Читать книгу The Kitchen Diaries II - Nigel Slater - Страница 78

I have always regarded mopping food from my plate with a piece of bread as one of life’s better moments. No doubt it is made twice as enjoyable by the fact I was forbidden from doing it as a child. Those last few puddles of sauce sponged up with anything from a wodge of floury bap to a jagged shard of warm pitta form a natural conclusion to my day’s cooking, a form of delicious closure. Given half the chance, I would be happy to transfer an entire meal from plate to mouth in pieces of warm bread.

Any soft dough, flat or bun-like, can be used to scoop sloppy, spicy or stew-like things from our plates. Yes, the bread adds substance to our supper, but the real point – for me at least – is the tactile pleasure to be had from holding the hot sauce in a piece of damp bread. It feels as good as it tastes. More than just an edible receptacle with which to trap our food, the bread, saturated with juices, becomes part of the dish – more than you can say for a knife and fork.

I sometimes make flatbreads at home, the kind of slipper-shaped breads you can split and stuff, or tear into rough pieces to dunk into taramasalata, puréed chickpeas or chunkily textured tomato sauce. They are perhaps my favourite of all for cleaning my plate. The most straightforward is a flour, yeast and water dough rolled into small ovals and baked. They often leave the oven crisp, so in order to make them soft enough to wipe a plate, I cover the warm breads with a tea towel, which leaves them suitably pliable.

Today I made a sort of gloopy stew with chickpeas and tomatoes, sharpened with pickled lemon, leaving them to cook long enough to make the juices thick and rich. To introduce a bit more depth, I roasted the tomatoes first, tossed around with a chopped ripe pepper and a few cumin seeds, adding a deceptively smoky quality. Just the stuff for a bit of bread.