I have volunteered to do the cooking this week. Or perhaps the Systems Administrator volunteered me, having remarked wistfully on holiday that it was nice not to have to cook for once. I actually like cooking, especially in the darker months when it doesn't eat into so much good gardening time. I just need due notice, so that I can think about what to make and what I need to buy for it. Faced with the question in the supermarket Could you cook tonight? my mind becomes a complete blank. Then we end up with chicken stewed in tomato with rosemary, but there's only so many times you can dish that up before it begins to seem like a nervous tic.
I decided that this week I was in a retro mood. On Sunday night we had roast chicken, with saute potatoes. And cauliflower au gratin. I can't think when I was last in a restaurant that offered me cauliflower au gratin, certainly not a London one. I think the only time I've seen it in years is as part of a medley of vegetables served to a large group booking at club events of the sort where you have to choose your menu in advance. I turned to the ever reliable Good Housekeeping Cookery Book to remind myself how to make both. Good Housekeeping is still the single most useful cookery book I possess. Not the prettiest, or trendiest, but for telling you how to do something you might actually want to do, like making saute potatoes, as distinct from something you like the sound of but won't actually do, like spit roasting a whole suckling pig, it is the most comprehensive and reliable source.
The cauliflower came out rather solid, but that was my fault for not measuring any of the ingredients, and using up the whole of a small piece of cheddar that was sitting in the fridge on the grounds that keeping half of it would have been silly. You evidently don't need that much cheese in a cheese sauce. The basic white sauce was lump free, though, and it's ages since I made a roux. The saute potatoes worked perfectly. I used butter as the book said, cooked them gently and refrained from poking at them before the first side was done, and they stayed in whole pieces and went a beautiful shade of golden brown. I have never stopped cooking with butter, because I like it, but the recent about turn in public health advice that it will not clog your arteries and indeed might be better for cooking with than vegetable oils means I don't have to feel guilty while I do it.
Last night was a veal ragout from Gretel Beer's Austrian Cooking. I loved my mother's copy of this book when I was learning to cook as a teenager. So did my mama, who showed no signs of giving it up, and I was delighted to find it available as a facsimile reprint by Andre Deutsh in the early 1980s. I was pretty pleased that Waitrose actually had veal in stock, since they don't always and I'd gone shopping with a contingent list of the vegetables I wouldn't need if I wasn't doing the ragout, and the extra ingredients I'd need instead if I was doing something else. One of the things that puts me off the idea of internet grocery shopping is the impossibility of making contingent choices. The substitutions you hear about are bizarre enough, but there's no hope of stipulating that if you can't have veal, you don't want a cauliflower.
The ragout was very, very old fashioned, and made me feel quite nostalgic, though I'm not sure what for, since my central European ancestors would not have been dining on veal ragout in an apartment on Vienna's ringstrasse, but supping on cabbage in a shtetl in rural Poland. Never mind, there is something delicious about the idea of bourgeois pre-war Vienna that veal ragout encapsulates. You simmer the veal with onions, celery, cauliflower florettes and carrot, then discard the first two which are there for flavouring, and keep the carrot, slicing it up and putting it back at the end. The cauliflower meanwhile has disintegrated into a sort of vegetable thickening agent. Then you make a roux (another one!), add the juice from the meat to the roux, put the sauce back on the meat with some mushrooms you fried earlier and some frozen peas, and finish it off with an egg yolk beaten into some milk.
The quantities are all fairly approximate, since how big is an onion or a carrot, and when Gretel Beer talks about half cups I think she meant half whatever teacup you have to hand in your kitchen, rather than American measures, and the packets of veal in Waitrose weren't the same weight as that given in the recipe. And I wasn't sure how runny the end mixture was meant to be, so lost my nerve before getting to the egg stage and used a teaspoon of cornflour to thicken things up a bit. I was slightly dubious about adding the egg mixture, since the sauce already seemed rather liquid even with the cornflower, but stuck to the method (always a good idea for the first run through of a new recipe) and I'm glad that I did, since it had a transforming effect. The sauce suddenly became far silkier, and the faintly worrying taste of cooked flour vanished. Again, I can't think when I last ate a meal out that featured a flour thickened sauce. The smell of it cooking took me back decades.
The main thing that caught me out was the cooking time for the veal. I'd assumed that as it came from a little baby animal it would be ever so tender and done in three quarters of an hour, but the packet said one and a quarter to one and a half hours, and it needed the full one and a half before it lost its faintly rubbery texture and fell into melting pieces. I should have read the instructions at the outse. We ate rather late, but fortunately the SA has fallen into the same trap, and is anyway a forbearing sort of person.
As I said, I like cooking from time to time, especially in the darker months.
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