Imperative cooking: take a cold shower .10mL.0441.44 0 t.,• YOU THINK you
know about food, cook rather well and keep a good table every day, a pukka five courses? Let's take the smile off your face. Even we good cooks need a cold shower now and then. This week here is the trick which makes good cooks better and at no extra cost except effort and humility.
For the next three weeks, keep up those daily five courses but cut your shopping spending by half. It will force you to find new shops, remember old recipes and tech- niques, and rediscover discarded pleasures.
First establish what you have been spending. You don't know, do you? You don't keep accounts. You should. But it's not difficult to reconstruct. The monkfish last Friday was £3.50 a pound and you had just over £4 worth between the two of you. The beef en daube on Thursday — the daube totalled just under £3 but the wine it was cooked in took it back over £4. On Wednesday, remember, you cooked those home-made sausages — a pound's worth of pork — with white beans and the remains of Tuesday's duck (£6). It looks as if the average main course is around £4. To start with: pasta with funghi, avocados, saucis- son, potato and rollmop salad, mussels, an average of just under £1. Vegetables, salad, and fruit and cheese another £1. So the immediate cost of dinner has been a little under £6 a day. For the cost of basics bread, olive oil, butter, coffee, the dried beans with the sausage — you can certainly take it up to £8, £4 each. And that is not bad compared with the cost of eating out or pre-prepared food.
Now cut it down to £4, a dinner of £2 each, without reducing courses or quality. The trick obviously is not to cut everything. Do not cut basics; in fact spend a little more on them. These are essentially the resources that permit you to prepare and transform main ingredients. And cheaper meats and fish need more preparation. There is one exception. By making your own bread you will save more than 50p a dinner. And, since it will be better than most bought bread, it can even replace some vegetables, not only as croutons and breadcrumbs but as a pusher and mop- per.
Salad offers a little opportunity, with dandelion now in season and free. Laugh not. The Frogs are already out and after it. Vegetables also offer a few possibilities. Such is the mass demand for perfect-look- ing veg that anything with the tiniest blem- ish is often half price: who cares if he has to cut out a fingernail-sized bruise on a pep- per before cutting it up for a piperade? But there is a bigger saving: one main dish using eggs once a week will cut the main course bill from £4 to 50p. Offal will do nearly as well. My Bangladeshi butcher sells sheep's kidneys at 50p a pound. Sheep's liver is only slightly more and chicken hearts and gizzards rather less. Best of all is sheep tripe at 75p for over 2lb.
Search the high street and you should find lambs' tongues around 60p, pigs' melts 30p, boiling hens 50p a pound, ears, feet and tail as good as free. There is no diffi- culty in bringing that main course bill from £4 to well under £1 many days a week. And look what you get: the ingredients for some off the very best in French, Spanish and Italian cooking, breaded feet, offal stews with pulses, stock and meats for risotto, tongues in tomato, liver stewed in onions, stocks for soups (at least twice a week knocking a bit of the first course bill). And look up what you can do with Chinese offal recipes or how that hen can be relaunched in Indian spices.
Fish is not quite so easy. Herring, sprats and mackerel are all• between 50p and £1. But look, too, for conger tails and cod heads. They both yield meat for sauced fish dishes and the bones make stock for fish soup, rice and other starch-based dishes. Herring roes are one of the best fish for fish- cakes, and £1.30 buys more than enough.
Even good cooks are corruptible and find themselves using ingredients which call for less thought and effort. Affluent good cooks are even more easily corrupted, since money can buy off effort and time. But it also results in less variety and pleasure. The easier dishes have a monotony of their own. After three weeks on half expenditure you will be eating better, have found new shops and be ready to use your full allowance to better effect.
And you will have saved £84. What to do with it? I would say give it to the deserving poor, but that is easier said than done. Giv- ing money away effectively is a daunting task. Compared with it, earning money and saving it on food expenditure are child's play.
Digby Anderson
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