Imperative cooking: eating well on a modest income
A NEW ACADEMIC year approaches and with it we shall have the annual bleating round. Leftie journalists and poverty lobby- ists will explain how students are now so poor they are starving. Luckily, not all stu- dents believe this and I keep getting requests to update a column I once did on how to eat well on a modest income. The latest is from another student, Joe Jenkins. So here, Master Jenkins, we go.
One of the things you would never gather from reading most cookery advice is that French cooking and, to a lesser extent, Ital- ian and Spanish are bread-based cuisines. Bread is the ubiquitous accompaniment. It stands instead of the English multi-veg, mops up sauces and oils, acts as a pusher and fills you up. Fancy recipes and ingredi- ents are worth nothing if you do not have good, chewy bread and, if you do have it, the rest of cooking becomes simpler, easier and cheaper. You must make your own bread every day from a running dough. Simply add more flour, water and salt to a knob of yesterday's dough, knead it, leave for a couple of hours or longer; then roll flat and cook under the grill or in a flattish Indian pan on top. This way, a single per- son can take and bake the amount he requires as he needs it. Use 50/50 strong white flour and Indian Atta (No 1, not brown on any account). Buy big bags. £1 a week will cover the operation and leave enough to make dough for pizza or onion and olive bread.
Monday breakfast: three fried duck eggs (25p from farm or man in pub), warm bread, China tea. The tea is from a Chinese shop. It is very cheap and leaves should be drained and re-used twice, then the fourth infusion can be used for cleaning the front step. Italian espresso coffee can also be had for as little as £1.20 a lb. It is still, though, comparatively expensive. Use it rarely but use a lot. There is no point in having it weak. You cannot afford an espresso machine but you can buy one of those Ital- ian machines which force water up through the coffee into a top compartment. That's what the Eyeties here use. For most break- fasts, stick to tea. Combined cost of coffee and tea per week: 80p. Dinner: dried pasta (15p), boiled, eaten with a sauce made from stewing squashy and very cheap toma- toes (10p) from greengrocer's reject box in oil and garlic. Use past-sell-by-date olive oil (mine was £7.99 for 5 litres). You will use
just over a pint a week, say £1. Then 8 oz sprats — or herrings or mackerel, which- ever is the cheapest — grilled (30-40p). You could make a mustard sauce with French mustard stirred into the fat and a little wine added. Or just have raw onion with it. Perhaps some Stilton (30p), fruit or celery, again whatever is in glut or from the reject box or a friend's garden, and coffee.
Tuesday breakfast: last week when you bought the sprats or herring, you bought more and pickled some. They are for breakfast when you have a hangover (25p). Bread, of course, and tea. Dinner: potatoes or cauliflower, warm with olive oil. Then a large risotto made from stock from turkey or chicken necks and crops (a well chosen butcher will give you a huge bag for 50p). Boil up the necks and crops. When the neck meat is done, take it off the bones and boil the bones and crops some more. Make the risotto with Italian rice and the stock and add the neck meat to serve. Invite a couple of friends. The rice, 50p. Then a salad, 30p, and coffee, after the friends have gone.
Wednesday breakfast: duck-egg omelette (three eggs, 25p). Dinner: cold risotto enlivened with chopped onion or a little parsley scrounged from the fishmonger when you bought the sprats, or lemon juice (10p). Then, if your butcher has any, 'block ornaments', end cuts from chops; if not, breasts of lamb (75p). Try them for tender- ness, then fry, grill or stew them (in more squashy tomatoes) or serve with aubergine purée (blemished aubergines from that reject box again; street markets are another source). Salad.
Thursday: when you bought the giblets, you set aside the livers, which you mixed with minced belly of pork (£1) to make a pâté. That is now breakfast with more warm bread. Reserve 8 oz of the minced pork. Dinner: chick-peas (dried, soaked, boiled), 20p, stewed with tomatoes and tripe or melts or trotters or tails (50p), again with tomato. Then onions in yoghurt. End with Stilton and fruit.
Friday is fish soup made from heads and skeletons (cod, plaice, conger, dogfish are all good) with a rouille (breadcrumbs, olive oil, garlic and chilli), and croutons, fol- lowed by potatoes fried in olive oil with beaten eggs, parsley and garlic added at the last moment, then salad and fruit.
Saturday breakfast is home-made sausage (that 8oz of pork, you remember). For dinner there is a pizza (bread dough, olive oil, whatever is cheap on top — toma- toes, spinach, grated melted Stilton rind, onions, mushrooms but only one of these). Next ox cheek stewed in wine (my butcher charges 50p a lb). Then salad again.
Sunday breakfast is home-made crum- pets and in the evening you go to dinner with one of the chaps you have entertained. Throughout the week, the quantities have been such as to leave enough bread and bits and pieces over for a sort of sandwich at lunch.
The cost? It is silly to be over-precise but I estimate, including the oil and bread and other staples such as onions and garlic, a few herbs and spices but not gas or electric- ity, around £15 per head. It would be cheaper if it were for two or more people and you should get together with someone else for some of the purchases. Success depends on establishing good sources of supply and that, too, is easier if there is more than one person involved. If you are working with others, then there is no rea- son whatsoever why you should not eat very well and have half a bottle of wine a day on £25 a week.
When I periodically and generously offer this encouraging and practical advice, I am sometimes told that the students do not have time for the effort involved and that they should be studying. This is quite wrong. Students go to university to be edu- cated, and learning how to cook and man- age and eat well is the most important part of their education, especially since many are at an age when they are about to marry and run a home. Better a lower second, no debts, a contented belly and eager friends than an upper second, social leprosy, rick- ets and penury.
Digby Anderson
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