An Everlasting Meal

Excuse the tardiness of this (/last) week’s newsletter, I’ve been suffering from the most general of malaises and have found the idea of confronting the empty page in an effort to fill it with the free-flowing joy that you lovers of the good stuff have become accustomed to, simply overwhelming.

I have instead spent the time rocking my baby gently (consoling myself, not him) and putting one foot in front of the other, not questioning much, hoping if I ignore whatever lies at the source long enough it may go away.

A good night’s sleep I often think will do the trick. Or better yet a good meal.

The thing that did most manage to pull my head above this cloud of ennui was the whiff of cooking. It came from a corner of my apartment block’s courtyard and it strengthened with each loop of me rolling George round there in his play-mobile. The scent was garlic cooking in oil, beginnings that like a baby are pure potential. It placed me there with wooden spoon in hand, adoring that phase in a preparation not yet blemished by the flaws of our tending; inappropriate environment, lack of resources, poor quality in the ingredients themselves, the hangups of the cook ( …and so forth). I wanted to nudge and stir the garlic, or maybe I was contented in already doing something similar, wheeling that little boy of mine about in his plastic car.

I hadn’t smelt cooking in an apartment building courtyard since life in Milan, where scents of garlic and oil accompanied each step out the door. This shouldn’t conjure images of some dreamlike and provincial Italian scene; my life there was deeply inner city. In fact the only thing as reliable as meeting this scent was meeting the Moroccan man on the street corner who would offer me cocaine each time I went to buy the morning milk.

So the courtyard near that particular corner may have been no Italian idyll but it did contain some characters more interesting than you’d find in such imaginings. There was a poor soul with schizophrenia co-inhabiting with a poor man without means in what could only be a space of 3 by 3 metres. The two were straight from Of Mice And Men; the huge, lumbering one with a screw loose and his silent, sharp and smaller counterpart. I believe the small one was given a bed merely in return for the company, another odd circumstance that could be happening under your nose anywhere in the city.

You’d receive a big wave from the giant as he’d peddle off each day to search bins for food, while his little friend could at best force a smile for you, one though that conveyed a continual insecurity about his future and present, which both lay at the mercy of another’s insanity.

My other neighbour was a builder with a raging coke addiction who lived with an elderly woman, either his aunt of great aunt. She was over 90 and would speak to me in half Italian, half Puglian dialect, where her indecipherable sentences would invariably end with her sighing “eh…” as in “well, what you gonna do?” to which I would huff back some imitation of the sound and shrug my shoulders in sympathy to the notion.

Occasionally the tone could become more evangelical, rising, and calling to Christ as she detailed the troubles of life in World War 2 (where she told me they had to eat cats among other things), though which she also assured me was nothing compared to kids these days, whom she feared may shoot her each time she went to get groceries. The most animated I saw her was describing how she had to help wet-nurse my builder friend in his infancy; “I fed him my milk!” she cried to me. There was a pause. Then again; “I fed him my milk!” Another pause, “Eh…”

The builder and some other Neapolitan friends from the courtyard came for dinner once. I hosted them, but they did the cooking, probably untrusting of an Englishman at the stove. I never understood who was in charge exactly and they each got up and down to take over different parts of the preparations as if their separate limbs were all being orchestrated by a ghostly culinary octopus sat at centre table (apparently also Italian and similarly distrustful of myself as its surrogate).

Though with some culinary wisdom of my own acquired over the years, the ghostly octopus hypothesis seems more farfetched and I can posit a simpler explanation for such seamless coordination. Most Italians fundamentally understand the order a meal should follow and how to prepare ingredients. This constitutes more of a manifesto than a set of recipes, which means as long as you are familiar with the gospel then you can step into the kitchen and continue its interpretation.

At its simplest, you often need no more than to cook things down in garlic and oil. This brings me back to circling the courtyard, and furthermore, to a book that also stirred me from my malaise this last week, Tamar Adler’s “An Everlasting Meal.” I’d begin to fully extol its virtues, but in truth I found the writing style a little excessive, and additionally I’ve already spent myself in writing a thousand words about courtyards before getting to the point where I was supposed to start this whole newsletter.

However it is a very good cookbook, largely because it is not a cookbook. It’s a book instead about the home kitchen’s cycling nature, with recipes that are not to be shopped for directly, but ideas that will be there “like birds in a tree - if there is a comfortable branch.” (A quote from MFK Fisher within the book).

There is a thread beyond the courtyard that pulls together the schizophrenic, coke-addicted builder and 90 year old woman. If I gave them a bag of lentils, they’d know instinctively how to produce dinner. An Everlasting Meal does not concern only Italian food, but it shares that straightforward approach to cooking; don’t know what to do with a vegetable? Just boil it! (And probably toss it some garlic and olive oil)

My copy is dotted with underlined sections that I hope to internalise in my daily cooking. The one tip that has stuck most already is cooking in batches. This does not mean cooking a massive vat of some sauce at once, but more if you have many vegetables, roast them all in one go and reclaim them across the week for quick victories; salads, curries or sandwich fillings.

When preparing tinned sardine pasta, the simple revelation struck that instead of caramelising the sole onion required, I should instead be caramelising all the onions. The excesses could then lay in the fridge, a jar of pure potential, equally ready to be deployed as a cold relish or the base of a hot soup, and so provide one way to feel prepared in a temperamental May, where weather shifts like mood and memory.

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Caramelised Onions & Onion Soup

Ingredients

• Onions

• Olive oil

• Butter

• Stock

• Flour

• Bread

• Cheese

• Wine

This recipe is a bit of a non recipe, quantities are not important, though a rough proportion would be 1 onion wants 250ml stock, a tablespoon of wine, and a quarter teaspoon flour.

Caramelise your onions by slicing them thinly and placing them in a pan with a pool of oil and a big nob of butter and a big pinch of salt. Fit a lid on top and put on lowest heat. They will take about an hour to cook, you can lift and stir every 10 minutes, though this is for the benefit of cook rather than onion. We are looking for the point where they have collapsed entirely and released all their sweetness.

Transfer whatever excess onions you cooked into a jar and keep in the fridge to stir into pastas with some anchovies, fold into a cheese toasty, put in an omelette…

For the soup turn the heat up on the remaining onions to medium. Add another dot of butter if you’re feeling it, then the pinch of flour. Stir and cook another minute. Add in the wine and stock and salt to taste. You should taste a slight flouriness at this point, keep cooking for another 15 minutes on a low simmer and taste again until this taste has disappeared. Toast a piece of bread for each bowl of soup and top with cheese and place under the grill, or more simply rub with a little garlic and top with a drizzle of olive oil. Mount bread on soup, et voila.