What We Cooked Today: cooking with lads Vol III

Sunday 30 March 2014

cooking with lads Vol III

poaching an egg

do you want me to tell you about poaching an egg, just a quick one. trial and error, its taken danny years, not the ones we used to have in paper pockets. they were ace. then it comes out a perfect poached egg. i did the one where you spin it. you lose a lot of the white though and if you do it wrong you get a solid orange pebble which is terrible.
so boil a lot of water. its a bit of a waste of water. if you can just have a boiled egg do that. if you do two are you poaching two different eggs or does it become one big egg?
"are they discreet?"
i boiled loads of water in a tall thing. a pan. thats it. a tall pan. a deep pan. yeah quite a lot of water and you get it to boiling point and its bubbling away, and you've broken the egg into a bowl.
and you could drop it in with vinegar. that keeps it together.
i didn't have any vinegar. so it was just spinning round and it was a vortex, like a whirlpool. remember them. then it's spinning and you've got the egg but don't break the yolk. thats a disaster. then the eggs in the vortex. then you cover with a plate thing maybe and it's spinning round like mad *dances* and its hot still and bubbling. then you leave it for two minutes and you leave the room. for two and a half minutes. imagine you're probably using your phone and just adding two, but you need to know the thirty seconds cos it goes quickly. then you need to take it out with a slotted spoon otherwise you pick up loads of water.
then you come back in and take off the lid and look inside and it will probably look like an orange pebble. you lose quite a lot of the egg as well! unless you get good at the game.
"you should get good at it"
"what was the end result was it good?"
NO it was crap.
i tried to do two but it didn't work and it broke the yolk.
i don't think it makes them taste better.
i had it on a piece of toast. the one i made didn't look very nice. did it.
"madeleine was a champion egg poacher"
she gave kari 8 slices of toast for a ferry ride.
danny's quite good at it though. he eats it with a salad for breakfast.
pepper. lots of pepper.

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When I grew up everybody knew how to cook but nobody ever thought about food. Now everybody thinks about food and hardly anyone knows how to cook. It’s an extraordinary shift in national culinary perception.
I learnt out of necessity when I came down from university to London, and realised that poverty meant cooking or starve to death. In those days there were very few restaurants and no celebrity chefs to give you delusions of culinary grandeur and refreshingly few cookbooks to live up to. My mother spent her whole early married life cooking from the two Good Housekeeping step by step guides. They came in yellow and white, contained black and white photographs and the pages were encrusted with spilt food. They were full of the food of my childhood, but I had no idea how you went about getting it from page to plate. Jocasta Innes prevented me from actully starving. Her Pauper’s Cookbook was my Good Housekeeping equivalent and quite soon I could produce two dishes: beef casserole nicoise and ginger biscuit pudding (there was another book, Cooking in a Bedsit by Katharine Whitehorn which contained a list of items one needed to embark on a culinary career, two of which were a sheet of newspaper and an open window, but I don’t remember any of her recipes). Jocasta’s two dishes appeared at just about every dinner party we ever had.
Back in the culinary desert of the Eighties, not only did you have few culinary aspirations, but you also had no money and quite likely a parent who had gone through the war and instilled in you the virtue of thrift; you only ever bought what you could afford and never threw away any leftover food. You cooked what your mother had cooked for you and shopped at the end of the day, when everything was cheap, at street markets, made stock out of bones given you by the butcher and consumed smoked salmon offcuts for a wildly extravagant treat. I am now completely unable to throw away any unfinished food and the fridge is full of saucers and bowls of tiny bits of the previous weeks meals (that was the other thing - sell-by dates did not exist. So long as it smelt right, it was ok to eat). ‘Doh mum, are you trying to kill us with these little plates of salmonella poisoning?’ my children, the fridge police, are fond of saying when they are open the fridge looking for something fashionable to eat.
Well, little plates of salmonella poisoning make an excellent weekend soup as i do not tell my children.
My daughter, who cooks by instinct far better than I ever will, has grown up with TV celebrity chef culture; our kitchen is awash with highly-coloured cookbooks, and she has absolutely no qualms about chucking stuff out of the fridge and experimenting with unfamiliar ingredients. Her cooking is flamboyant and experimental. Her kitchen gods are Nigel Slater and Mark Hix and the fact that she was brought up on a diet of sausages, shepherds pie, macaroni cheese, roast beef and kedgeree (what my mother cooked for me) has not influenced her style at all - when she is at home, our kitchen is an international melting pot: fish sauce, coconut, garlic. She makes wonderful tarte tatin and beef wellington and can knock up a miso soup whenever she feels like it.
Now that we (mostly) share a kitchen, I thought it’d be interesting to see how these two styles, essentially contradictory, worked together; how old style ‘adult’ British cooking, thrifty, leftover, filling and straightforward, could exist alongside, or perhaps be updated by, flamboyant, celebrity style modern ‘youth’ food - would we produce a strange fusion of the two and would this be of any use to those who are strapped for cash, but dying for a more exciting, perhaps even healthier diet. We thought we’d spend a year writing down what we each cooked every day to find out.