Home cooking

by Laurie Colwin

  My particular favorite is curried flank steak, for which you must make your own curry: the powdered kind simply will not do. You can balance the following ingredients to suit yourself: turmeric, paprika, ginger, cumin, dry mustard, a little ground clove and cinnamon. Add olive oil, a drop of soy sauce and mix to a thick sludge. Anoint the flank steak with this delicious paste, stud with garlic and let it sit. You can either marinate this all day long, or for an hour before cooking.

  When you have grilled and sliced it, add the meat juices to the cooking pan and pour over the meat.

  1 also like to use a dry, very peppery marinade of crushed red pepper, black pepper, thyme, a pinch of ground clove and a half teaspoon of dark brown sugar. Rub this on the meat, stud with garlic and let it sit. Naturally, the garlic is removed before grilling.

  Now let us pretend you served flank steak for a dinner party of four people and there are a few slices left over. If you come from the sort of family that finds steak on toast for breakfast disgusting (I come from a family that finds cold steak on toast delightful), you will be able to have cold beef and lentil salad for dinner. Shred, slice or dice the flank steak and dress it with olive oil, pepper, whatever pan juices were left over and some

  wine vinegar. Cook a cup of lentils in the usual way, drain, cool and dress with olive oil, garlic, scallions, pepper (or some minced, fresh hot pepper) and vinegar. Combine the lentils and the beef and serve with watercress.

  In my house, however, any leftover flank steak is gone by lunchtime. I am fortunate that 1 am married to a man who finds leftovers for breakfast repellent: 1 don't have anyone to fight. As children, my sister and 1 fought bitterly over any cold meat that happened to be lying around. A cold steak sandwich is sort of disgusting, but it is also sort of wonderful:

  /. Toast two slices of whole-wheat bread

  2. Let the bread cool and then generously spread with sweet butter (this is a recipe for people whose cholesterol is too low).

  3. Tenderly lay on one layer of sliced flank steak, making sure to include the juices.

  4. Add salt and pepper to taste, and enjoy it with a large cup of coffee.

  KITCHEN HORRORS

  Awful things happen in the kitchen all the time, even to the most experienced cooks, but when they happen to you it is not comforting to know that you are supposed

  to learn from your mistakes, especially when you contemplate the lurid-looking mess in front of you.

  I myself have never made a spinach pie, and therefore I have never had the thrilling opportunity to see one catch on fire. Therefore I have never watched my husband place his large, wet hiking boot on top of my flaming puff pastry to keep it from burning down the house, but this did happen to a friend. More mundane things happen to me: half the cake sticks in the bundt pan. The pudding won't unmold from the pudding mold, and when it does, half of it is melted.

  A really first-rate disaster passes into legend. My sister and I have never forgotten the salmon loaf our mother, an excellent cook, made when we were little. By mistake, she reached for the cayenne pepper instead of the paprika. 1 was six, my sister was ten and we remember it as if it were yesterday.

  My husband recalls a dinner party he attempted to give as a

  young man around town. The beef stew turned into an ocean of gray juice in which tiny, hard cubes of overcooked meat floated. The dessert was to be crepes but when he removed the batter from the refrigerator, something had gone terribly amiss. The batter had turned into cinder block, and the wooden spoon he had left in it was stuck. Later it turned out that he had used potato starch instead of flour. These things happen.

  My own greatest disasters have been the result of inexperience, overreaching, intimidation and self-absorption.

  As a blithe young thing I became quite hipped on a dish called rosti—a Swiss way of frying shredded potatoes in an enormous quantity of butter. I had been introduced to this dish by an English boyfriend, who loved to entertain. One night he invited six people for dinner and I thought it would be a swell idea to make rosti.

  Alone in my beloved's kitchen, 1 began to shred the potatoes into a big bowl. By the time my arm began to get sore, I noticed that the potatoes had taken on a pinkish tinge, but 1 pressed on. A few minutes later, I looked to see how many more potatoes I needed and observed that a sickly green was now the predominant shade. A few minutes later, my heartthrob appeared.

  "Good gracious," he said. "What's this funny black stuff?"

  There was no doubt about it. That funny black stuff was my potatoes. Into the garbage they went, and to this day I am still a little phobic about potatoes: rosti for two, potato pancakes for four is my motto.

  In the middle period of my kitchen disasters, by which time I had done a lot of cooking and knew my way around the kitchen, I decided to entrap the man I would later marry by baking a red snapper, the only fish he liked. Misguided by passion, I decided I would stuff this fish with sliced grapes, small shrimp and fermented black beans. I had never stuffed a fish before, let alone baked one. I had no idea what I was doing. In fact, 1 must have been out of my mind. I had no recipe to guide me, but does love need a recipe? Does inspiration require instructions?

  It is hard to describe the result, which was put back into the

  oven many times before it dried out and became inedible. Many were my maidenly blushes as I said: "Well, the inside still looks a little underdone, but I'll just pop it back in the oven for a minute." I might have said this fifteen times.

  When it finally emerged from the oven, this fish looked like Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell, with little nasty-looking things spilling out into a pallid-looking puddle of undercooked fish juices.

  Years later, I entertained a newly married friend. This friend had married a goddess and lived in the country. I of course was a slob and lived in the city. The goddess had built their post-and-beam house with her own two hands, raised chickens, milked cows and was a veterinarian as well. On the side she was a glassblower. She had built her own studio. All the glassware, jugs, pitchers and vases in their house were made by her. Of course she baked her own bread, raised her own vegetables and made her own clothes, although she didn't yet know how to spin. At that news 1 heaved a sigh of relief.

  As the burden of this woman's accomplishments was being piled ever higher on my lowly shoulders, I cooked dinner. Baked chicken, hominy in cream, steamed string beans. By the time I heard about the glassblowing, I was whipping up some butterscotch brownies for dessert.

  It was the first meal 1 have ever cooked of which there was not enough. I don't mean that my husband and our friend polished everything off because it was so delicious. They polished everything off because there was so little to polish, and there were no seconds. My butterscotch brownies would compensate, I thought. They were cooling in their pan on a rack, and when I went to cut them, I knew that something awful had happened.

  I did not think that substituting Demerara sugar for white sugar would make much of a difference, but the knife wouldn't seem to penetrate. When I finally sawed through to the bottom, I realized that the sugar had settled to the bottom and solidified. Oh, well, I thought. It will be like Scotch tablet, that delicious confection of butter and sugar.

  But those butterscotch brownies were not like Scotch tablet. They were like cooked sugar that had turned into firebrick. From this experience I learned that you should never be in the kitchen with anyone married to a perfect person.

  My greatest horror, however, was a culinary triumph, in my opinion. In my opinion are the crucial words.

  I had been invited to the country for Easter. At the same time an English friend had sent me a packet of suet. With this I intended to make something called Suffolk Pond Pudding from Jane Grigson's wonderful book English Food.

  Suffolk Pond Pudding, although something of a curiosity, sounded perfectly splendid. First, you line a pudding basin with suet crust. Then you cut butter mixed with sugar into small pieces. Next you take an entire lemon and prick it all over w
ith a fork. Then you stick the lemon on top of the butter and sugar, surround it with more butter and sugar, stick a pastry lid on the top, tie it up in a pudding cloth and steam in a kettle for four hours. It never occurred to me that nobody might want to eat it.

  I followed every step carefully. My suet crust was masterful. When unwrapped from its cloth, the crust was a beautiful, deep honey color. I turned it out onto an ornamental plate.

  My hostess looked confused. "It looks like a baked hat," she said.

  "It looks like the Alien," said my future husband.

  "Never mind," I said. "It will be the most delicious thing you ever tasted."

  The pudding was brought to the table. My host and hostess, my future husband and a woman guest looked at it suspiciously. I cut the pudding. As Jane Grigson had promised, out ran a lemon-scented buttery toffee. I sliced up the lemon, which was soft and buttery too. Each person was to get some crust, a slice of lemon and some sauce.

  What a hit! I thought. Exactly the sort of thing I adored. I looked around me happily, and my happiness turned to ash.

  My host said: "This tastes like lemon-flavored bacon fat."

  "I'm sure it's wonderful," said my hostess. "I mean, in England."

  HOME COOKING

  The woman guest said: "This is awful."

  My future husband remained silent, not a good sign. 1 had promised him a swell dessert and here was this weird, inedible sludge from outer space. The others ate ice cream. I ate almost the entire pudding myself.

  I have had a number of small horrors since then, mostly involving pie crust, something I haven't quite gotten the hang of. One of my pies fell apart. One was so odd-looking my husband took a picture of it, and one had the texture and resilience of old parchment.

  Now that 1 am more accomplished I feel that I am in a position to gauge my kitchen disasters and choose them carefully. For my next I am either going to make Circassian chicken (poached chicken blanketed with a walnut puree) or a chocolate jelly roll which my sister assures me is a snap to make. I have never cooked either of these things before, but instinct tells me that the possibilities for something going terribly wrong in either case are endless.

  ABOUT SALAD

  A salad is an abused, neglected thing. Everyone laughs when the waiter in Ninotchka says to Greta Garbo, who has ordered a plate of chopped greens: "Madame, this is

  a restaurant, not a meadow."

  In some restaurants these days, the meadow is thrown in without much thought, or given away free, as if to unload it.

  The hapless diner may be confronted by a small, fake wooden bowl containing the chopped carcasses of what were once edible plants, usually the unfairly treated romaine, with some depressed red cabbage that has turned blue, dribbled with lurid orange-colored dressing and polka-dotted by a woolly or woody radish. Often a dispirited cherry tomato sits aloft.

  Or else a plate appears bearing what resembles a bleached wedge. It is a wedge, of almost frozen iceberg lettuce. Or one may meander over to a salad bar and festoon a pile of wilted greens with fake bacon bits, marinated mushrooms, tuna fish, olives, pickled beets, chopped egg, chick peas, canned artichoke hearts and red peppers. This pile is then held together

  with a kind of thinned library paste studded with crumbs of blue cheese.

  No matter how elaborate or simple, the salad is a source of controversy. When to eat it? In the East, after the main course, in the West, before.

  Some people feel strongly that salad should be dressed, tossed and served, while others put the dressing in a sauce boat and let each person dress his own.

  As for dressing, purists hold that oil, vinegar, salt and pepper— the classic dressing—should never be tampered with in any way. More laid-back types might add dill, or Parmesan cheese, or hot sauce, angostura bitters, lemon juice or mustard. And there are even those who cling to the belief that all dressing must contain a teaspoon of sugar. Others shriek at the very idea.

  True extremists, in retaliation against the tendency to drown a salad in dressing, bring to the table a large platter of naked watercress.

  Then there are composed salads about which entire books have been written and are believed by some not to be salads at all. They contain meat and fish and cheese. These salads are complicated.

  The basic point of a salad, as every schoolchild ought to know, is that it is green, quick and easy to fix.

  For example, it is lunchtime and you are starving. You are about to make the one bunch of arugula, that most sophisticated of salad greens, into a little salad lunch for yourself when the telephone rings. A starving pal and her baby are going to drop by to visit you and your baby and one bunch of arugula will not feed two. Because invention is the necessity of mothers, you may remember the dish of cold brussels sprouts in the fridge and the jar of walnuts in the pantry. Tossed with a good dressing, these three elements produce a very tasty salad.

  Extreme hunger recently propelled me toward this last-minute composition: cold steamed broccoli di rape, avocado, lentil sprouts and watercress. Lentil sprouts, available in health food stores, are crispy and nutlike, while avocado is buttery and

  smooth. Broccoli di rape is pungent and slightly bitter and watercress has a peppery snap. Together these elements behave rather like the instruments in a string quartet. With the addition of some hard-boiled egg or a little sliced potato, this salad is a meal.

  The combinations are endless, especially in summer. In winter, when good lettuce is hard to find, the salad lover can always turn to cold cooked greens: collard with ginger dressing, kale with mustard and garlic, escarole with oil and pepper. Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good.

  If you are sick of tossed salad, get it to lie down and serve it flat. The flat salad makes a good appetizer or first course. This is a salad that is beautifully placed. It is not necessary to have gone to Japanese flower arranging classes—all you need is a sharp knife and a nice plate. Paper-thin slices of cucumber, drizzled with garlic dressing and sprinkled with chopped dill, is about as simple a salad as you can get. The slices can be arranged in a circle and wreathed with watercress or those Japanese radish sprouts that are hot enough to bring tears to your eyes.

  In the summer, the platter of tomatoes, sliced mozzarella and onion is actually a flat salad and so is a plate of potato, cucumber and tomato with vinaigrette.

  These salads are good for you—low in calories, high in fiber and vitamins—besides being easy and cheap. But what about a salad that is expensive, complicated to fix and bad for you? This salad exists and it is served in the kind of very expensive, old-fashioned restaurant that makes you feel secure and safe while you are there. It is called Salade Gourmande and after you have finished it, instead of feeling light and springy, you feel liverish and heavy, as if your pockets were stuffed with large sums of money.

  It is composed of the tenderest inner leaves of Bibb lettuce, tiny cubes of pate de foie gras and lobster meat. The dressing is primarily French olive oil and the merest drop of vinegar. Here

  HOME COOKING

  is a salad loaded with cholesterol and fat. It is high on the food chain. It makes you feel guilty for spending a small fortune on a salad.

  One New Year's Eve I attempted to feed it to friends. Cutting pate de foie gras into tiny cubes is a job that makes you gnash your teeth. Buying the cooked lobster meat (a whole lobster is a waste) makes your side hurt as you pay for it. And it takes a lot of Bibb lettuces to provide enough tiny inner leaves.

  But never mind—it is worth the half a month's rent it costs.

  1

  REPULSIVE DINNERS: A MEMOIR

  There is something triumphant about a really disgusting meal. It lingers in the memory with a lurid glow, just as something exalted is remembered with a kind of mellow

  brilliance. I am not thinking of kitchen disasters—chewy pasta, burnt brownies, curdled sauces: these can happen to anyone. I am thinking about m
eals that are positively loathsome from soup to nuts, although one is not usually fortunate enough to get either soup or nuts.

  Bad food abounds in restaurants, but somehow a bad meal in a restaurant and a bad home-cooked meal are not the same: after all, the restaurant did not invite you to dinner.

  My mother believes that people who can't cook should rely on filet mignon and boiled potatoes with parsley, and that they should be on excellent terms with an expensive bakery. But if everyone did that, there would be fewer horrible meals and the rich, complicated tapestry that is the human experience would be the poorer for it.

  My life has been much enriched by ghastly meals, two of the awfullest of which took place in London. I am a great champion

  of English food, but what I was given at these dinners was neither English nor food so far as I could tell.

  Once upon a time my old friend Richard Davies took me to a dinner party in Shepherd's Bush, a seedy part of town, at the flat of one of his oldest friends.

  "What is he like?" I asked.

  "He's a genius," Richard said. "He has vast powers of abstract thought." I did not think this was a good sign.

  "How nice," I said. "Can he cook?"

  "I don't know," Richard said. "In all these years, I've never had a meal at his house. He's a Scot, and they're very mean."

  When the English say "mean," they mean "cheap."

  Our host met us at the door. He was a glum, geniusy-looking person and he led us into a large, bare room with a table set for six. There were no smells or sounds of anything being cooked. Two other guests sat in chairs, looking as if they wished there were an hors d'oeuvre. There was none.

  "I don't think there will be enough to go around," our host said, as if we were responsible for being so many. Usually, this is not the sort of thing a guest likes to hear but in the end we were grateful that it turned out to be true.

  We drank some fairly crummy wine, and then when we were practically gnawing on each other's arms, we were led to the table. The host placed a rather small casserole in the center. We peered at it hopefully. The host lifted the lid. "No peeking," he said.