WAGGING MY (OX)TAIL

As most of my faithful readers are aware, I am working on getting a publisher for my book Cooking for Men. The greatest difficulty is communicating to them, that it isn’t a recipe book. It's purpose is to explain the basic ideas that form the principles of cooking with good ingredients. It's a book for foodies who don't know how to cook. Indeed it might be dedicated to those starting out on life in the kitchen for the first time. Those who have lost a mother, a wife, a boyfriend. Bachelors, sons, widowers and boyfriends who know about food but cant cook. And as the Belgian tells me that nothing I ever cook is ever exactly the same, the suggestions I make about cooking food are much too inexact a science to be a recipe book - more a manual of cooking for the modern male foodie.

What I offer are some simple ideas of how you might make something or other.

But more importantly, the whole thrust of my cooking philosophy is that if you can learn some principles of cooking the food you like to eat, then you will always achieve your goals. You treat recipe books the same way as books and magazines about design. When you are refurbishing a home, you use them as points of inspiration. A point of departure.

My point is this. From the mumsy to the profane, the sexy to the laddish, all these chefs and food writers assume that their viewers and readers have a level of knowledge about where you start. Their books and programmes consign the really important knowledge to a few oblique comments or couple of pages between chapters.

But from everything I have learned, it is these early obstacles that hinder myriad potential cooks and prevent them from actually getting going. Before you start cooking, how do you know what kind of oil to buy? Is some better for cooking than others? How do I sharpen my carving knife? What’s the difference between sea and rock salt, t-bone and fillet, red and grey mullet? When should I grill, fry or bake? Does peeling vegetables remove their nutrients and why is meat hung? The book encourages you to learn to shop for what you like the look of and then how to transform that into what you want to eat.

In relief these do seem rather prosaic questions but by my book, in the time you have taken to answer them, you have effectively become a knife-wielding commis chef able to make your own decisions about what you are going to do to the food under your regime. So if you fancy a stew or a salad or fish pie, you know exactly how to throw those together with ease, instinctively.

Don't get me wrong. I own many much loved and well-thumbed recipe books which I consult on a regular basis (though a miniscule collection compared to my mother). But I am not hidebound by them. And I know that they don’t always get it right.

Last week I bought some oxtail. After simmering for 3 hours with little turnips, onions, carrots and celery, it hit the senses, sticky and oozing in goodness. Normally it would be served immediately with bread. But after reading H F-W on oxtail, I decided to forgo the instant temptations of finger-picking tastiness. He suggests removing the meat into a bowl, reducing the gravy with red wine and then allowing the lot to cool and set. The next evening. I duly turned out the meaty jelly accompanied by new boiled potatoes.

The Belgian, seldom one to carp about food, tends towards a characteristic silence when he disapproves of anything. I, however, bravely soldiered on. Until I asked. The dish was pronounced ‘cat food’ and turned into a pot of piping, tasty oxtail soup.

It’s this last bit my book teaches you.

TENDER WORDS

Tender (2009) tells the story of Nigel Slater's love affair with his garden in Islington and the many seedlings he has raised in his box-hedged vegetable patches. It’s a magnificent volume, like a medieval knightly treatise with pictures of his Eden, its produce and many of the recipes he has created from them.

23 May, 2010

FOOD FROM THE HEART

Cooking is a basic human instinct. We’ve been eating, chopping, shaping, flavouring, enticing ingredients into something delicious since time began. But as the way many of us live has changed, the basic skills we require to cook, are no longer valued and it’s often easier to let others take control of what we eat.

21 April, 2010

IN A RIGHT FISH STEW

This week we had sustainable fish stew. It’s a quick and easy way to feed a gang of hungries on a Friday night and doesn’t need much else but some good bread and wine. Like all stews, you need balance, rich liquid and a range of potent flavours steaming from your pot.

15 March, 2010