David
Cooking for Friends
Wood
David
Cooking for Friends
Wood
David
Cooking for Friends
Wood
Photographs by Gillean Proctor
Copyright © 2018 by David Wood
Whitecap Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For more information contact Whitecap Books, at Suite 209, 314 West Cordova Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 1E8 Canada.
The information in this book is true and complete to the best of the author’s knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author or Whitecap Books Ltd. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information.
Whitecap Books is known for its expertise in the cookbook market, and has produced some of the most innovative and familiar titles found in kitchens across North America. Visit our website at www.whitecap.ca.
editors Penny Hozy and Patrick Geraghty
design Andrew Bagatella
food photography Gillean Proctor
food styling Gillean Proctor
proofreader Penny Hozy
ebook conversion Ken Geniza
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wood, David, 1944 May 7-, author
Cooking for friends / David Wood.
ISBN 978-1-77050-300-7 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-77050-346-5 (ePUB)
1. Cooking. 2. Entertaining. 3. Cookbooks. I. Title.
TX731.W66 2018 641.5’68 C2017-908081-4
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities and the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Nous reconnaissons l’appui financier du gouvernement du Canada et la province de la Colombie-Britannique par le Book Publishing Tax Credit.
17 18 19 20 21 22 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in China by Regent Publishing Services
To my Family, my Friends, and our loyal Customers near and far, whose encouragement and enthusiasm over many years have enabled me to expand and deepen my understanding and enjoyment of food. Your open hearts and curious minds have taught me the many ways in which both food and friend-ship are enriched by the presence of the other.
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contents
foreword ix
introduction 1
BREAKFASt 10
SOUPs 28
PASTA AND RISOTTo 36
SALADs 56
before dinner 72
FISh 88
CHICKen 100
MEAt 116
(GREAT COMPANY) VEGETABLES AND POTATOEs 146
EASY BAKINg 166
EVERYDAY DESSERTs 178
SPECIAL OCCASION DESSERTs 188
BASICs 224
acknowledgments 243
index 245
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foreword
Toronto to Salt Spring Island
When David Wood Food Book was published in the fall of 1987, the Food Shop in downtown Toronto had been open for three and a half years and we were enjoying a certain popular success. But financially the business was not doing well, and I was at a loss as to what to do about it.
Our food costs were high, but so too were our prices, despite my egalitarian desire to have the shop be accessible to anyone interested in food. The unfortu-nate fact was that I did not value my own efforts enough to be comfortable raising our prices, and was not hard-headed enough to manage the business with a firmer hand. I had not yet learned Einstein’s definition of insanity: continuing to do everything the same way while hoping for a different result.
Around this time, I was introduced to a businessman with a background in supermarkets who felt ready to move into the world of specialty food. Backing him was a small group of investors prepared to build a newer, larger version of the two shops we already had. We came to an agreement that instead of start-ing from scratch, they would invest in our company, expand the business, and build a new shop with us. It was an attractive idea that at the very last minute fell victim to the stock market crash of October 1987, and I was back to solving our problems on my own.
The following January, Nancy and I went to the Fancy Food Show in California. We rented a car and drove up the coast to Mendocino, only to find the restaurant that we had wanted to visit closed. We turned back and stopped late in the after-noon at the Station House Café in Point Reyes. While we waited for the food, away from the intensity of daily life with our minds free to wander, we jotted down on a placemat the things that we wanted in our lives. Our wish list contained things most people would include—time for family and friends, a compatible community, safe surroundings, a benign climate—as well as things more specific to us, like liv-ing in the country. Opposite this we wrote down the things we actually had: we lived downtown in a big city with little time for anything except work and holding things together at home; from my perspective, there was not enough time with the kids, from her perspective, there was perhaps too much. The gap between what we had and what we said we wanted was enormous, but by the time we were on the plane home, I was determined to bring the two lists together.
It was clear that freeing myself from the business would be an essential part of this, and I wondered whether the agreement that had almost happened in October might provide the answer, and whether it could be revived. It turned out that it could, and we closed the deal in June 1988: the investors put in the money to build a large new store, while I agreed to stay on for two years and remain as a minority
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shareholder. At the end of two years I would be free to leave.
The store we built opened in June 1989. In many ways it was an immediate suc-cess: the store was beautiful, overflowing with food from around the world (local was not on our radar), and people loved it. But parking was very difficult, and we did not get the customers we needed. In a stronger cash position, we could have weathered a year or two of slow sales, but cash was a luxury we did not have. I found out later that our Vietnamese cooks were not impressed with my explana-tions about parking or needing more time and, after the store closed, they told me they were not surprised the store did not make money. Opposite the front door of the shop, on the other side of Yonge Street, a side street ran away to the west. According to feng shui, a road running away from your front door will carry away all your money. It would have been nice to know this before we signed the lease—but I doubt that it would have made any difference: even today it’s hard to imagine myself turning down a location because of feng shui.
At Christmas we had good but not great sales, and in the New Year the inves-tors brought in a consultant to replace the man they had backed. Over the following months, as consultants came and went, I discovered that almost every-one who looked at our business from the outside was convinced that they could do a better job of running it than we did. They thought buying, cooking, and sell-ing food should be as simple as it sounds, although I could not for the life of me understand why—all I saw were the many parts we tried to make work together that stubbornly refused to cooperate. There was a certain satisfaction when one of the consultants—himself on the way out, walking papers in hand—acknowledged that running a food shop was more complicated than it looked.
Nine months after opening the doors to the new store, the company was out of money and the board decided to look for a buyer. They were not able to find one. We were saved by two things: the first was that everyone thought running our business was not as difficult as we made it; the second was our catering manager’s talent for friendship. Krystyna Schmidt was brilliant at her job and, in the course of it, she had got to know one of our very good customers, whose husband turned out to be in the business of buying and selling companies. Krystyna suggested she and I talk to him. I remembered a piece of wisdom once offered to a fundraiser friend: If you go to a potential donor and ask for money, what you are most likely to get is free advice. But if what you want is money, ask for advice. Krystyna and I went to see our customer’s husband and we asked for advice. Within six weeks he had bought the company—for $100, it’s true—but he had also assumed all of the liabilities, including those to the Canada Revenue Agency, for which the directors (including me) were personally liable.
The sale came with new management, some new money, and it bought some time. But the light of this sale, which we had briefly hoped might be shining at the end of the tunnel, turned out to be an oncoming train, and by the end of June we had little choice but to close down the new store, hoping to slow the cash drain and give the other two stores and catering business another lease on life. Barely a
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year after opening, we walked away from the new store and spent the night mov-ing out as much of the inventory as we could. As the sun came up, I locked the front door of the shop, posted a note of thanks to our customers, and turned out the lights. Two weeks later, Nancy and I, the three children, and the dog climbed into our minivan, turned north out of the city, and headed for the West Coast. The two other stores and the catering business, which we had hoped to save, did not sur-vive much longer. They were sold to two different buyers who ran them for a while and eventually closed them. They, no more than we, were able to find the magic formula to make them successful.
Shortly after arriving on Salt Spring, I got in touch with the dairy inspector for Vancouver Island and explained my newly formed plan to get a small flock of sheep, milk them, make cheese, and sell it locally. My inspiration came from Olivia Mills, an English woman who almost single-handedly revived sheep dairying in Britain in the 80’s and literally wrote the book on it (Practical Sheep Dairying, for anyone with the same ambition). If the inspector thought milking sheep on Salt Spring Island was a poor career choice, he was gracious enough not to say so.
Olivia had talked about how big you had to be to make a go of making sheep cheese. I thought I could survive if I had just enough sheep for me to handle the milking, cheese making, and selling all by myself—like they do in France and Spain, I said. She gave me a pitying look: “It depends on how much like a peasant you want to live.”
I learned from the inspector that a goat dairy had recently closed its doors on Gabriola Island, just up the coast from Salt Spring. A few years earlier, a young woman had enrolled in agricultural college in Quebec, where she had met and fallen in love with a young French-Canadian. They shared a desire to milk goats and make cheese, which eventually led them to a honeymoon spent driving a school bus full of goats from Montreal to the West Coast. Over the next three years they built a goat farm, a milking parlour, and a dairy on her father’s property, with the father as engineer and their own hands doing the work. It was not made any easier by a very challenging health inspector, but eventually they began produc-tion late in 1987. Less than a year later they closed it down, worn out by the hard labour and a hesitant market for goat cheese, which was new to the West Coast at the time. They mothballed their cheese plant, closed the doors, and handed the keys to her father.
I had heard this story in 1990, but it was not until 1995 that I was ready to do something about it. By then I had nearly five years’ experience looking after sheep and some limited experience in sheep milking (not limited enough, from the sheep’s point of view). I had travelled, studied, experimented, and got to know sheep in a way that I had never imagined, but in truth, I had very little to show for it but a succession of doubtful looks and bad jokes. I realized it was time to get down to business or stop talking about it.
I called Jim Brown, the owner of the mothballed goat farm, and asked if he was interested in selling his dairy equipment. He suggested I come take a look, and I
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asked a friend to come along to temper my enthusiasm. Jim met us at the milking parlour, showed us around, and left us to our own devices. It was much larger than I had expected, and the way it was put together was clearly the work of an engineer. Everything I would need to get started was here; for an aspiring cheese maker, it was perfect.
We were invited back to the house for lunch and Jim asked for my thoughts. I told him the truth, that my intention was to start on a smaller scale, and he smiled politely. When lunch was over, he slipped away for a few moments, reappearing as we were leaving, his hand in his pocket. In front of everybody, he asked me how much I planned to pay for the milking and cheese-making equipment I would need. I had no idea—I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet (foreshadowing financial bumps on the road ahead …). I grasped for a plausible number and finally came up with twenty-five thousand dollars. Jim took his hand out of his pocket and handed me a piece of paper. On it, he had written $20,000. I shook his hand and thanked him.
Two days later, Nancy came out of the house looking for me. She said the bank was on the phone; they wanted to know whether I had written a large cheque to someone called Jim. I had to confess to her and to the bank that that was exactly what I had done. We had passed the point of no return.
For most of the last five years in Toronto, I had been squeezed out of the kitchen and into a suit, and I knew what I wanted when we arrived on Salt Spring was to get my hands back in the dirt. Learning how to look after a sheep and milk it is a foolproof and quite pleasant way to do that.
Sheep have small teats with just enough room for a finger and thumb, and milk-ing one by hand is not easy. I did master the technique in the end and used the milk for cheese-making practice. After we received our dairy license we switched to machine milking, which was more productive but decidedly less pleasant for both sheep and milker. Because most sheep produce milk only between spring and fall, I looked forward to having the winter off. But seasonality has its drawbacks, as I learned at the end of the first summer, when the sheep dried up and cheese sales came to an end. I could not build a business on a seasonal product, and searched out a year-round source of goat milk on Vancouver Island. It was the first step away from my plan for a simple life.
One of the things Salt Spring offered was the opportunity for a fresh start in business, to avoid the mistakes I had made in Toronto. A major one was growing too big and too fast. Soon after we started to sell cheese in 1996, a journalist asked me about my plans; I said I hoped I would have the brains to know when to stop growing. Of course I did not. “Big enough” is a point that is gone before you know you are at it. Over the twenty two years we have been in business, we have relied on growing sales to cover escalating costs like a dog chasing its tail, on the road to profitability. I don’t think there was any time during those years when we were at a perfect size, no point that I would choose to go back to, even if it were possible. Perfect is relative to the life that you want and what you like to do—a constantly moving target.
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My vision of a small farm operation where everything could be done by a few people has long since gone out the window. The turning point came after we had been making cheese for six years, as a result of a conversation I had had many times before that started with someone asking how things were going in the cheese business. I would launch into a long explanation about how it was not really a business, more a way of life, and that things were pretty good, but if truth be told, it was a lot of work for not much return. Eventually I could no longer believe my own answer. Getting up at five in the morning to milk sheep did not have the appeal it once had, and I was tired of making excuses. If I was not happy with what I was getting from my work, it was time for a change.
The past 10 years have been devoted to changing a way of life into a business. We are getting there. We have an excellent and committed staff, a dedicated man-agement team, and very loyal customers. I cannot imagine living and working in a better place. I am particularly fortunate having my three children work in the business. They bring very different skills than mine, and I know that many of those skills are what the business needs in order to grow. I don’t want to disparage what I have done in creating it, but I feel that we have been stuck for a few years now at a size and in a way of doing things that are no longer appropriate to our stage of growth. I am optimistic that my children and our other managers have the bal-ance of talents to imagine the future and bring it about.
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1
Food is about much more than nourishment. There are many wonderful things about food, but the greatest is that it opens a Pandora’s box full of doors, to variety and excitement, memory, comfort, texture, and flavour, and most of all to the com-pany and conversation of good friends.
We all want our friends to know how much we appreciate and value their friendship, and there are many ways in which we can do that, but they all, in one way or another, involve an act of generosity on our part. Cooking is my way of giv-ing, and I suspect there is a good chance that it is yours, too, given that you are reading this rather than leafing through a coffee table door-stopper entitled “Dry-walling for Friends.”
Like you, many things draw me to food, but near the top of the list is the way that food works its magic in our lives two or three times a day, seven days a week. Not every meal has to be a star-studded gala (I am told it would get dull after a while, like staying in hotels); but twice a day we have an opportunity for personal pleasure and expressing gratitude. Cooking for our friends provides us with the opportunity for both.
Gratitude is something we think about a lot these days, and properly so: we routinely take too much in life for granted, and forget to say thank you to both peo-ple and to the food we eat. If this sounds a bit New Age for a sensible cookbook (which this one is, obviously), I apologize, but there is no question that the more I understand what it takes to get food onto a plate, the more I appreciate the contri-butions made by all the different parts. At the very least, gratitude is in order. And enjoyment; I would not want to be killing and eating things and not appreciating their gift (even if it was not exactly their choice to end up on the plate …).
But overall and hands down, the best thing about food is that it brings us together with friends and family (who are also friends)—it eases conversations and opens our hearts and minds, even to those who on first acquaintance we did not imagine could be our friends. As Dr. Johnson observed more than 250 years ago: “A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.” While today we would wish he had used a more inclusive pronoun, his sentiment cannot be faulted. There is no better way to keep our friendships in good repair than to invite our friends into our homes and cook for them.
what makes good food?
I owe my taste in food to a Scottish upbringing and Elizabeth David.
I grew up in post-war Scotland, a world of grey days and soot-blackened build-ings. Food was for sustenance, not pleasure, and anyone who was interested in what they were eating was probably foreign, maybe even English. Scottish machismo prided itself on being able to subsist, as Dr. Johnson noted, on what in England they feed to horses. I have no idea where the idea came from that well brought-up people did not discuss food at the table; it was, like so much else in
Introduction
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British life, one of those rules you were just meant to know. So we did not talk about food—at the table or anywhere else.
There were, even in Scotland, houses where people cared about their food, and I was fortunate enough to live in one of them. The quality of our food was always good at home, although the preparation tended toward the basic end of the spec-trum. My stepfather was a Scot of the old school variety and his favourite meal was “mince and breakups”—ground beef in a thin gravy and potatoes boiled until they fell apart. My mother had been at school in France before the war but it did her no good when it came to cooking for him. She talked to us, the children, about real food, but not at the table.
In those grey days before the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and avocado pears came into our lives, good cooking still followed the rules set by Escoffier and others during the Golden Age, even though post-war shortages made it impossible to actually make any of the recipes. This was the time when Britain earned its repu-tation for stodgy puddings and overcooked vegetables, and menus featured Brown Windsor soup and the memorably named Spotted Dick. The food may have been monotonous and lacking in imagination, but in our house there was always plenty of it, and for that I will always be grateful.
The seeds of my interest in food and cooking sowed by my mother eventu-ally sprouted and then grew through trial, error, and books. My first attempts to cook were not for friends, but for myself. In my early twenties, I worked briefly for a company that had once been the family business, and where I still had enough connections to get a job. I was very fortunate to be sent for training to Mexico City.
I lived alone and quickly grew tired of eating on my own in restaurants. The alternative was to try cooking for myself (there being no other volunteers) and I fell into reading the recipe column in the London Times. I am embarrassed to admit that I received this every day by airmail, a lapse from life in the real world I can only explain by having had a very sheltered upbringing. But I did learn to cook, and to this day I retain a soft spot in my heart for Katie Stewart, the author of the column at the time.
My early heroes were the stars of “Nouvelle Cuisine,” many of whom, like Paul Bocuse, had trained under Fernand Point at La Pyramide in Vienne. But most of all I admired the English food writer Elizabeth David. For pure food reading pleasure, there is for me nothing that can touch the Introduction to French Provincial Cook-ing. Largely because of her, the food I am most drawn to is what used to be called la cuisine bourgeoise, the thoughtful and economical cooking of the French mid-dle classes—the doctors, lawyers, priests, and modest landowners. Long before the 100-mile diet, this cooking style depended almost entirely on the careful use of local and seasonal ingredients, although in season they were able to supplement their larders with wonderful things from all across France—melons from Cavail-lon, asparagus and butter from Normandy, fish from Brittany, and oysters from Les Landes, all as fresh as if they had picked them themselves. To us, FedEx is a marvel (on most days), but it is nothing compared to the railways of the late nine-teenth century (which I am just about old enough to remember).
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The result of these bourgeois tastes (as well as age, I suspect) is that I would much rather eat in a bistro than a modern fusion restaurant. I think the chefs who are in the forefront of modern cooking are wonderfully creative and brilliant, but my preference is for two or three sensibly sized courses rather than a dozen differ-ent plates so small that I need to stop for a hamburger on the way home. I prefer that the chef be more of an artisan, less of an artist. I like to be the one who decides if what I am eating needs more salt, and not be told by the server that Chef likes it the way it is. Much as I am in favour of keeping food and cooking alive and relevant, and admire creative cooks who push boundaries with foams and essences, for my own pleasure I like to be able to recognize what is on my plate for what it was before it entered the kitchen. If I sound like a curmudgeon, it is because I am (a bit).
what makes a good cook?
A good cook must love to cook. Without that, you can forget it, for a cook who can-not find pleasure in the processes of cooking will easily become bored. It is a good sign if you enjoy cooking for yourself alone, and are quite happy to take the time to make something interesting even when no one is coming to dinner.
Nothing else is essential. Qualities like great technique, the ability to come up with interesting new recipes, or a powerful belief in your own talent are certainly nice to have, but are only necessary if you are planning on opening a three-star restaurant. But most of us, wisely, are not, for there is no shorter route to a life of fatal stress and financial ruin.
There are other qualities I admire in cooks who do food well, and one thing they will almost certainly agree on is that it takes more than good food to make a meal memorable. Meals that leave a lasting impression do not always necessitate amaz-ing food—in fact, the food can sometimes be quite ordinary. My definition of good food is not that it stands out, but just the opposite: that it fits in. Without harmony between all the different elements of an evening—food, atmosphere, setting, con-versation, mood—there is no balance, and the chances of creating an experience that people will remember are shot in the foot.
As people who love to cook, we can be tempted into making amazing food for our friends, simply because we can. The time for that is when your friends are as passionate about food as you are, and are happy to spend the evening talking about it; go for it and let your passion show. But when, as sometimes happens, your friends are not as food-obsessed as you, serving amazing food runs the risk of upsetting the applecart of the evening. Food that does not demand to be the centre of attention will be a much better background for a broad-ranging conversation, and allow for some other element, such as the pleasure of the first outdoor dinner of the summer, to be the memory that people take away.
Bear in mind, too, that the consequence of serving amazing food to non-foodies is that you will never be invited anywhere again. Friends will be convinced their
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food can never come up to your standards (which may be true), and they may also be convinced that you only eat things that are very exotic, very expensive, or very difficult to make, and this is almost certainly not true. We who love food must take care not to intimidate our friends by dazzling them with our own brilliance. It can easily be mistaken for smugness.
I am not particularly good at technique (though I get better with practice), nor especially creative when it comes to inventing new dishes. But there is one thing I am good at, and that is making food that works for the occasion at hand, what-ever it may be. I can come up with a menu that reflects the setting, enhances the atmosphere, and supports the conversation, and when that is done, that is within my skill set. (It is not a good idea to plan a menu around recipes you cannot make!)
There is another talent I have observed in cooks I admire, and which I have tried to cultivate within myself—the ability to produce something interesting out of not very much. A good cook can look in a sparsely populated fridge and find the makings of a meal; non-cooks look in the same fridge and complain there is noth-ing to eat. I like the challenge of the sparse fridge, supplemented by supplies from the larder (usually pasta, I admit).
At the end of the day, what a good cook wants is to be able to cook for them-selves and their family and friends, to make satisfying and delicious things to eat, to welcome guests to the table with warmth and generosity, and, in the process, to give pleasure to themselves and to others. Learning to trust your instincts is an important part of the process. It is easier said than done, of course, but remember that inside each of us is a feeling for food that is ours and ours alone. No one else can cook like you. If food is one of the ways you show your talents to the world, trust that you know what you’re doing and do not hold back. Take risks but don’t be stupid. Some people say that you shouldn’t try out a new dish on guests; I would say it depends on the guests. With that in mind I would also say: just the one course.
One last piece of advice that over the years has made me appear a better cook than I am, which I have always attributed to Julia Child (perhaps wrongly, but if anyone deserves the credit, it is she): a cook should never apologize (for their food, at least). You may think you have made the most unholy mess of a recipe, and per-haps you have, but the chances are good that your friends will have no idea unless you make the mistake of telling them. Julia’s advice, and mine to you, is to let them enjoy your food in blissful ignorance.
an appreciation of taste
What is it that makes some foods go so well together? Think of all the taste combi-nations we come across every day that are so commonplace we don’t even question them: lemon with fish; salt and vinegar on French fries; horseradish or mustard with roast beef; duck and orange; eggs and bacon; tart apples and sharp cheese;
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introduction
coffee and chocolate. Why do these combinations work so well and others not at all?
I have wondered about this for a long time, but did not understand the reasons until Helen, my wife, gave me a copy of Taste by Sybil Kapoor, an English cookery writer who has made it her mission to understand the workings of our taste buds. To summarize her work and that of many others, there are just five tastes, each experienced by a different part of the mouth. The familiar four are: sweet, sour, bit-ter, and salt. The fifth, which has been identified only quite recently, is “umami,” a combination of the Japanese words meaning “delicious” and “taste.” In English it is normally referred to as “savoury,” and the classic examples are soy sauce and chicken stock; meat and cheese are both umami.
Sybil Kapoor has done a wonderfully thorough job of exploring how the five tastes work together, and I have no intention of plagiarizing her work here. I have however tried to introduce some of her ideas into these recipes. I completely rec-ommend her book to anyone interested in food. (Taste, by Sybil Kapoor. Mitchell Beazley, London, 2003.)
Have you ever tried putting a twist of lemon zest into a sweet espresso? The coffee is bitter, the sugar is sweet, and the combination can be delicious and satis-fying at the end of a meal. But adding a zing of lemon transforms it, and here’s why: almost no food has just one taste—most are a combination of two or even more. In this case, the sugar is only sweet, but the coffee, while mainly bitter, has a lit-tle sweetness of its own. The lemon is mostly sour, but it, too, has some sweetness and also some bitterness. The bitter element of the lemon tempers the much more pronounced bitterness of the coffee, and the lemon’s sourness reveals the coffee’s hidden sweetness. And, more obviously, the sugar sweetens the lemon.
You might say: If you want your coffee to be sweeter, just add more sugar. But that would be to ignore the subtleties of taste. The lemon does not just make the coffee taste sweeter—it transforms it into a different drink. It introduces sourness, a taste element that was not there before, and allows interactions between the dif-ferent tastes to produce a much more sophisticated drink than sugar alone can do. Another example is adding an anchovy or Parmesan cheese to a pasta sauce instead of salt; both anchovy and Parmesan are umami, and anchovies introduce sweetness as well. The result is a complexity of taste that you cannot easily put your finger on, but which is the opposite of flat, bland, and boring. It stimulates the appetite and leaves us wanting more.
To the best of my understanding, there is no simple set of rules to tell us how to combine tastes and produce wonderful food—at this point, at least, there are only the experiences of our taste buds and the tastes of others to educate us. When you come across something that works, particularly if it is an unfamiliar combi-nation, try to identify what is going on. If you understand why it works, you can begin to play with taste in your own cooking and open the door to a whole new way of thinking about and experiencing food. You do not need to add a lot; in most cases I have found that it only takes a small amount of a new taste element to add a sophisticated complexity to a recipe.
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raw materials
After a couple of months of living on Salt Spring, we acquired a small number of sheep, who, in the natural way of things, gave birth to lambs, and eventually it came time to turn these into lamb chops. Mike Byron, a local farmer with a heart of gold, took me under his wing and showed me how to do it. It was a practical decision on my part (it’s good to know how to do the things that need to be done on a farm), and a philosophical one, too (as a meat eater, I wanted to understand how meat arrives on my plate). The reality was not as unpleasant as I had expected, and I particularly liked the fact that the deed was done right where the animals were raised, with the lambs subjected to as little stress as we could manage. There was no getting away from the fact that death was part of the process, but knowing that I had had a hand in giving the lambs a comfortable life made it less difficult to accept. They were not the most tender lamb chops I have ever eaten, but it was the meat I felt the least conflicted about eating. When we buy meat from the store, we don’t know about the conditions by which the animal was slaughtered—in fact, no one wants us to know what goes on in there. However, we can ask these question where we buy meat, and, sooner or later, the butchers and stores will get the mes-sage that this is something they need to care about.
Animal welfare is just one of many food issues we deal with every time we pick up a carton of milk in the supermarket or a bunch of carrots at a farmers’ market. These issues are not quite as confusing as we might think, because the fact is that we already have an opinion on many of them. Do you only buy wild fish? Are you a vegetarian or vegan? What about free range eggs? What do you think about GMO products? Would you like some foie gras? Or veal? Unpasteurized cheese? Organic, or local, or both? There is no wrong answer here—whatever our answer, it is the correct one, because although the list goes on and on, most of the time we know where we stand.
As cooks, we are people who like to eat, and our choices put a strong empha-sis on taste. Of course, there is more to food than flavour; if that was all we cared about, veal, foie gras, and raw milk cheese would be flying off the shelf. We would only eat strawberries in June and July, never in winter, and only choose foods that are locally grown and raised, not transported halfway around the world to get to us.
All of us—carnivores, vegetarians, and vegans alike—have to consider whether we buy local or global, where we stand on organic and genetically modified produc-tion, what we think about the scale on which food is produced, and monoculture crops.
For meat eaters, the issues are climate change, animal welfare and the use of hormones. We have all heard stories about the cattle rancher who keeps a few ani-mals for his own consumption, not willing to eat those he raises commercially because he knows what he pumps into them—scary stuff if the stories are true. For all the regulations that exist around food, there are none for happy meat. We are taking steps along the road, however: labelling chickens as free range, for a start
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(assuming they are). Free range may not guarantee happiness (if happiness for ani-mals is as complicated as it is for people, we may be doomed before we start), but it is a huge improvement over the caged, constrained, and air-conditioned lives lived by most of the chickens we buy. And it would be great to see farmers get together and develop standards for raising and slaughtering animals.
What about salmon? This is a big issue here on the West Coast. The best salmon from several perspectives is wild Atlantic, but it is expensive and not local, which is only fine for special occasions. The available alternative is farmed salmon, but this is not a popular choice here when most farms raise their fish in open nets that can pass sea lice on to the wild stock and make a desert of the seabed underneath; so far only a few fish are raised in land-based closed containment systems. One day we will get fish farming right (we had better if we want to keep eating it), and when that day comes, we can eat farmed salmon with no more environmental guilt than the chicken we eat—some guilt to be sure, but we eat it nonetheless, particularly when it’s raised in the open air and happy as the day is long.
What level of risk are we prepared to accept on food safety? Do we let our kids eat dirt? Or does everything we put in our mouths have to be squeaky clean and scrubbed within an inch of its life before it is safe? That is certainly what our gov-ernment appears to believe, and maybe it is what we want as a country. The price we pay is that everything starts to taste the same, distinguished only by different amounts of salt and sugar.
What does all this mean for our own food shopping? Buying free range and farm raised is a good place to start. As the Eat Local movement has grown and spread over the last 20 years, it has become clear, even if it was not before, that the best food we can buy is local and seasonal—and organic, too, although I don’t put it on quite the same level.
At the end of the day, after thinking our way through all the issues around food, knowing where we stand is one thing, sticking to it is another. My personal food choices are more about taste and being able to buy from friends and neigh-bours, but even as this idea of local and seasonal becomes more widely accepted there still remain massive, even insurmountable, practical difficulties, not least the Canadian winter. We all fall off the wagon and buy food that goes against our ethical grain, from places we don’t approve of, simply because we are human. But that does not absolve us from making up our own mind about the issues that food raises.
Here are a few things that I think it is worth spending more on, to get the best:
Vinegar for salad dressing
Parmesan cheese
Bread
Tomato paste in a tube
Olive oil for drizzling
Farm eggs
Cultured butter
Saffron
Meat, chicken, and fish with a known source
Dried pasta
Black peppercorns
Tomatoes in winter
BREAKFAST
Apple Pancakes 13
apricot and blueberry pancakes (variation) 14
Banana Pancakes 14
French Toast 15
Waffles with Strawberries and Whipped cream 17
Perfect Scrambled Eggs 20
Soft Boiled Eggs with Soldiers 21
Breakfast Wrap with Eggs, Tomatoes, and Goat Cheese 23
Poached Eggs on Toast 23
Huevos Rancheros 24
Lentils with Tortillas, Eggs, and Feta 24
A Full House (Breakfast in the Afternoon) 27
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breakfast
Breakfast is in danger of losing its soul. Take for example (and because I am most familiar with it) the English breakfast as served today. The parts are present—sausage, baked beans, fried bread, tomato, fried egg, bacon, black pudding for the brave-hearted—but the soul is missing. It is poetry read by the marine weather forecaster. When was the last time you came across a tomato cooked properly, deep reds and yellows, burned at the edges, soft enough to squish into the toast? In most places, they do not understand toast. They probably just made it that morning. Breakfast toast should not be just made; it needs to sit and cool and become slightly leathery, for how else can you spread the butter thick enough? At university, the landlady of one of my friends stored toast in the toast rack overnight so that by the morning it had just the right amount of bend, and we would fight for invitations to breakfast. When eating it with marmalade at breakfast, buttered toast is two things: toast and butter, and they should remain so until you, and not someone in the kitchen, bring them together, pref-erably one bite at a time. That other thing—where the butter has melted into the hot toast and is dripping onto your hand and the toast is soggily soft—is for teatime, and soft-boiled eggs.
Most of us are adventurous and broadminded when it comes to lunch and dinner (even elevenses) but less so at breakfast. You don’t need a wide repertoire, but you do need to care about it. Let’s give breakfast back its soul.
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david wood
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breakfast
There is one key to making perfect waffles and pancakes, and it is this: separate the eggs. Add the yolks to the batter; beat the whites to stiff peaks and fold them in very gently at the last minute. This introduces air and lightness into the batter and makes a much fluffier pancake or waffle. The difference is chalk and cheese.
These are the best pancakes I know. The modern hybrid apples—Jazz, Brae-burn, Gala, etc.—are good as they don’t go mushy when cooked.
Warm the oven to 175°F (80°C).
Peel, quarter, and core the apples. Cut each quarter cut into 3 or 4 slices.
Heat a large frying pan or griddle over medium heat, add the butter, and arrange the apple slices in the pan. Cook a few minutes on one side until lightly browned and softened; turn and cook the other side until tender but not mushy. Remove from the pan and set aside.
Whisk the yolks, yogurt, and milk in a large bowl until smooth. In a sep-arate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and baking powder.
Sprinkle most of the flour mixture on top of the liquids, and fold together gently with a spatula. Add more of the flour as necessary to make a soft and slightly soupy mixture, erring on the side of softness as the batter will firm up as it sits—remember that it is easier to add flour to a batter that is too wet than liquid to one that is too dry.
In a stand mixer or by hand, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks, adding the sugar halfway through. (The sugar is optional, but it gives the whites a firmer texture and makes folding easier.) With a rubber spatula, gently fold half the whites into the batter, then add the rest of the whites and fold again until just a few pockets of unincorporated egg white remain.
Heat the frying pan or griddle over medium-low heat. Spoon mounds of batter (about ½ cup [125 mL] each) onto the frying pan or griddle, leaving a little space between. Arrange 3 or 4 slices of the cooked apple on top of each pancake.
When a few small air bubbles begin to appear on top, turn them over and cook the other side. The outside should be a lovely golden brown, so adjust the temperature of the cooking surface as you go—up if they are too pale, and down if too dark. Take care not to overcook the pancakes—the inside should be just cooked.
They are best eaten as soon as they are ready. Serve with Greek yogurt, butter, or maple syrup. Breakfast does not get much better.
serves 4
3 apples
1 Tbsp (15 mL) butter + extra for serving
3 eggs, separated, whites set aside in a large clean bowl
½ cup (125 mL) plain yogurt (the higher the fat the better, but low fat is okay)
2 cups (480 mL) milk
2 cups (480 mL) all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp (15 mL) baking powder
1 tsp (5 mL) baking soda
2 tsp (10 mL) granulated sugar (optional)
Greek yogurt, for serving
Maple syrup, for serving
Apple Pancakes
. . . recipe continued
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