest of the meal, it is simply too draining for a first-timer to provide everything. A salad requires only a bunch of watercress, some oil and vinegar, salt and pepper. If you have your heart set on baking a cake, invite friends in for dessert only and forget dinner. Step by step is the motto here.
And as every cook knows, and every cook was once a novice of some sort or another, you can always experiment on yourself and your loved ones.
Keep in mind that you should always apologize and never explain and that if the ultimate in horror takes place, there is one sure remedy.
Once upon a time some old friends of my husband's came for dinner. 1 had never met these people, and 1 had also never cooked those dry, filled tortellini you find in packages in Italian food shops. I have come to realize that these are meant for soup—or they ought to be—but I cooked a large pot of them and we all sat down.
It is a strange feeling to have pasta first crunch and then stick to your teeth, no matter how nice the sauce is. My husband and I exchanged glances. His friends, it was clear, had smoked a considerable amount of marijuana before coming to us, but even they noticed that something was funny.
HOME COOKING
"Hey," said one of these friends, "wouldn't it be groovy if we could dump this whatever-it-is in the garbage and go out for dinner?"
So that is what we did. If all else fails, eat out, and while you are smiling through your tears, remember that novices usually make the same terrible mistake only once.
THE LOW-TECH PERSON'S BATTERIE DE CUISINE
HOW depressing it is to open a cookbook whose first chapter is devoted to equipment. You look around your kitchen. No chinoisel No flan ring! No salamander! How
are you ever going to get anything cooked? What sort of a person is it who doesn't own a food mill?
I have been daunted for years by my lack of equipment. One summer in a rented country house 1 had a flirtation with my landlady's food processor and vowed to marry one when I got home. Why, it pureed the soup! It shredded the carrots in two seconds! How had I ever lived without one? Winter came and found me in my own kitchen pushing the cooked vegetables through an old strainer and grating the carrots with one of those cylindrical tin graters with patches for shredding, grating and slicing. As ever, next to the contraption is the box of Band-Aids, since it is impossible not to grate your knuckles as well.
Instead of a food processor, 1 have a couple of knives, the grater, and a blender that has four speeds (all the same, as far as I can tell). Until I went to a tag sale and found a food mill for
three dollars, the kitchen strainer and the wooden pestle were all I had to help me puree the soup or the vegetables.
Until, at another tag sale, I bought a hand-held electric beater for fifty cents (thirteen years ago—bought secondhand and still going strong), what egg whites or cream was whipped by me got done with a whisk in an extremely heavy and uncomfortable copper pot. The copper pot is now a decoration, but I have retained the whisk. Every home should have one. For making lump-free polenta, cream of wheat or grits, there is nothing like it.
I do not have a toaster or a juicer. Three toasters have died on me and now I toast under the broiler. I do not have a cutlet bat, a pastry pin or a pastry bag. I wish I had a mandoline, but I do not. Instead I have my knives and the knuckle-scraping grater, which makes fine scalloped potatoes. I do not have a frying basket, a charlotte moid, a stockpot, a fish poacher or a terrine. I will never have a microwave oven because 1 believe they are dangerous, and totally unnecessary unless you are running a fast-food operation or, like one of my cousins, you are amused by watching eggs explode.
On the other hand, I have a number of mixing bowls, and since I have so little in the way of equipment, I have lots of room for them. I have come to believe that with a few wooden spoons and rubber spatulas (I have three) many things are possible.
Most things are frills—few are essential. It is perfectly possible to cook well with very little. Most of the world cooks over fire without any gadgets at all.
Here then, for people just starting out, is a list of what I consider essentials. It is wise to keep in mind that pots and pans are like sweaters: you may have lots of them, but you find yourself using two or three over and over again.
■ Two knives—one small, one large. The small cuts the vegetables, slices and pares. The large can be used to slice bread or carve the turkey or chop, as in a cleaver. These knives should be
of carbon steel. Stainless steel is hopeless: it never takes a proper edge. There is no point whatsoever in a serrated knife which, in my experience, does not cut bread well. In fact, there is no point at all in anything that does only one job.
■ Two wooden spoons—a long-handled one and a short-handled one.
■ Two rubber spatulas. One wide, one narrow. These last only a couple of years and then the rubber heads fall off.
■ A decent pair of kitchen shears, which can also be used for sewing, cutting the flowers and opening parcels.
■ Two frying pans, one small, one large. The small is for cooking two eggs, a child's lunch, a toasted cheese sandwich. The big one is for big jobs—pancakes, chicken breasts and so on. An omelet pan is a wonderful thing to have, but a large frying pan can always be used instead.
■ Two cutting boards, one large, one small. The large is self-explanatory. The small is for mincing a clove of garlic, chopping a few sprigs of parsley or slicing one egg.
■ Two roasting pans. A big one for the turkey and a medium-sized one, preferably earthenware, which holds and distributes heat better for baking eggplant parmigiana, or roasting a chicken. Such a pan can double as a gratin.
■ Two soup kettles, one four-quart, one ten. Mine are white enamel over steel and come from the local hardware store. They have many uses: making soup, steaming vegetables, cooking spaghetti.
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�� A heavy-lidded casserole, enamel over cast iron or earthenware, for stews and daubes and chili.
■ A pair of cheap tongs—no kitchen is complete without them. For picking up asparagus or other vegetables, for pulling the stuck spaghetti from the bottom of the pot, for grabbing cookies that have fallen off the sheet in the oven. Tongs can easily be unbent to form one long arm with which to retrieve things that
you have accidentally kicked under the stove, and then they can be bent back into tongs again.
■ One all-purpose grater.
■ One little bitty grater, the size of a fly swatter, for grating a little cheese for the pasta, garlic, ginger or egg.
■ Mixing bowls. As far as 1 am concerned, the more the better, but three in a nest—small, medium and large—^will do.
■ A sharp-pronged fork. This has endless uses and if it is good-looking enough it can be used to serve fried chicken.
Of course there are special interests that must be catered to. I own something called a chicken fryer—a large, straight-sided skillet with a domed top. I use it twice a year to fry chicken, and while it takes up space, it is the right tool for the job. I am also thinking of investing in a lemon zester, since my family is crazy about madeleines and the grater doesn't get enough zest off. My sister cannot live without her wok, a wonderfully versatile implement that I have never cozied up to.
As to baking, which requires a great deal of specific equipment, my motto is: never buy anything except at a tag sale. The tag, house or garage sale is the low-tech cook's happy hunting ground. People are constantly getting rid of bundt pans and springforms and bread tins. While it is true that you can always bake a meat loaf in a bread pan, a bundt pan is useful generally for making a bundt cake. My brioche mold cost two dollars and I have never paid more than fifty cents for a cake tin. A person might easily get along with a baking sheet, a muffin pan and a cake tin, but things get quickly out of hand when you start baking and one day you realize that you have acquired a tart ring, a couple of pudding basins and a madeleine pan and are hankering for a pizza tile.
But the world is full of people being ingenious. Most people have never heard of a savarin or a turk's head mold. I myself once cooked spaghetti in a champagne bucket, and while it is always nice to have a useful thing that does the job handily, it is
a fact that you can do anything a food processor can do and do it even during a power failure.
Certain things are totally useless (a matter entirely of personal taste): the electric knife, the garlic press, the electric pasta machine, the pastry blender.
For those who own nothing but one knife and one pot, here is the ultimate one-pot meal, taught to me by a working mother.
SAUTEED VEGETABLES AND POACHED EGG IN ONE POT
for 1 person
/ small green zucchini sliced
1 small yellow zucchini sliced
8 snow peas cut in thirds
1 small onion, sliced
butter
minced garlic, to taste
black pepper
1 or 2 eggs
7. Take the vegetables (the above combination, or whatever you like) and gently saute them in butter with garlic. The idea is not to fry them but to get them tender. They should be partially covered to let out a little of their own juice.
2. Take the cover off, grind on some black pepper, push the vegetables against the sides of the pot (or pan or skillet: anything will do) and melt a little more butter. Break in one or two eggs, depending on how hungry you are, and cover until the eggs are cooked. They will have partially poached in the butter and vegetable liquor.
3. If you are civilized, you can arrange the vegetables on a plate and put the egg on top. If you are not, you can eat it right
out of the pot. If you want some grated cfieese, you can scrape it with your knife.
While you are eating this satisfying dinner (perhaps with your sharp little kitchen fork), you can reflect that the common kitchen knife can reduce nuts to powder, mince meat as well as any grinder with less mess, as well as shred the cabbage for cole slaw. Always keep these points in mind:
■ If someone happens to give you one of those slicers that slices hard cheese, it can always be used as a spatula.
■ A double boiler is a handy thing to have but you will use its two separate parts more often than you will use it as a double boiler. A makeshift double boiler can easily be rigged up out of two pots.
■ A coffee grinder will grind nuts and spices and can be easily cleaned with a damp cloth.
■ In a pinch, you can always use a wine bottle as a rolling pin.
ALONE IN THE KITCHEN WITH AN EGGPLANT
For eight years I lived in a one-room apartment a little larger than the Columbia Encyclopedia. It is lucky I never met Wilt Chamberlain because if 1 had invited him
in for coffee he would have been unable to spread his arms in my room, which was roughly seven by twenty.
1 had enough space for a twin-sized bed, a very small night table, and a desk. This desk, which I use to this day, was meant for a child of, say, eleven. At the foot of my bed was a low table that would have been a coffee table in a normal apartment. In mine it served as a lamp stand, and beneath it was a basket containing my sheets and towels. Next to a small fireplace, which had an excellent draw, was a wicker armchair and an ungainly wicker footstool which often served as a table of sorts.
Instead of a kitchen, this minute apartment featured a metal counter. Underneath was a refrigerator the size of a child's playhouse. On top was what I called the stove but which was only two electric burners—in short, a hot plate.
Many people found this place charming, at least for five
minutes or so. Many thought I must be insane to live in so small a space, but I loved my apartment and found it the coziest place on earth, it was on a small street in Greenwich Village and looked out over a mews of shabby little houses, in the center courtyard of which was a catalpa tree. The ceiling was fairly high—a good thing since a low one would have made my apartment feel like the inside of a box of animal crackers.
My cupboard shelves were so narrow that I had to stand my dinner plates on end. Naturally, there being no kitchen, there was no kitchen sink. I did the dishes in a plastic pan in the bathtub and set the dish drainer over the toilet.
Of course there was no space for anything like a dining room table, something quite unnecessary as there was no dining room. When I was alone I ate at my desk, or on a tray in bed. When company came 1 opened a folding card table with a cigarette burn in its leatherette top. This object was stored in a slot between my countertop and my extremely small closet. Primitive as my kitchen arrangements were, 1 had company for dinner fairly often.
I moved in one cool summer day when I was twenty-three. That night I made dinner for two college friends who were known as the Alices since they were both named Alice and were best friends. I remember our meal in detail. A young man had given me a fondue pot as a moving-in present. These implements, whose real function was to sit unused on a top shelf collecting furry coats of dust, were commonly given as wedding and housewarming presents in the sixties and are still available at garage sales of the eighties. They were made of stainless steel and sat on a three-legged base at the bottom of which was a ring to hold a can of Sterno. Along with the pot came four long-handled forks, two of which I have to this day. (They are extremely useful for spearing string beans and for piercing things that have fallen onto the floor of your oven.) The fellow who gave it to me was fond of a place called Le Chalet Suisse, where I had once enjoyed beef fondue. I felt it would be nice to replicate this dish for my friends.
I served three sauces, two of which I made: one was tomato based and the other was a kind of vinaigrette. The third was bearnaise in a jar from the local delicatessen. I bought sirloin from the butcher and cubed it myself. When my two friends came, I lit the can of Sterno and we waited for the oil to heat.
While we waited we ate up all the bread and butter. One of the
Alices began to eat the bearnaise sauce with a spoon. The other Alice suggested we go out for dinner. Once in a while we would dip a steak cube into the oil to see what happened. At first we pulled out oil-covered steak. After a while, the steak turned faintly gray. Finally, 1 turned one of my burners on high and put the pot on the burner to get it started. Thereafter we watched with interest as our steak cubes sizzled madly and turned into little lumps of rubbery coal. Finally, I sauteed the remaining steak in a frying pan. We dumped the sauces on top and gobbled everything up. Then we went to the local bar for hamburgers and French fries.
It took me a while to get the hang of two burners. Meanwhile, my mother gave me a toaster oven, thinking this would ensure me a proper breakfast. My breakfast, however, was bacon and egg on a buttered roll from an underground cafeteria at the Madison Avenue side of the Fifth Avenue stop of the E train. My toaster oven was put to far more interesting use.
1 began with toasted cheese, that staple of starving people who live in garrets. Toasted cheese is still one of my favorite foods and 1 brought home all sorts of cheese to toast. Then, after six months of the same dinner, 1 turned to lamb chops. A number of fat fires transpired, none serious enough to call the fire department. I then noticed after a while that my toaster oven was beginning to emit a funny burnt rubber smell when I plugged it in. This, 1 felt, was not a good sign and so I put it out on the street. With the departure of my toaster oven, I was thrown back, so to speak, on my two burners.
Two-burner cooking is somewhat limiting, although I was constantly reading or being read to about amazing stove-top feats: people who rigged up gizmos on the order of a potato baker and baked bread in it, or a thing that suspended live coals over a pot so the tops of things could be browned, but I was not brave enough to try these innovations.
Instead, I learned how to make soup. I ate countless pots of lentil, white bean and black bean soup. I tried neck bones and ham hocks and veal marrow bones and bacon rinds. I made thousands of omelets and pans of my mother's special tomatoes and eggs. I made stewed chicken and vegetable stew. I made bowls of pickled cabbage—green cabbage, dark sesame oil, salt, ginger and lemon juice. If people came over in the afternoon, I made cucumber sandwiches with anchovy butter.
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