A Girl and Her Pig. April Bloomfield
you run three restaurant kitchens, trying to make sure the details aren’t lost in the race to feed your customers can drive you up the wall. At home, though, there is no such rush. So, for my recipes here, I chose not to gloss over the little things that I think make food taste great and that also make it a pleasure to cook. To that end, the recipes are a little longer than they might otherwise be and, I think, a lot more helpful.
Many of the dishes in this book have shown up in one form or another on my restaurant menus. I’m not much for cooking complicated food, but I do understand that what’s straightforward for me and my team of cooks might be a bit knotty for those of you at home just looking for a nice dinner. So, for each dish, I thought, how can I make this more like something an Italian grandma might do? For instance, sometimes I call for using water instead of stock. Or, if at the restaurant we cut vegetables into tiny cubes, I ask you to cut them into chunks. It’s easier, the resulting flavour is almost identical, and I think it’s quite nice to bite down on a big chunk of carrot or celery here and there.
I’ve included a few dishes that do take time and effort to make – veal breast stuffed with prosciutto and more veal, cassoulet with duck confit you make yourself, and mussels stuffed with mortadella. They’re not difficult to make, but to further encourage you to give them a go, I’ve included tips for doing some steps in advance.
In general, always read the full recipe before you get started. That way you’ll know what to expect and nothing will catch you off guard. You might be tempted to follow a recipe loosely – I know I often am – but on your first go, please try it my way. Then once you’ve made it one or two times, feel free to tweak it as you’d like. Oh, and always try to use the right pot. I tried to strike a balance between describing the proper pot for a particular dish without being so specific that I scare you off. But do keep in mind that the size and shape of a pot will affect your outcome.
I hope you have as much fun cooking these dishes as I do. And I also hope you’ll focus on the little things. Remember, it’s easy to make simple food taste great – as long as you don’t fuck it up.
Before you go headlong into the recipes, I’d like to tell you why they are the way they are. Here I take you through a few of my idiosyncrasies, from the way I think when I cook to the admittedly obsessive measures I take with common pantry staples, and that I urge you to take as well. But, so you don’t think I’m a complete nutter, I’ve given you alternatives whenever I can stomach them.
AT THE MARKET
Please buy great ingredients. I insist on it in my kitchen, and I’m quick to have a fannywobble if the parsnips are spongy or the greens have begun to go limp at the edges. If what you’re planning on cooking with doesn’t look nice at the market, alter your dinner plans. Talk to your butcher or fishmonger and make it clear that you’re after the best he’s got. Or order in advance – sometimes that’s the best way to be sure that you’re buying tasty proteins at their prime. Set your standards high: you might not always meet them, but you will always be better off in the end. Low standards are easy to meet, but the food you’ll end up with isn’t always good to eat.
Once you’ve found a great product, get to know it. Taste it raw and as you cook, but first give it a sniff and a good look over. Touch it. The more you do this, the sharper your intuition will become. You’ll understand why, for instance, there’s no need to peel young carrots and why I urge you to choose fresh sardines with skin that sparkles. That’s a good rule of thumb, actually: choose ingredients that sparkle, whether literally or not.
AMOUNTS
I don’t like precision. Converting cups to grams and measuring out tablespoons of chopped parsley does my head in. It feels odd, unnatural, and it’s not how I cook. After all, one carrot or tomato is not the same as another. So you don’t want to be inflexible, like a machine. If you open up a pumpkin and it looks a little different than usual, you might have to treat it differently too.
Yet you can’t have a cookbook without recipes, and you can’t have recipes without measures, so, in the end, I’ve provided amounts and weights for ingredients I never thought I’d quantify. But where it made sense, I kept the measures called for casual, using handfuls and glugs rather than teaspoons. Use these quantities as guidelines, and use your intuition too.
FINDING THE BALANCE
One summer while I was working at the River Café, I learned a lesson that really stuck. I looked on as Rose Gray, one of the chefs, made ribollita, the Tuscan bread soup. In the winter, we had added a smattering of chopped canned tomatoes to contribute a little acidity. Now it was summer, and we had a glut of ripe, fresh tomatoes. I watched Rose add them with a freer hand. Fresh tomatoes are more delicate, so you have to add more to get the same effect. But just because you have a lot of fresh tomatoes doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still add them judiciously. What you’re after is balance. Finding balance is about understanding a dish’s harmonious potential, the place where all the flavours achieve a sort of equilibrium. Each bite should make you want to take another.
Lemon juice is a lovely example of the principle of balance. Of course a dish should never be so lemony that your face scrunches up like a Muppet’s as you eat it. But neither should lemon play the same role in every dish. Sometimes lemon’s bracing acidity refreshes your palate, as in my Fried Pig’s Ear Salad (see recipe, here). Other times, lemon just adds brightness, barely perceptible as lemon but vital to encouraging your next eager bite, like in Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta and Juniper Berries (see recipe, here).
You must give thought, too, to proportion. A salad with too many walnuts or a sauce with too many capers is like a Sunday with too many free hours – you stop appreciating the pleasure they provide. I think about that when I cook. Put just enough sweet cubes of carrots in a soup, and you won’t have to search too hard to find one, but when you do, it’ll still give you a little thrill. Always keep in mind why you’re adding what you’re adding. In Radish Salad (see recipe, here), for instance, is the dish about the radish, the cheese, or the combination?
This may all sound a bit tedious. Yet it’s how simple food becomes exciting food. And while each recipe in this book aims to guide you towards that elusive place where a dish is in perfect balance, no recipe can account for, say, tomatoes that taste less sweet than you might like or lemons that aren’t as tart as usual. Ultimately, the balance is up to you to find.
CUTTING VEGETABLES
In this book, I often ask you to cut vegetables such as carrots and fennel into pieces. What I don’t mention, for fear of sounding too fussy, is that I typically prefer to cut vegetables into oblique pieces: angled ones with pointy, tapered edges. They’re more elegant than clumsy chunks and more rustic than perfect cubes. If you’re up for it, here’s how to do it: take, say, a carrot, halve it lengthwise, and set it flat side down. Cut the first piece on a diagonal, then continue slicing into irregular pieces, sliding the carrot back and forth with your other hand between each cut. Keep it up, making sure the pieces are more or less the same thickness.
PLATING
I’m not much for pomp on the plate, for presentation that says, ‘Look how pretty!’ But I do think that if food looks beautiful, people are more excited to eat it. To that end, with most recipes I give suggestions that more or less amount to this rule: don’t serve food in a big, dense lump. Rather, assemble the ingredients so there’s a little air flowing between them and any supporting players are scattered here and there among the stars of the dish. I like food to look as if the arrangement were almost accidental, as if it all dropped from above and happened to pile elegantly on the plate.
INGREDIENTS
HERBS
Because there