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Kitchenella

THE SECRETS OF WOMEN:

HEROIC, SIMPLE, NURTURING COOKERY – FOR EVERYONE

ROSE PRINCE

Photographs by LAURA HYND

For my children

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Photographic Insert

Introduction

Quick, Cheap and Filling

Things that Please Children

Fast, Good-For-You Lunches and Suppers

A Slow-Cooked Pot

A Pot to Bake in the Oven

A Plate of Something Special

A Clever Rehash

Halfway to a Meal

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Photographic Insert

PLATE 1: White bean well-dressed soup

PLATE 2: Summer vegetable broth

PLATE 3: Chickpea and tomato ten-minute soup; Notepaper bread

PLATE 4: Spiced butter and yellow split peas; Instant soft flatbreads

PLATE 5: Macaroni cheese with sweet cooked tomato

PLATE 6: Braised chicken rice, steamed with allspice

PLATE 7: Apple tart — quick

PLATE 8: Birthday cake

PLATE 9: Warm tomatoes, oregano and feta cheese with fridge dough breads

PLATE 10: Top rump steak with tender herbs and warm olive oil sauce; Potato, garlic and cream gratin

PLATE 11: Léa’s leaves and fried bread, with a smoked-herring dressing; Jacqueline’s tomato and olive oil

PLATE 12: Crisp smoked bacon, polenta cubes, bittersweet chicory

PLATE 13: Pan-fried plaice with lettuce hearts and lemon

PLATE 14: Monkfish and bacon cakes; Caper and tarragon mayonnaise

PLATE 15: Eighty degrees beef

PLATE 16: Oxtail stew

PLATE 17: Young lamb shoulder, shrugged off the bone

PLATE 18: Pot-cooked spring chicken with young veg

PLATE 19: Argiano pork with herbs and garlic

PLATE 20: Mother’s aubergines

PLATE 21: Picnic pie

PLATE 22: Banana and almond cake

PLATE 23: Crepe-wrapped asparagus with grated cheese

PLATE 24: Raspberry clotted-cream fool, with honeycomb

PLATE 25: Wild garlic omelette, with chilli, cheese and ham

PLATE 26: Roast rabbit saddle, stuffed with liver and kidneys; Slow-cooked rabbit

PLATE 27: Potato, beef and parsley hash

PLATE 28: Toffee bread pudding

PLATE 29: Courgette, basil and egg soup

PLATE 30: Risotto

PLATE 31: Aunts’ pasta, with sweet cooked tomato and anchovy

PLATE 32: Onion tart

Introduction

My earliest memories are full of the voices of women, telling you things. Their kitchen secrets, handed down, were at the heart of good suppers. Whispered advice or stern warnings, they are still there in my head, impossible to rub out, simply because they are useful. I collect these morsels now. I can’t let something good pass by without asking ‘how?’ In all honesty, I cannot cook unless I tune in to that busy frequency of influence.

This is a book about feminine cookery, at its best heroic: generous, practical and nurturing. It is more than a bag of worthy survival tools (though it has a proven track record in that respect). Feminine cookery is creative. Nurture is a deal, an agreement that can be a real struggle to sustain. The heroic feminine cook, Kitchenella, transforms it into a gentle art.

For most, stepping into the kitchen raises one dilemma or another. It is rarely the leisurely activity unrealistically promoted in the media. Often the need to cook is just a matter of answering hunger with little time and limited ingredients: dinners made with whatever can be bought in a late-night shop on the way home from work. But the idea of a pan filled with a hot, bubbling lava of melting salty cheese and tomatoes, ready within minutes to eat with bread, dissolves the problem, leaving behind a work of beauty.

We eye our children and plan to please them, but how? On the one hand they are difficult customers who run up a lot of credit, on the other they are much loved people we spend far too little time with. We aim to choose food that avoids arguments, but encourages adventure: sweet cooked tomato, whizzed into a non-bitty sauce, to use in at least seven dishes, has become a fridge standby to bless. Gently-spiced rice with chicken is an everyday staple, the crispest roast potatoes or pancakes a treat. This is family food with a long history of clean plates.

Balancing the extravagance of a special roasting joint by making good use of every scrap; planning the week’s meals ahead or creating dishes that are filling, cheap, yet still gorgeous to behold – these are typical tasks faced by home cooks, and need a practical, unselfish approach. It is work that is often done – astonishingly – for little thanks.

This is not to suggest bringing back the martyred, Fifties kitchen deity, whisking up unmatchable sponges each day at teatime. Recipes for modern life need to be realistic, and flexible enough to fit into very busy lives, yet the answers still lie in the feminine approach to cookery. Only it is not there. Trends show a decline in cooking fresh ingredients from scratch, while the consumption of convenience food continues to rise. Since women remain the main carers of others, their voices are silent and secrets are not passed on. The result is a generation of kitchen orphans growing up without any sort of good food ancestry.

Meanwhile, our chief food influence comes from men. Chefs dominate television cookery shows yet their efforts do not appear to convert more viewers to take up cooking – in spite of the hype to the contrary. We witness them telling mothers how to feed their children then weeping when their pleading is ignored. Viewers admit that while they are entertained, ultimately they are put off, even frightened to cook.

Traits in male cookery, while often inspirational and – thanks to some extreme competitiveness – technically astounding, are not the ones best suited to the everyday job of feeding others in the home. The customary man enjoys being a general in the kitchen, running a brigade of assistants, hence their success in professional kitchens. There is a tendency to cook for show, often extravagantly, and with an expectation of applause for doing so (something a regular home cook learns never to anticipate).

Such characteristics are admittedly stereotypical, though still very recognisable. It is difficult to pin the gender argument on clichés, however. There is a marginal new wave of young men who cook keenly at home, and fathers that approach family food in ways that emulate great women cooks. Women are also perfectly capable of rejecting their nurturing instinct and instead borrow traditional, tough-talking male traits. With the genders impersonating each other, the picture gets very blurred.

The highly potent influence of food television fails to sort the problem out because broadcasters determinedly characterise women in cookery programmes either as pouting goddess or dependable headmistress, expecting obedience. Where are the real mothers, facing genuine predicaments and solving problems? Nurturing cookery is absent in television. It is a reality show too far, perhaps.

But the fate of home cooking was sealed long before many of our TV chefs were born. Feminism made cooking a symbol of a woman’s drudge, successfully and rightly, bringing to an end girls-only cookery classes in schools and empowering women to seek the same jobs and pay awarded to men. You couldn’t, they reasoned, do both. In truth, for the 70 per cent of women in work who have dependent children, having it all still means having to put supper on the table at the end of the day.

Not surprisingly then, an eager and efficient food industry has galloped to the aid of liberated women. The industry that grew up after feminism rode on cheap and convenient food, cooked by someone else. It once seemed a great model, the answer to the busy person’s prayers, until the environmental and health costs of fast food and ready meals was judged unsustainable.

But feminism does not mean having to drop femininity. When prominent feminist voice Germaine Greer made chicken stock one night for her fellow inmates in the Big Brother house, her practical, generous act said it all. Similarly, there is evidence that young women are rediscovering and celebrating unique feminine skills, learning to sew, knit and cook.

More and more people, men and women, now say they wish they could cook and want good food to be part of their life. It is a question of finding that ingredient that switches aspiration into reality and the most effective food education has always been the unwritten, hand-me-down knowledge given to children by their mothers.

If this knowledge is not already there, Kitchenella, the heroic, modest feminine cook is a workable surrogate. Useful good ideas can become easily lost. Unless passed on they float in the ether, the verbal tradition looking for a receptive ear. The pity is that ideas can disappear forever, because they are typically the notions of people who would never have thought to write them down.

By the time I left school, I knew what I was bad at, but I was aware that information about cooking, especially when it linked to something good, would always stick in my mind. I am not even sure how much of it got there, or when it began to fill my head. Food was important in my family, discussed often. Snippets, thoughts, exclamations of pleasure – clocked. A mistake: a burned pan, an overdone roast – registered.

This is a recipe book but it is also a book of answers and ideas, a conversation between people who share an interest in solving problems. Much of what is inside its covers has been learnt from others: people I love, writers I read and individuals I meet every day. Good food should naturally lead to a moment of chat, a chance to ask, ‘How did you do that?’ The opposite is silence. Listen carefully for Kitchenella’s voice, though. It is not the loudest. She won’t show off, but nor will she bully you. She just wants to leave her mark: indelible, delicious influence.

QUICK, CHEAP AND FILLING

White bean well-dressed soup

Tomato and mascarpone cream

Garden ‘essences’

Lettuce and courgette ‘butter’ soup

Toasted garlic bread and squash soup

Golden broth with parsley and pearl barley

Bean and pasta broth

Summer vegetable broth

Autumn vegetable ‘harvest’ soup with grains

Winter vegetable stew-soup

Watercress butter dumplings

Mushroom broth with sausage, oats and parsley

Leek and potato soup with cream

Green cabbage and pickled duck garbure

Chickpea and tomato ten-minute soup

Clam, cider and potato chowder

Coconut spiced soup with chicken

Flawless mashed potato

Boiled floury potatoes

Roughly mashed haddock and potato with spring onion

Mashed sweet potato with green chilli and coriander relish

Spiced butter and yellow split peas

Everyday mountain lentils

Instant polenta and grilled polenta, with variations

Is that the time? Time to cook – again? Keeping up a supply of food, among everything that needs doing every day, is a lot to ask anyone new to cooking. When you decide that good food matters, you enter a conflicting world. Loving food is bittersweet. A passion that is painful without guidance from someone who really knows how hard it can be. You need someone to say, ‘I know. I know what to do – it won’t be showy or hard to make. It is not the kind of supper that costs a lot or needs a trip to a special shop. It will not mean you have to grow your own, rear pigs or catch a mackerel on a line. But everyone will be full, and remember how good it was.’

These are the secrets of women for you to use every day when it is time to cook. Big, good dishes in one pot to get ready quickly: modest, nurturing, heroic food that solves a daily dilemma.

Reality, pitched against aspiration. That is the sum of my daily life. Of course I would like to bake cupcakes or cure hams all day, but the truth is that under the roof of my home, the daily summit of my cooking ambition is simply to provide enough good food for us to continue to exist. It is not that I do not make forays into more extreme areas of cookery – it is my job to do that – but the recipes I want are very different from those I need. My dilemma, shared by millions, is that I am short of time, I do not have unlimited funds to spend on food yet I – and everyone in my home – need real nourishment.

What can I make that is fast, economical and filling? This is the trinity of subsistence for most people in full-time employment, those who turn the key in the front door in the early evening aware that their day’s work is a long way from done. Not everyone feels this way. That is why ready meals were invented. Yes! Those things that taste good while watching a cookery show on telly!

Knowing how to make soups with delicate white beans, an ingredient that is rather wholesome yet seems so glamorous, so well dressed, when eaten with transparent splinters of crisp smoked bacon. Understanding how to cook a pan of faultless, smooth mashed potato, or make a dish of spiced pulses that tickles with interest. A lot of us want to do the right thing but not all of us have the tools to do it. There are many lost domestic skills, but while life will go on without darning the children’s socks every night, it is threatened by the loss of home cooking that uses fresh ingredients.

More bizarrely, this is not the result of there not being enough to eat. In the West, the loss of cooking skills does not cause starvation – but it is the root of serious ill-health epidemics. A few clever ways to feed ourselves, our families and friends with food that is cheap to buy, quick to make and fills the tummy with goodness would do much to change lives – and that is what this chapter is about.

The verbal tradition

I am a self-taught cook and I, too, have my disasters, some of them highly embarrassing. But I love to pick up secrets from others. There are people to meet in every part of this book whose knowledge I want to pass on to you. Some were women who have been very much part of my life, like my mother, a perfectionist with a great creative mind. Others are people I know, some well, some not, or those whose lives I have studied, like les mères, the working mother cooks of France who understood completely how to fit good food into a busy day.

Never be afraid, when someone serves you something good, to ask them how they did it. This is the verbal tradition: the passing on of information and secrets, so easily lost when the talking stops. It is the single most vital tool in retaining traditions of cookery and needs to be there with each jotted recipe, every cookery book, any time there is a pan on the cooker.

My mother

Being full is something I knew before anything else. As a small child, I remember our round tea table and its wicker chairs, the piles of sandwiches and toasted, buttered currant buns. I was my mother’s fourth child – she would eventually have six. Tall and blonde, my mother had her hair done weekly in the hairdressers at the end of the street: backcombed on top and curling down to her shoulders. I noticed her long nails were pale pink as she made our supper after school. She claimed not to have been able to cook a thing when she married, aged only 18, but she became a very good cook.

Her mother had lived in France since 1950, and with every visit the French commonsense way of eating must have bled into my mother’s attitude. She made creamy soups, melting gratins and beat her mustard-yellow mayonnaise by hand. She always peeled tomatoes by plunging them in hot water, then dressed them in real vinaigrette made with genuine Dijon mustard which sank deep into their flesh – and she made heavenly dauphinoise potatoes. She never cheated, but like a French housewife she saw nothing wrong in buying in a terrine or a tart when she did not want to cook. As children we probably smelled more garlicky than our school mates.

My mother was not one of those to make fairy cakes with. We never had hilarious squirting sessions with piping bags and hundreds-and-thousands. She did not ‘play at cooking’, but taught us to cook – and she could be a terrifying perfectionist. It was she who drove me to make sweet pastry so thin it was possible to shine a light through it. She was the person who came up behind me when I was peeling potatoes at the sink for the roast, and said, ‘I never cut them up that way, myself,’ with chilling authority. When we were teenagers, visiting friends would gasp at the achievements of my mother and her brigade of cooking daughters. I loved to cook but already, before I was grown up, I knew it was hard work. I think my home tuition went a little far and was overly obsessive – though useful for my career. For me, cooking has always been an exhausting passion, though I have now learned how to enjoy it and not be worn down by it.

At primary school age we had our fair share of fish fingers, baked beans and Heinz tomato soup, but more and more, as we got older, we ate ‘grown-up’ food at weekends. On one occasion my mother came back from shopping carrying a tray of soft raw bread dough, covered lightly with greaseproof paper. ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘I am going to make a pizza,’ she answered, unwrapping a pack of Danish ‘mozzarella’. It was the early 1970s. She was a long way ahead of her time.

Running out

As a family we were unusually preoccupied with food and there was at one point a definite fear of ‘running out’. Not due to poverty; financially we were privileged, though my mother knew how to be frugal, often cooking oxtail and tongue, and giving us an early introduction to dumplings, lentils and beans. At the time I hated the meals with pulses. Lentils especially, which tasted floury – I longed for potatoes. I adore lentils now.

My parents had divorced when I was three. We lived with my mother but spent half of our school holidays with my father. My mother remarried when I was six and we moved from London to north Buckinghamshire, about two hours’ drive from my father’s house.

My stepfather, Teddy, was a commodity broker who commuted daily to London by train, flamboyant ‘kipper’ tie around his neck. In the mid-1970s, just prior to the power cuts and three-day week, he predicted a food shortage. For several weeks we spent each Saturday at the cash and carry, picking up dry food supplies that would be taken down to the cellar of our house for storage. He bought whole butchered lambs from Wales and filled a chest freezer with them. I remember my mother making meat pies and stewing apple for crumbles and filling a second freezer. We installed a generator and bought a lot of candles, sacks of sugar and flour, Marmite, ketchup, even jars of sweets.

There was no food emergency after all. We ate from that cellar for years, even moving house later on with some of the ketchup and Marmite. But we had experienced something unusual and it has stayed with me. Witnessing my mother caught up in survival mode for those few months, however ultimately unnecessary, left its mark. What I saw (and my siblings are bound to accuse me of melodrama) would for a short period have been similar to that of a child observing their mother during food rationing in World War II, or even a degree of the desperation felt by the women just ahead of the French Revolution who could not feed their children. My stepfather had provided the means for obtaining food; my mother had set about cooking her way out of trouble.

Stuffed

After that we were always full – if anything, I was rather overfed. ‘Being stuffed,’ answered one of my sisters when I asked her for her earliest memory. And I became interested in cooking, imitating my mother, learning from her, helping her and eventually leaving home a reasonably competent cook. Being in a large family meant I learned to make heaps of food from very little. Filling food on a budget – and always, as my husband remarked with horror when we met – far, far too much of it.

None of this mattered for years. I did eventually learn to temper the size of my helpings and to waste less, though I admit to a deep-seated fear of an empty fridge or store cupboard. I hate the idea of running out. It seems vaguely paranoid, but now I am in a new phase of this. Here it is again: the sense that the food supply is once again threatened, this time not only because of politics but also global warming. The added dissatisfaction with the food industry has narrowed my choices with food and as a consequence our food bills are rising. Once again there is the need to use cooking, combined with good economics, to deal with a crisis. The battle has begun.

Money

Two strong arguments are always put forward by women who do not cook: time poverty and money – poverty itself, in fact. They feel these are powerful reasons why cooking has more or less stopped in their home and every meal is eaten out or is bought ready made. But time is a commodity that cooking does not eat up unless you want it to.

Most of the recipes in this chapter take between 20 and 40 minutes to prepare, an acceptable period of time for a hungry person to wait and not much longer than reheating a ready meal. It is true that skill helps save time – obviously the quicker you can crush and peel a garlic clove or chop an onion, the sooner the food will be on plates. Cooking regularly hones those skills – and the process becomes faster all round.

The actual will to cook is quite another thing, but that is a slow process of persuasion that has much to do with building a series of good memories: experiences where things have gone well and left nice thoughts in the part of the brain that keeps a record of smell and flavour.

But money. That’s a good one. Discussing the cost of food is like talking about religion. Someone is going to become upset. People who have money are traditionally not permitted to tell people who have little how to spend it. So that rules out most of our TV chefs – both they and the broadcasters become rather indecisive. They either broach the subject with supreme clumsiness and drive the bad eaters underground, or they are just plain unconvincing. It is hard to get inside the skin of those for whom budgeting is a daily concern, unless it is an experience you genuinely face. Anxiety about money also overwhelms creativity, experiment and adventure. This is the reason why so many on low incomes rely on trusted, branded ready-made foods that may not be as nourishing as other low-cost meals but which every mum knows she can serve and every plate will be emptied. The thought that anything bought on limited means will be rejected is nothing short of disastrous. This is why it is so necessary, when giving up convenience food and embarking on becoming a home cook, to know the secret of how to do it well each time.

SOUPS

Knowing how to make just a few soups is the secret of survival. Most take only 20 minutes to make, the ingredients are cheap and, after a bowl of soup, you feel full to the ears. We don’t want much more than that, do we? The food industry has a long tradition of making our soup for us, and selling it in cans, packets or ‘fresh’ in cartons. But in terms of goodness, it always falls short of the real thing.

Soups are to most Europeans what dal is to India and Pakistan – a vital, nourishing food that is affordable. But the British and Americans are a little soup-shy. The wealthy traditionally view soups as a starter, or diet food, and there is an educated margin of bowl-food enthusiasts – but on the whole we typically avoid all but the best-known canned varieties. A pity all round, not least because a bigger love for soup would instantly solve the catering problems of schools and hospitals.

Italian mothers rear their children on minestrone and pasta e fagioli, the delicious garlic-scented white bean and pasta soup capable of supplying a slow stream of energy for the rest of the day. The soup-devoted French have their Niçoise pistou, similar to minestrone yet greener and with more garlic; they also have their famous fish stew-soups and a delicious heartening cabbage and pork broth from the hilly Auvergne. In central Europe buttery dumplings float in rich and gamey meaty soups, while potatoes dominate the soups of colder Nordic countries. That is not to say we do not have some great broths in Britain, such as mutton and pearl barley, likely based on the lost medieval pottages, soups made with peas, grains and herbs.

Velvet soups

These are the smooth, creamy-textured soups that are sometimes just the essence of one vegetable, sometimes two, but never too many. The good news, for those still not persuaded to make meat or vegetable stock, is that you do not need to use it in these soups. There is another, time-saving and effective way, using additional butter, which is typically found in French home cooking but less in chefs’ books (chefs tend to be slavish to bouillon). When making a soup in which one ingredient stars, like lettuce or watercress, the butter method is especially successful. In the meantime, soups should begin in their humblest form.

White bean well-dressed soup

see PLATE 1

A big energising soup, its creaminess comes from the beans and adding wholemilk or Greek yoghurt at the end of cooking, which also gives the soup a refreshing, citrus taste. Onion, garlic and one of a number of green vegetables are added to lighten the floury texture of the beans. ‘Well dressed’ means it has a number of guises and can be many different soups, depending on what you add from the list of embellishments.

The secret value of beans

The trick of balancing the food budget yet feeling happy with what you eat lies in some of the humblest foods. Bean soups like the one below are something I turn to often – but with great enthusiasm. All types of bean are now fairly easy to find. Even the otherwise unimaginatively stocked late-night grocery across the road from where I live sells a range. I will sometimes buy dried beans, reconstitute and boil them, but it is a longer process (see page 230) and this section is about time poverty. Beans, like all pulses (lentils, chickpeas, peas), are in many ways the perfect food. They contain a vast range of nutrients and are high in fibre, growing them is great for the environment and though they are not grown in the UK (some ought to be) they are never air-freighted. Canned beans and pulses, incidentally, are not an inferior food to dried. With one can costing under £1 yet containing enough to serve 2–3 people, learning to use them in soups should be an essential part of every home cook’s abilities.

SERVES 4

4 tablespoons olive oil

2 medium white-fleshed onions, roughly chopped

4 garlic cloves, crushed with the back of a knife and peeled

1 fennel bulb, roughly chopped, or choose from: 2 celery sticks, sliced; 2 leeks, sliced; half a cucumber, seeds removed and thickly sliced; 3–4 medium-sized turnips, including green tops, sliced

2 x 400g/14oz can white haricot beans or cannellini beans

900ml/1½ pints water or stock

salt and white pepper

400ml/14fl oz Greek-style, wholemilk strained yoghurt

EMBELLISHMENTS

Add one or more of the following (you can also eat this soup plain):

• Slices of ciabatta, baguette or other open-textured bread, fried until golden in olive oil

• Melted butter, with chopped garlic

• Red chilli, the seeds removed, then sliced

• Crisp sautéed bacon or pancetta, chopped

• Basil pesto sauce

• Black olive tapenade sauce

• Roasted red peppers

• Flakes of raw, undyed smoked haddock (they will cook in the hot soup)

Put the oil in a large pan and heat over a medium flame. Add the onions, garlic and fennel or other green vegetable and cook until transparent and fragrant, but not coloured. Add the beans with their liquid, then the water or stock. Bring to the boil and then cook for about 10 minutes until the beans and vegetables are soft. Transfer all to a food processor or liquidiser and blend until smooth. Taste and add salt if necessary. Add a good pinch of white pepper.

To serve, reheat until almost boiling. Add the yoghurt and heat until nearly boiling, then remove from the heat. Ladle into bowls and add one or two of the extra ‘outfits’ from the list.

Tomato and mascarpone cream

My father also remarried, when I was five. My stepmother Annie Lou, who at the time had no children, was suddenly faced with four children to feed for half of every holidays and little sympathy from her instant family. There was a kind of competence and reliability about her cooking, learned from Cordon Bleu recipe cards, Arabella Boxer’s First Slice Your Cookbook, and The Joy of Cooking, which we displaced children found reassuring. I am not sure how much joy Annie Lou found in cooking itself, but she saw it as a duty and shopped enthusiastically with the village butcher, and even grew vegetables. She did not make all the many different dishes my mother made, nor share my mother’s love of southern European food, but she had a few great staples that became ‘old friends’. You knew where you were in the week by what was on the table. If it was fish pie, it was Friday; cottage or shepherd’s pie was usually there on a Monday, the day after a magnificent roast, the joint bought from Mr Vigor in Woodborough. I have no complaints. On winter picnics at horsy events (not my favourite days as I did not share the family’s devotion to all things equine) she always filled flasks with very hot, Heinz tomato soup ‘let down’ with milk. I loved that stuff. Later, when making my own tomato soup with milk, I laughed to find its eventual flavour not unlike the one from the can. Adding fresh mascarpone cheese, however, takes the flavour of tomato soup to a new, richer level.