Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (24 page)

To make the marinara sauce, heat 4 or 5 tablespoons of olive oil in a frying-pan. When it is hot but not smoking, throw in several sliced cloves of garlic; after a few seconds add 750 g (1½ lb) of ripe skinned tomatoes, roughly chopped. Let them cook about 3 minutes only. Season with salt and pepper, and then add a few coarsely chopped leaves of fresh basil, or failing that, some parsley. The sauce is now ready to be served with your pasta, or for that matter with boiled rice or haricot beans. The amount of garlic used is entirely a matter of taste, and those who like only a faint flavour can remove it from the pan before putting in the tomatoes, for it will already have scented the oil.

MINESTRA ALLA VERONESE

This is an example of the way Italian cooks will embellish a chicken and noodle soup with a small quantity of extra ingredients, making it almost into a meal.

For each 600 ml (1 pint) of clear chicken broth the other ingredients are about 45 g (1½ oz) of very fine noodles or vermicelli broken up small, 4 or 5 chicken livers, 200–250 g (7–8 oz) of shelled green peas, butter, Parmesan cheese.

First boil the noodles or vermicelli in boiling salted water for 5 minutes. Drain them. (If cooked direct in the broth they would make it cloudy and starchy.) Heat the broth, add the peas, then the pasta. Cook gently until the peas are quite tender.

Meanwhile clean the chicken livers, fry them gently in butter, chop them fairly small and add them to the soup. Stir in a tablespoon or so of grated Parmesan before serving.

MACARONADE

In Italy pasta is absolutely never served as an accompaniment to a meat dish or in the guise of a vegetable. It comes as a first course, either
asciutta
or dry, that is, with a sauce or simply with butter and cheese, or
in brodo
, in a broth or consommé, which may or may not also contain vegetables, as in the recipe above. This applies both to pasta as we know it and to all the tribe of stuffed pastas such as ravioli, tortellini and anolini.

In France, both in the southern regions of Provence and the Niçois country (where cooking is very much Italian influenced) and in the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, where the habit was no doubt acquired from Germany and Poland, some forms of macaroni or noodles do sometimes figure as part of the main course. The traditional
macaronade
of the Nice district consists of small macaroni or noodles served with some of the sauce from a
daube
or
estouffade
of beef plus a little grated cheese. Originally this dish was served as a first course, with the beef to follow. Nowadays the two dishes often come together, and the noodles make an admirable accompaniment, preferable to potatoes, to the rich wine and garlic-flavoured stew. What seems to me a mistake is to serve pasta as an accompaniment to a dry dish, such as fried escalopes of veal or steak.

House & Garden
, May 1958

Do not Despair over Rice

Every amateur cook, however gifted and diligent, has some weak spot, some gap in her knowledge or experience which to anyone critical of her own achievements can be annoying and humiliating. To some it may be a question of not being able to get a roast precisely right; to others, a cream sauce which only spasmodically comes off; and even to those who admit to having little talent for pastry or cakes, it is irritating to be defeated by a process which to others appears so effortless. Some regard the confection of a mayonnaise as the easiest thing in the world, some with terror and despair. There are those who have a talent for perfect rice dishes, while for others the stuff invariably turns to a mush. And it is no coincidence that when dishes go wrong, it nearly always happens when they are cooked for guests, and consequently in larger quantities than those with which one is accustomed to dealing.

Sometimes this is due to something so obvious as cooking for eight in the same utensils as those normally used for four, or to the cook having overlooked the fact that even a good-tempered dish like a meat and wine stew may disloyally change its character and appearance, losing all its professional-looking finish, if kept waiting too long in the oven. Or perhaps the joint, twice as large as usual, has been cooked twice as long, whereas what should really have been taken into consideration was not the weight but the shape and thickness of the joint.

Sometimes, of course, the trouble is more psychological than technical. Take rice, for example. Because a rice dish has gone wrong once, no doubt because the cook had no experience of cooking the particular rice she was using, she will ever after be scared stiff of making it. There
is
something rather specifically dismal about a failed rice dish. And I would never recommend anybody to cook a risotto for a dinner party which had to be managed single-handed, because it is a bad dish to keep waiting. But there are so many other ways of cooking rice and some of them appear to be specially designed for the kind of meals we all cook these days – meals consisting of dishes which simply must not be of the kind requiring split-second timing. Good quality rice is essential, though. The two kinds to look for are the long-grained
Patna type and the round-grained Piedmontese rice called Avorio or Arborio, which has a hard core in the centre of the grain so that it is almost impossible to ruin by overcooking. The flavour of this Piedmontese rice is also much more pronounced than that of the Patna type, which makes it a good one to use when the rice itself, rather than any flavouring or sauce, is the main point of the dish.

All the following recipes are ones in which the rice can be kept waiting, not indefinitely it is true, but long enough to give you a chance to have a drink before your meal, without keeping an eye on the stove.

A good point to remember about the boiling of rice is that ten times the volume of water to that of rice is an ample quantity to calculate. So measure the rice in a cup or glass, and then reckon the amount of water accordingly.

CHICKEN PILAU
(I)

For 4–6 people the ingredients are 2 scant teacups (250–280 g/ 8–9 oz) of Patna long-grain rice, 3 teacups of chicken stock from which the fat should not be removed, since it helps to lubricate the rice, salt, pepper, about a teaspoon of mixed spices (cardamom seeds, a scrap of grated green ginger root, allspice, mace, pepper, cumin seeds or whatever mixture happens to suit your taste), approximately a cupful of meat from a cooked chicken cut from the bone into neat little strips.

Two-thirds fill with water a very large saucepan of about 4.5 litres (8 pints) capacity. Bring it to the boil and throw in a heaped tablespoon of salt, then the rice. Boil it steadily for exactly 7 minutes after the water has come back to the boil. Drain the rice into a small mesh sieve or colander in which the holes are not so large as to let through the grains of rice, for being only partly cooked, they are not yet swollen. Hold the colander under the cold tap and rinse until the water runs clear. Turn the rice into an earthenware pot or other fairly deep fireproof dish, of about 1.7-litre (3-pint) capacity. Stir in the spices all pounded together – the quantity can be increased if you like – and add the chicken meat and the hot stock. Bring just to simmering point on top of the stove. Have ready a clean, dry, folded linen teacloth and put this over the rice. Cover with the lid of the pot. Put in the centre of a low oven, preheated to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3. In just 20
minutes’ time the rice should be swollen and tender, all the liquid absorbed. The rice is ready to serve on a heated shallow dish with, if you like, a few slivers of almonds or some pine nuts lightly browned in the oven on the top, and some chutney and lemon separately. It will, or should, serve 6 people as a first course, 4 if it is the chief dish.

Be sure that your teacloth is one which has been properly rinsed when it was washed and does not smell of soap powder or detergent, for there is a risk of this communicating itself to the rice.

If the dish has to be kept waiting, take it from the oven once it is ready, but leave it covered with its cloth and its lid. For 10 minutes at least it will keep hot without spoiling. But do not attempt this system of cooking with poor quality, small-grain pudding rice, nor with any of the American patent rices for which the amounts of liquid to rice and the cooking times are given on the packets.

CHICKEN PILAU
(2)

Supposing that your oven is occupied by another dish cooking at a temperature much higher or lower than the one at which the pilau is to cook, here is another method, using the same ingredients.

Boil your rice for 10 minutes instead of 7, rinse and drain it. Heat 30 g (1 oz) of butter, or a tablespoon of oil, in a pot or bowl or saucepan which will stand inside another one. Put in the pieces of chicken and, on top, the rice into which you have stirred the seasonings and spices. Pour in, for 2 cups of rice measured before cooking, 1 cup of hot stock, and another tablespoon of butter or oil. Cover with a folded teacloth and a lid. Steam in your improvised bain-marie for about half an hour.

This is also an excellent method for cooking moist rice to serve with a meat or chicken dish.

If you want your rice coloured and spiced with saffron, pound up about half a dozen of the little filaments, pour the warmed stock over them before you start cooking the rice, and strain them off when you add the stock to the rice.

LOBSTER WITH CREAM SAUCE AND RICE

Here is a lovely dish for a dinner party, for which all the main preparations can be made in advance.

For a first-course dish for 4 people allow 1 large cooked lobster or crawfish, a hen one if possible, for the coral improves the flavour of the sauce; 60 g (2 oz) of long-grain Patna rice, and, for the sauce 90 g (3 oz) of butter, 2 level tablespoons of flour, 300 ml (V2 pint) of milk, 4 tablespoons of white wine or dry vermouth, 150 ml (¼ pint) of cream, seasonings, breadcrumbs.

Melt 45 g (1½ oz) of the butter in a thick saucepan, stir in the flour off the fire; when smooth add the heated wine or vermouth and then a little of the milk, also heated. Return to the fire, gradually adding the rest of the milk, stirring all the time. Season with a little salt, freshly milled pepper, nutmeg and a scrap of cayenne. Turn the flame very low and leave the sauce cooking over a heat diffuser.

If you have a hen lobster, extract the coral and the creamy parts from the shell and pound them up with 30 g (1 oz) of the butter. Cut all the white flesh of the lobster into small neat pieces.

When the sauce has been gently cooking for about 10–15 minutes add the cream and let it cook another 5 minutes. Now stir in the butter and coral mixture. After another couple of minutes press the sauce through a sieve. Return it to a clean saucepan and, if it is being made in advance, cover the sauce with a film of melted butter, which will prevent the formation of a skin on the top.

Cook your rice in plenty of boiling salted water for 7 minutes only, rinse and strain it quite dry.

When the time comes to finish cooking the dish, allow 10–15 minutes for heating the sauce and 20 minutes for the dish to bake in the oven. The sauce should be re-heated with the pan standing in another one containing hot water. When it is hot, stir in the lobster flesh. Taste for seasoning.

Have a shallow buttered gratin dish ready. Spread the rice at the bottom. On top pour the lobster mixture, without disturbing the layer of rice. As with all gratin dishes, the dish itself should be quite full to the top. Strew fine, pale golden breadcrumbs over the mixture; add the remaining butter in little knobs. Heat in a low oven, 150°C/300°F/gas mark 2 for 15–20 minutes. At the end of this time the rice will be quite tender, and because it has been so slowly heated in the cream sauce the lobster will not have toughened and dried as it does when re-heated too abruptly; but do not be tempted to put more rice or to make a thicker sauce – you will get a stodgy dish.

To get a good glazed surface on the top of the dish, it can be put under a hot grill for a minute or so until it is blistering and bubbling. If you are going to make this dish in larger quantities, make sure you have the appropriate size of dish, or do it in two dishes rather than cram it into one which is too deep.

RICE WITH CHEESE SAUCE

This is a first course adapted from an Italian one – one in which the sauce, being a fondue of cheese and eggs, is just the kind of thing which turns malicious when you do it for guests, either refusing to thicken, or curdling when you try to hurry it up. So instead of this unreliable mixture, make a cream sauce strongly flavoured with Gruyère or Parmesan cheese. The rice is cooked
in bianco
– in other words, plainly boiled.

Ingredients for 4 good helpings are: 300 g (10 oz) round-grain
Piedmontese Avorio rice and, for the sauce, 45 g (1½ oz) butter, 1 level tablespoon of flour, 300 ml (½ pint) milk, 150 ml (5 fl oz) single cream, 90 g (3 oz) coarsely grated Gruyère cheese or 60 g (2 oz) grated Parmesan, salt, pepper and nutmeg.