Читать книгу Len Deighton’s French Cooking for Men: 50 Classic Cookstrips for Today’s Action Men - Len Deighton - Страница 30

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.