The chef and writer Tamar Adler’s book An Everlasting Meal was first published in 2011 but has been republished as a hardback. The book is about food and cooking, but it isn’t a traditional cookbook per se.
Instead, it’s about simplicity, and how skills like boiling, preparing and storing ingredients can make for a delicious meal. Adler shows that frugality can be satisfying and that if we make a mistake in the kitchen, it’s fine.
The book is beautifully written, with a philosophical bent, and aims to empower every cook. This extract is taken from the first chapter – about how to boil water.
BRING A BIG pot of water to boil, add salt, and taste. Drop the vegetables into the water and then let them cook, stirring once or twice.
This does not, contrary to a lot of cooking advice, take only a minute. You don’t need to stand over the pot, because your vegetables don’t need to be “crisp” or “crisp-tender” when they come out.
For boiled vegetables to taste really delicious, they need to be cooked. Most of ours aren’t. Undercooking is a justifiable reaction to the 1950′s tendency to cook vegetables to collapse. But the pendulum has swung too far.
When not fully cooked, any vegetable seems starchy and indifferent: it hasn’t retained the virtues of being recently picked nor benefited from the development of sugars that comes with time and heat. There’s not much I dislike more than biting into a perfectly lovely vegetable and hearing it squeak.
Vegetables are done when a sharp knife easily pierces a piece of one. If you’re cooking broccoli or cauliflower, test the densest part of each piece, which is the stem. Remove the cooked vegetables from the water with a slotted spoon directly to a bowl and drizzle them with olive oil. If there are so many that they’ll make a great mountain on each other, with the ones on top prevailing and the ones at the bottom of the bowl turning to sludge, spoon them onto a baking sheet so they can cool a little, and then transfer them to a bowl.
There seems to be pressure these days to “shock” vegetables by submerging them in ice water to stop their cooking. The argument in favour of shocking vegetables is that it keeps them from changing colour. If you drop cooked broccoli into ice water, it will stay as green as it ever was.
As a rule, I try not to shock anything. I also don’t think keeping a vegetable from looking cooked when it is cooked is worth the fuss.
A British chef named Fergus Henderson gently reprimands new cooks who want to plunge perfectly warm boiled vegetables into ice baths and tells them that fresh vegetables can be just as beautiful when they’re pale and faded.
Nature isn’t persistently bright; it wears and ages. At Mr Henderson’s restaurant St. John, the two most popular side dishes on the menu are boiled potatoes and cabbage boiled “to the other side of green,” and happy patrons, after a few bites of either damp, cooked-looking vegetable, order two or three servings with any meal.
A plate of boiled vegetables can be dinner, with soup and thickly cut toast rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil. If you boil a few different vegetables, cook each separately. Dress each of them like you do broccoli, with olive oil, and if they’re roots or tubers, like turnips or potatoes, add a splash of white wine vinegar or lemon while they’re hot.
Once you have a vegetable cooked, you can cook a pound of pasta in the same water and use the boiled vegetable to make a wonderfully sedate, dignified sauce by adding a little of the pasta water, good olive oil, and freshly grated cheese.
Boiled broccoli and cauliflower both take particularly well to this.
Put two cups of either vegetable, boiled until completely tender and still warm, in a big bowl and leave it near the stove. Bring its water back to a boil and adjust its seasoning. If the water is too salty, add a bit of fresh water. When the water returns to a boil, add a
pound of short pasta, like penne, orecchiette, or fusilli.
While the pasta is cooking, smash your vegetable a little with a wooden spoon and grate a cup of Parmesan or Pecorino cheese into the bowl.
Taste a piece of the pasta by scooping it out with a slotted spoon. When the pasta is nearly done, remove a glass of the pot’s murky water. This will help unite pasta, vegetable, and cheese. If you think you’ve pulled the water out before it’s as starchy and salty as it can be, pour it back and return for saltier, starchier water a minute or two later.
Scoop the pasta out with a big, handheld sieve or drain it through a colander and add it to the bowl with the vegetable and cheese, along with a quarter cup of pasta water, and mix well somewhere warm. This is always a good idea when you combine ingredients.
Heat is a vital broker between separate things: warm ingredients added to warm ingredients are already in a process of transforming. They’re open to change. Even small amounts of heat, released from the sides of a pot while it simmers away, or by the warmed surface of a heated oven, help. Whenever I’m mixing things that aren’t going to cook together, I look around for odds and ends of heat.
This pasta is good as is, but is improved by a big handful of chopped raw parsley or toasted breadcrumbs. I often push the limits of a single pot of water’s utility, boiling broccoli or cauliflower, then pasta, and then potatoes, all in succession, and then use the water to make beans.
As long as you move from less starchy ingredients to more starchy ingredients, one pot of water can get you pretty far.
A new hardback edition of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with economy and grace, by Tamar Adler is out now, published by Swift Press.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say