Len Deighton’s French Cooking for Men: 50 Classic Cookstrips for Today’s Action Men. Len Deighton

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      ANIMAL FIBRES

      Meat, fish and poultry are the basic protein foods. All such flesh foods contract, dry and then harden, with cooking. Such protein foods cooked under a grill or broiler are served juicy and only partly cooked. Because only choice, expensive cuts are tender when under-cooked these are the ones chosen for the fierce heat of the grill or barbecue.

      Flesh foods cooked in liquid will also harden. But after hardening they will break up, and eventually disintegrate, as the connective tissue disolves. Some cuts of meat have so much connective tissue that they can be cooked to a point where the disintegration resembles tenderness. For example try cooking a shoulder of lamb or mutton for five hours at 250ºF.

      Egg and fish are also protein foods but they are much softer than meat, so although they will harden above boiling point they will not be rendered inedible. But a fresh new-laid egg will still taste better below boiling point than above. Eggs subjected to brisk heat (e.g. omelette) are best served only partly cooked, i.e. still moist and soft in the centre.

      FAT

      Fat occurs naturally in animal tissue. When meat is heated the fat melts and becomes dripping. Dripping always has a great deal of flavour so the cook uses it with care. There are all kinds of refined fats on the market: vegetable fats, vegetable oils, olive oil and butter. When fat is used as part of the texture of food, e.g. rubbed into pastry, cake mixtures, sponge, etc., the cook is most concerned with its flavour, but when the fat is used as a cooking medium – frying and sautéing – then the choice is based upon the temperature at which it burns. Even the fat which burns most easily – butter – can go much hotter than boiling water. On page I have listed the burning points of various fats so you can compare them with the boiling point of water. N.B. When you are cooking in butter its burning point can be raised by adding a little oil.

      FLOUR

      When heat is applied to flour it goes hard. Very, very hard. If you mix flour and water and then cook it, it will become rock-like, so the cook makes sure that things made with flour have plenty of tiny air particles in them.

      The glutens in flour which produce the starch provide the cook with a binding – liaison – an ingredient that will thicken liquids. If you stir a little cold water into an ounce of flour and go on pouring and stirring until you have half a pint of mixture you will have made a liaison à la meunière. If you apply heat to it, it will begin to thicken – keep stirring and don’t let it boil. After three minutes’ simmering the flour will have glutenized, it will be as thick as it gets and the floury taste will have disappeared. You have made a sauce. It won’t be a very interesting sauce, but if you had used flavoured water or even milk it would have been a real sauce.

      Because fat can be made much hotter than water the cook usually glutenizes the flour in butter and then adds the water or etc. This combination of fat + flour is called a roux; it’s described further on pages ref1 and ref2.

      SUGAR

      Sugar caramelizes when heated. It turns a golden yellow, then light brown and, according to the amount of heat you apply, eventually black and burned.

      VEGETABLES

      Vegetables soften when heated by the cook. They don’t contain protein so you can boil them furiously if you want to. Frying is hotter than boiling and so when you fry vegetables you will see the sugar in them caramelize. Fried onions will, with a little heat, lose their capacity for making your eyes water, then they will soften and after that go a golden colour, then brown. Now they have taken on quite a different flavour. The cook sometimes uses this caramelization of onions etc. to add flavour and/or colour to a stew.

      EGG

      Egg is protein. All protein hardens above boiling point. Although egg is often given a blast of fierce heat we usually eat them only partly cooked. Omelettes, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, boiled eggs are given just enough heat to make them firm. Cook them longer and you’ll find yourself in the plastics industry.

      High temperature releases hydrogen sulphide (from the sulphur in the egg-white) and makes an egg taste stale. This same sulphur combines with iron in the yolk to make that grey ring round the yolk of a hard-boiled egg that has been made too hot. So you see that a real boiled egg is unattractive, indigestible and tastes disgusting.

      Although a ‘boiled egg’ goes into boiling water, do not bring it back to boiling point. Keep the water well below boiling temperature so that the surface just moves (the French say frémir which means to shiver and perfectly describes it). The water is now at about 185ºF.

      The most satisfactory way to cook the egg in its shell is the old-fashioned method of ‘coddling’. Bring a pint of water to maximum boil. This rolling confusion of water, changing to steam, is nearly at 212ºF. Put one egg into the water, put a lid on the saucepan and turn off the heat. After approximately six minutes, eat it. I say approximately because the freshness of the egg influences the cooking time, and you might need to modify your cooking times to find the right one for your eggs, and your taste. Measure the amount of water you use, and provide one pint of water per egg. And from now onwards, remember how to estimate water temperature.

      The egg is also a liaison, used, as flour is, to bind liquids into a sauce. But while flour is tough enough to withstand boiling, the protein of the egg curdles at 167ºF., and your sauce collapses. So when there is egg in your sauce be cautious. Heat it gently, and if possible cook it in a double-boiler (a basin over a saucepan of water will do). But there is a way of cheating – add a trace of flour to the egg and the sauce will withstand boiling, if you bring it to the boil slowly.

      ALCOHOL

      When wine or spirits are used in cooking they must be subjected to considerable heat or they will be very indigestible. Unless alcohol is set on fire, or has over one hour’s cooking at any temperature, it should be boiled until half its bulk has evaporated.

      WATER

      Water is perhaps the most important of all things subjected to the heat of cooking because all foods contain water. About 60 per cent of the weight of meat is water. Fish is 65–80 per cent water and vegetables and fruit 85–95 per cent water. (Foods that don’t contain water, e.g. dried fish, dried peas and beans, rice, etc., won’t go bad, because the bacteria in water cause that, but they will need water added to them again before being cooked.)

      When water is added to food mixtures – especially those containing flour – the amount of water is very important. Any sort of pastry must have only enough water added to make the mixture manageable. Batter mixtures should be like cream. Cake mixtures are somewhere between the two. The difficulty for people writing recipes СКАЧАТЬ