Imperative cooking: menus in the home
A COLUMNIST in Nice-Matin recently attacked the tendency for restaurant menus to become, shall we say, discursive. One can guess what some of his colleagues could get up to with their local Salade Nicoise: Pedigree Ratte potatoes freshly dug from our own specially chosen and graded soil, gently washed in crystal water and cooked in the traditional Provençal diable, then tenderly stripped of their skins, laid side by side with Roma tomatoes, newly plucked from their tresses, peeled and sliced, both anointed with a fine drizzle of extra-virgin, first-pressing olive oil, its sombre brooding green lightened by eggs, taken dew-fresh this morning from the hens' bottoms, boiled until the whites firm and yolks a soft sunrise golden, and all topped with the finest tuna landed from our own boats, anchovies freshly de-salted after their loving burial in robust and cleansing Mediterranean salt, and the dish speckled with olives, olives the very essence of the Midi, small Nicois luques, cracked olives, the stones bulging from their flesh in an orgy of extravagant sensation.
You know the sort of thing.
In restaurants, the discursive menu is, of course, silly, but there might be a use for it in the home. Generally the use of written menus in private houses is pretentious, though Imperative cooks will have learned that verbal warnings are essential. So many guests have only two or three courses in their own pathetic homes that it is only good manners to warn them of what is to come. Otherwise they wolf down all the bread they can lay their hands on as soon as they are seated, tank through the Nicoise, fish soup, rouille, croutons and the skate in black butter as if there was no tomorrow, and then can't do justice to the daube, salad, Gorgonzola and fruits pickled in alcohol when they arrive.
Unable to eat, they become restless and bored and start advancing progressive opin- ions about the advantages of rail over motor-cars, or squabbling with their spous- `I'll wait until it comes out in paperback and English.' es. What a chap likes to look at when he is eating, apart from the exciting things on his own plate, is other chaps manifestly and robustly tucking into the food. A line of grin) unmoving lips above a row of precociously sated bellies and arms feebly pushing round unwanted food at the end of a fork, or trying to hide it behind a discarded piece of bread, does not encourage those who might other- wise enjoy their grub to do so.
But, as I say, such warnings could be ver- bal. The discursive written menu has quite other possibilities because it purports to tell the story behind the dinner, what the cook has done. How useful if we could persuade Rachel Stephenson to offer us a truthful, discursive menu when next she invites us: Salade Nicoise — ma facon: potatoes I picked up in the supermarket without think- ing whether they would be the sort to boil and use in a salad and, anyway, I don't know and have never been bothered to find out about the uses of different sorts of potatoes, boiled overlong, some floury, some hard, mixed with tasteless tomatoes from Holland (they looked lovely), which produced lots of pips and water, which did not mix with the mixture of cooking oil and bland olive oil I used (I had to use cooking oil. The olive ran out. How was I to know you needed so much? If I'd got a bigger bottle, we'd have lots left over. We don't use it everyday, you know); three-week-old eggs really hard- boiled and left in the water so the yolks are green.
The cheapest tinned tuna emptied with its own brine into the mire of floury potatoes, cooking oil and tomato water. Those seven stuffed olives Harold had in the cocktail cabi- net from last Boxing Day drinks party. Instead of anchovies, a tin of sardines. Though the book says they are very different, I can't believe it. They both come in tins and they didn't have any anchovies up the road. I have a job to do. Entertaining friends is meant to be fun not hard work. There are limits to the effort I am prepared to make; in fact, quite a lot of them.
Last, an idea of my own: some prawns, small frozen ones. We used them last weekend with the avocados so I kept a few back for the Nigoise as decoration.
Even if Rachel is unlikely to show us her menu, the act of writing it might shame her into giving up dinner parties altogether. What a relief that would be.
Digby Anderson
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