Kitchenella: The secrets of women: heroic, simple, nurturing cookery - for everyone
A passionate, personal account of the battle to feed and nourish family and friends.The continuing story of the rise and fall of good food finds us at the end of a decade of exceptional growth and opportunity, yet once again in crisis. Our food culture has taken a turn for the worse. Recession has slowed the good food revolution as shoppers cut back on quality ingredients and head for the budget lines.Education about food is limited to the voices of TV chefs, mostly men, whose testosterone driven pursuits include hunter gathering, butchery, deep sea fishing and cooking inimitably difficult recipes. Their programmes do nothing to solve the everyday predicament of real people: putting economical, common sense food on the table. Even when a woman gets her small piece of TV airtime, she is either the love interest that licks her chocolaty fingers to camera, or she is a former author of kitchen bibles advising viewers to cobble together meals using unhealthy and expensive processed ingredients. Progress is slowing down, thanks to food television.We believe in food icons, from Delia to Jamie, but their philosophies are no longer convincing, because they cannot possibly understand the predicament of the average family, living through recession and trying to do it right in the kitchen.Where are the cooks with wit, who work out the budget and plan an easy dish that efficiently feeds family and friends? In A Taste of Real Life Rose Prince calls for a return to a system of cooking that is nourishing and energy efficient. Food addressed to real people in real life situations.Full of logical, economical and imaginative recipes that solve the modern cook's dilemma, A Taste of Real Life will teach you the skills of those teachers who work without books, the 'mothers' and the cooks who subsequently learned from them, to decisively show you the easy way to cook and shop.
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Kitchenella
THE SECRETS OF WOMEN:
HEROIC, SIMPLE, NURTURING COOKERY – FOR EVERYONE
ROSE PRINCE
Photographs by LAURA HYND
For my children
Contents
Photographic Insert
Introduction
Quick, Cheap and Filling
Things that Please Children
Fast, Good-For-You Lunches and Suppers
A Slow-Cooked Pot
A Pot to Bake in the Oven
A Plate of Something Special
A Clever Rehash
Halfway to a Meal
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Photographic Insert
PLATE 1: White bean well-dressed soup
PLATE 2: Summer vegetable broth
PLATE 3: Chickpea and tomato ten-minute soup; Notepaper bread
PLATE 4: Spiced butter and yellow split peas; Instant soft flatbreads
PLATE 5: Macaroni cheese with sweet cooked tomato
PLATE 6: Braised chicken rice, steamed with allspice
PLATE 7: Apple tart — quick
PLATE 8: Birthday cake
PLATE 9: Warm tomatoes, oregano and feta cheese with fridge dough breads
PLATE 10: Top rump steak with tender herbs and warm olive oil sauce; Potato, garlic and cream gratin
PLATE 11: Léa’s leaves and fried bread, with a smoked-herring dressing; Jacqueline’s tomato and olive oil
PLATE 12: Crisp smoked bacon, polenta cubes, bittersweet chicory
PLATE 13: Pan-fried plaice with lettuce hearts and lemon
PLATE 14: Monkfish and bacon cakes; Caper and tarragon mayonnaise
PLATE 15: Eighty degrees beef
PLATE 16: Oxtail stew
PLATE 17: Young lamb shoulder, shrugged off the bone
PLATE 18: Pot-cooked spring chicken with young veg
PLATE 19: Argiano pork with herbs and garlic
PLATE 20: Mother’s aubergines
PLATE 21: Picnic pie
PLATE 22: Banana and almond cake
PLATE 23: Crepe-wrapped asparagus with grated cheese
PLATE 24: Raspberry clotted-cream fool, with honeycomb
PLATE 25: Wild garlic omelette, with chilli, cheese and ham
PLATE 26: Roast rabbit saddle, stuffed with liver and kidneys; Slow-cooked rabbit
PLATE 27: Potato, beef and parsley hash
PLATE 28: Toffee bread pudding
PLATE 29: Courgette, basil and egg soup
PLATE 30: Risotto
PLATE 31: Aunts’ pasta, with sweet cooked tomato and anchovy
PLATE 32: Onion tart
Introduction
My earliest memories are full of the voices of women, telling you things. Their kitchen secrets, handed down, were at the heart of good suppers. Whispered advice or stern warnings, they are still there in my head, impossible to rub out, simply because they are useful. I collect these morsels now. I can’t let something good pass by without asking ‘how?’ In all honesty, I cannot cook unless I tune in to that busy frequency of influence.
This is a book about feminine cookery, at its best heroic: generous, practical and nurturing. It is more than a bag of worthy survival tools (though it has a proven track record in that respect). Feminine cookery is creative. Nurture is a deal, an agreement that can be a real struggle to sustain. The heroic feminine cook, Kitchenella, transforms it into a gentle art.
For most, stepping into the kitchen raises one dilemma or another. It is rarely the leisurely activity unrealistically promoted in the media. Often the need to cook is just a matter of answering hunger with little time and limited ingredients: dinners made with whatever can be bought in a late-night shop on the way home from work. But the idea of a pan filled with a hot, bubbling lava of melting salty cheese and tomatoes, ready within minutes to eat with bread, dissolves the problem, leaving behind a work of beauty.
We eye our children and plan to please them, but how? On the one hand they are difficult customers who run up a lot of credit, on the other they are much loved people we spend far too little time with. We aim to choose food that avoids arguments, but encourages adventure: sweet cooked tomato, whizzed into a non-bitty sauce, to use in at least seven dishes, has become a fridge standby to bless. Gently-spiced rice with chicken is an everyday staple, the crispest roast potatoes or pancakes a treat. This is family food with a long history of clean plates.
Balancing the extravagance of a special roasting joint by making good use of every scrap; planning the week’s meals ahead or creating dishes that are filling, cheap, yet still gorgeous to behold – these are typical tasks faced by home cooks, and need a practical, unselfish approach. It is work that is often done – astonishingly – for little thanks.
This is not to suggest bringing back the martyred, Fifties kitchen deity, whisking up unmatchable sponges each day at teatime. Recipes for modern life need to be realistic, and flexible enough to fit into very busy lives, yet the answers still lie in the feminine approach to cookery. Only it is not there. Trends show a decline in cooking fresh ingredients from scratch, while the consumption of convenience food continues to rise. Since women remain the main carers of others, their voices are silent and secrets are not passed on. The result is a generation of kitchen orphans growing up without any sort of good food ancestry.
Meanwhile, our chief food influence comes from men. Chefs dominate television cookery shows yet their efforts do not appear to convert more viewers to take up cooking – in spite of the hype to the contrary. We witness them telling mothers how to feed their children then weeping when their pleading is ignored. Viewers admit that while they are entertained, ultimately they are put off, even frightened to cook.
