Len Deighton’s French Cooking for Men: 50 Classic Cookstrips for Today’s Action Men. Len Deighton
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Название: Len Deighton’s French Cooking for Men: 50 Classic Cookstrips for Today’s Action Men
Автор: Len Deighton
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Кулинария
isbn: 9780007524846
isbn:
This is one of the most perfect ways of cooking. It requires very little attention – just making sure the saucepan doesn’t boil dry – and because the rate of cooking is slow the time factor isn’t too vital. Sometimes the inner container has a tight-fitting lid. (In the case of apple pudding and steak pudding the food is encased and sealed in suet pastry.) Because blood, being protein, curdles at 176ºF. this is the way jugged hare should be cooked. Superior types of stew can be cooked this way, so can eggs en cocotte (page); in fact anything can be cooked this way, even large pieces of meat.
Some ovens can be adjusted to give heat below the boiling point of water – 212ºF. – and obviously a pot inside such an oven will get exactly the same sort of heat as a double-boiler. Such cooking is called étuver. It is often used for vegetables cooked with butter.
STEAMING
The process of steaming provides a vivid chance to see the difference between heat and temperature. Put your hand into the hot air of an oven at 212ºF. and you’ll feel no more than discomfort but I advise you not to plunge your hand into water that is at this (boiling) temperature. Hot water is more violent than hot air and more violent than steam. A potato cooked in the dissipated heat of a steamer will take longer to cook than one that is boiled.
Steaming is done by putting food into a perforated container and placing that over a saucepan of boiling water. Only the steam touches the food. Sometimes egg mixtures – like custards – are steamed and they are much better than the same mixture boiled. Sometimes cooks making a pudding in a basin will stand it in simmering water so that the bottom part of it cooks double-boiler method and the top – pastry – part steams. Diabolical English cunning this. (Because this is a popular way to prepare English steak and kidney pudding, cooks often say steamed when they really mean this two-part way of cooking.)
PRESSURE COOKING
Pressure cooking is a special way of cooking at high temperature (226ºF.). Although it will cook fragile things, it is at its best when neither overcooking nor violent movement of air will affect the food. Soups, stocks, stews, and vegetables that will end up as a purée (e.g. swede, potato, turnip) are particularly good. So are any dried fruits or vegetables or suet puddings. A pressure cooker – marmite à pression – is a valuable tool for any cook who is short of time, even if it’s only used to make soup and stock. Read the instruction book that comes with it.
Although I like pressure cookers it must be added that a good cook should plan in advance, and stock that has simmered for five hours without attention is scarcely more bother than a pressure cooker that needs close attention for thirty minutes. The simmered stock will be far better and less cloudy.
Finally In the section on steaming, a paragraph or so back, I described how a steak pudding can enjoy being half steamed and half double-boiler cooked. That’s a clever and logical way to cook that dish because it is two entirely different foodstuffs being cooked in a method suited to each, i.e. pudding steamed, meat double-boiler cooked. However there are many other combination methods of cooking that stem from muddled thinking and are not logical or clever. For instance, it’s not logical and clever to have a joint of meat standing in a tray of fat in a hot oven: if you want it baked, then why have it in a tray of fat; if you want it fried, why have it in the oven? Another muddled cooking method is braising (see Very moist heat, page) which has so much moisture in it that the bottom half is stewing. Do whatever is best but not both together. Even more common is the cross between sautéing and frying. This is probably due to the popularity of eggs and bacon because the eggs are best deep-fried and the bacon is best sautéed. To save time and trouble most British cooks have their fat about an eighth of an inch deep for everything they fry. This is too shallow for cooking eggs and yet so deep that it swamps the bacon. Like most compromises it’s the worst of both worlds.
Now that you know all the ways to cook you should be able to apply them to any chunk of food that stands in front of you.
A potato will lend itself to roasting or baking. Sliced up it can be sautéed, fried, put into a stew, boiled, poached, steamed, pressure-cooked, and, although it’s unusual, pot-roasted or double-boiler cooked too. As long as you bear in mind the limitations of protein foods you can do anything any way. The only limit I would put upon you is that of using good-quality meat for the first four heating methods – dry radiant heat, oven heat, sauté, and frying.
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