An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

Introduction

How to Begin

In 1942, M. F. K. Fisher wrote a book called How to Cook a Wolf.

How to Cook a Wolf is not a cookbook or a memoir or a story about one person or one thing. It is a book about cooking defiantly, amid the mess of war and the pains of bare pantries. Because food was rationed, it is about living well in spite of lack, which made a book devoted to food and its preparation as the New York Times described it, spiritually restorative.

The essays it contains make it seem practical to consider one’s appetite. It advocated cooking with gusto not only for vanquishing hardship with pleasure but for weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.

I love that book. I have modeled this one on it.

This is not a cookbook or a memoir or a story about one person or one thing. It is a book about eating affordably, responsibly, and well, and because doing so relies on cooking, it is mostly about that.

Cooking is both simpler and more necessary than we imagine. It has in recent years come to seem a complication to juggle against other complications, instead of what it can be—a clear path through them.

If we are to weed, today, through all the advice for how to eat better, and choose what we ourselves feel most able and like best to do, we must regain our faith that cooking can be advantageous, something that helps eating well make sense.

Resources for simple cooking often do more harm than good. A fast-and-easy cooking magazine I picked up recently seemed contrived to scare its readers off. The magazine advertised recipes for boil-and-toss pastas and last-minute omelets amid other tips for getting meals to the table quickly. It pretended to make cooking easier, but complicated it instead.

All pasta is boil and toss. A lot of perfectly wonderful meals are boil alone. You don’t need a shortcut for either, but to reserve the three dollars you might have spent on the magazine and use it for buying salt and decent olive oil.

There’s plain deceit in hawking last-minute omelets. Omelets happen almost instantly, no matter what you do to speed them up or slow them down. Suggesting there are special last-minute ones is akin to selling tips for breathing air more rapidly—if you have an egg, you have a meal that needs but a quick tap to be cracked open.

This book contains what I know of boiling and cooking eggs. It contains my strategies for cooking vegetables and meat, which rely on the fortuitous truth that both are best bought whole and cooked ahead, and the ways I have of making each earn its keep.

It doesn’t contain perfect or professional ways to do anything, because we don’t need to be professionals to cook well, any more than we need to be doctors to treat bruises and scrapes: we don’t need to shop like chefs or cook like chefs; we need to shop and cook like people learning to cook, like what we are—people who are hungry.

We’re so often told cooking is an obstacle that we miss this. When we cook things, we transform them. And any small acts of transformation are among the most human things we do. Whether it’s nudging dried leaves around a patch of cement, or salting a tomato, we feel, when we exert tiny bits of our human preference in the universe, more alive.

Luckily we don’t have far to go. Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made—imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell.

I have spare but sturdy recommendations for beginnings, and lots for picking up loose ends. Stale slices of bread should be ground into breadcrumbs, which make a delicious topping for pasta, and add crunch to a salad. Or they must be toasted and broken apart for croutons or brittle crackers, which ask to be smeared with olive paste.

Meals’ ingredients must be allowed to topple into one another like dominos. Broccoli stems, their florets perfectly boiled in salty water, must be simmered with olive oil and eaten with shaved Parmesan on toast; their leftover cooking liquid kept for the base for soup, studded with other vegetables, drizzled with good olive oil, with the rind of the Parmesan added for heartiness.

This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking. If we decide our meals will be good, remanded kale stems, quickly pickled or cooked in olive oil and garlic, will be taken advantage of to garnish eggs, or tossed with pasta. Beet and turnip greens, so often discarded, will be washed well and sautéed in olive oil and filled into an omelet, or served on warm, garlicky crostini. The omelets or little toasts will have cost no more than eggs and stale bread, and both will have been more gratifying to eater and cook.

In her first book, Serve It Forth, M. F. K. Fisher wrote that its recipes would be there like birds in a tree—if there is a comfortable branch.

I hope that the recipes in this book are only there because branches offered themselves. I have been economical with them. I have always found that recipes make food preparation seem staccato: they begin where their writers are, asking that you collect the ingredients their writers have, and end with the instruction: Serve hot, or less often Serve cold.

But cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page. There should be serving, and also eating, and storing away what’s left; there should be looking at meals’ remainders with interest and imagining all the good things they will become. I have tried to include more of that and fewer teaspoons and tablespoons and cups.

This is my attempt to hand over what I think matters. Then, whether you are hungry or anxious or curious, you can at least weed through and decide what seems right. I only mean to show what cooking is: an act of gathering in and meting out, a coherent story that starts with the lighting of a burner, the filling of a pot, and keeps going as long as we like. So, our end I think is clear. If our meal will be ongoing, then our only task is to begin.

One

How to Boil Water

When is water boiling? When, indeed, is water water?

— M. F. K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf

There is a prevailing theory that we need to know much more than we do in order to feed ourselves well. It isn’t true. Most of us already have water, a pot to put it in, and a way to light a fire. This gives us boiling water, in which we can do more good cooking than we know.

Our culture frowns on cooking in water. A pot and water are both simple and homely. It is hard to improve on the technology of the pot, or of the boil, leaving nothing for the cookware industry to sell.

The pot was invented 10,000 years ago, and a simmering one has been a symbol of a well-tended hearth ever since. I don’t mean to suggest that now that you have been reminded of the age and goodness of a pot of water, you start boiling everything in your kitchen—but that instead of trying to figure out what to do about dinner, you put a big pot of water on the stove, light the burner under it, and only when it’s on its way to getting good and hot start looking for things to put in it.

In that act, you will have plopped yourself smack in the middle of cooking a meal. And there you’ll be, having retrieved a pot, filled it, and lit a burner, jostled by your own will a few steps farther down the path toward dinner.

There are as many ideas about how to best boil water as there are about how to cure hiccups. Some people say you must use cold water, explaining that hot water sits in the pipes, daring bacteria to inoculate it; others say to use hot, arguing that only a fool wouldn’t get a head start. Debates rage as to whether olive oil added to water serves any purpose. (It only does if you are planning to serve the water as soup, which you may, but it makes sense to wait to add the oil until you decide.)

Potatoes should be started in cold water, as should eggs. But sometimes I find myself distractedly adding them to water that’s already boiling, and both turn out fine. Green and leafy vegetables should be dropped at the last second into a bubble as big as your fist. Pasta, similarly, should only be added when a pot is rollicking, and stirred once or twice.

Ecclesiastical writers on the subject point out that in the beginning there was water, all life proceeded from water, there was water in Eden, water when we fell, then the slate got cleaned with it. Water breaks, and out we come.

The point, as far as I can tell, is that water has been at it, oblivious to our observations, for longer than we know.

I recommend heating up a great deal of it, covered if you’re in a rush, because it will boil faster that way, or uncovered if you need time to figure out what you want to boil. As long as it’s a big pot and the water in it gets hot, whichever technique you choose and however you time your addition of ingredients, the world, which began by some assessments with a lot of water at a rolling boil, will not come to an end.

Julia Child instructs tasting water periodically as it climbs toward 212 degrees to get used to its temperature at each stage. Her advice might be overzealous, but it teaches an invaluable lesson, not about boiling, but about learning to cook: if there is anything that you can learn from what is happening, learn it. You don’t need to know how the properties of water differ at 100 degrees and at 180, but by tasting it at those temperatures you may learn something about your pot or your stove, or the spoon you like best for tasting.

Once your water reaches a boil, salt it well. The best comparison I can make is to pleasant seawater. The water needs to be this salty whether it’s going to have pasta cooked in it or the most tender spring peas. It must be salted until it tastes good because what you’re doing isn’t just boiling an ingredient, but cooking one thing that tastes good in another, which requires that they both taste like something.

All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender spring pea would be narcissistic to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It’s not so: it doesn’t reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.

Add salt by hand so that you start to get a feel for how much it takes, and as you do, taste the water repeatedly. This may at first feel ridiculous, and then it will start to seem so useful you’ll stand by the pot feeling quite ingenious. Even though the water is boiling you can test it with your finger. If it’s well seasoned, just tapping the surface will leave enough on your skin for you to taste.

When you find yourself tasting your water, you are doing the most important thing you ever can as a cook: the only way to make anything you’re cooking taste good, whether it’s water or something more substantial, is to make sure all its parts taste good along the way. There are moments in cooking when common sense dictates not to taste—biting into a dirty beet or raw potato—but taste anything else from a few minutes after you start cooking it until it’s done. You don’t need to know what it’s supposed to taste like: what anything is supposed to taste like, at any point in its cooking, is good. This is as true for water as for other ingredients.

Boiling has a bad name and steaming a good one, but I categorically prefer boiling.

We think we’re being bullish with vegetables by putting them in water when we’re actually being gentle. There may be nothing better than the first tiny spring potatoes and turnips, their pert greens still attached, or the first baby cabbages, thickly wedged, all boiled.

Salted water seasons the vegetable, which means that by the time it comes out, it is already partially sauced. Additionally, boiling a vegetable improves the water as much as it does the vegetable. Water you’ve cooked cabbage in is better for making cabbage soup than plain water would be, and it’s easier than making chicken stock.

The best vegetables to boil will be the ones in season. They will also be the ones with the most leaves, most stalks, longest stems. Knowing that you can simply boil the expensive, leafier vegetables at the farmers’ market should help justify your buying them. All you have to do is cut them up and drop them in water, and you can drop all of them in water.

When you go hunting for vegetables for your boiling pot, don’t be deterred by those stems and leaves. Though it’s easy to forget, leaves and stalks are parts of a vegetable, not obstacles to it. The same is true for the fat and bones of animals, but I’m happy to leave that for now. You can cook them all.

We most regularly boil broccoli. If you do so obligatorily, I want to defend it. If you don’t do it, because you’ve always held boiling in contempt, I suggest you buy a head of broccoli that is dark jade green, stalky, and bold; and while you’re at it, one of cauliflower, whole, with light, leafy greens still attached; and boil each on its own. If only withered, mummified versions of either are available, they can be improved by slow stewing with olive oil, garlic, and lemon peel, but for boiling, only the best will do.

To boil broccoli or cauliflower, cut off the big, thick, main stem, or core. Cut the remainder of the heads into long pieces that are more like batons than florets, including stem and leaves on as many of them as you can. Cut the stem or core you’ve removed into equivalent-sized pieces and include them in your boiling, or save them to turn into the pesto of cores and stems.

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 1950s 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 favor of shocking vegetables is that it keeps them from changing color. 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.

It almost always makes sense, if you’ve bought a slew of vegetables, to cook more than you need for a given meal. If you can muster it, you should go ahead and cook vegetables you’re not even planning to use that night. The chapter How to Stride Ahead explains how and why to cook a lot of vegetables at once, then transform them into meals on subsequent days. In it, I recommend roasting because you can fit a lot in your oven at one time and then go do other things. But while you have a pot of water boiling and are standing near it, let it do you proud.

The simplicity of boiling vegetables might be maligned in our country, but the idea of boiled meat is pure anathema. Meals of boiled meat, though, are cornerstones of the world’s great food cultures.

In each of the really good ones, the elements of the boiling pot are served separately. This means that you either get a very elaborate meal from one pot or the building blocks for a number of them.

In France, pot-au-feu, a traditional meal of boiled meat and vegetables, is served in stages: first comes a bowl of rich broth with a thin toast and a marrow-filled bone with a silver spoon for scooping, then a plate of the meat and vegetables themselves. In northern Italy, region of truffles and cream, the broth of bollito misto is served similarly, on its own, adorned with little tortellini. Once they’ve finished their broth, diners select the pieces of meat they want from gilded carts.

We are probably most familiar with the English boiled dinner, which has none of that pomp about it, and a bad reputation. To be fair, only some of boiled meats’ bad reputation owes to the British. The rest owes to it so regularly being boiled badly. There’s a misleading laxity to the terminology of boiling. In neither pot-au-feu nor bollito misto—nor the English version, for that matter—is the meat actually boiled: the term refers more to ingredients being cooked in a pot of water than to the violent rumble of a real boil. Pasta and plain vegetables are