Читать книгу A Long and Messy Business - Rowley Leigh - Страница 51

March

For some reason these dishes that have washed up on

the shores of March all have rather basic ingredients.

I admit wild sea bass is a luxury these days – farmed

sea bass is ubiquitous despite its extraordinary lack of

flavour – but here the wild fish is given the most honest

and least fancy of treatments. For the rest, you can buy

most of this this stuff just about anywhere.

One of the joys of writing for the Financial Times is

the range of ingredients with which I can work. There

is an understanding that our readers are a sophisticated

bunch and have the access and the means to buy the

rarefied and expensive, if they want them. By the same

token, I can choose the humblest of ingredients if I so

wish. Some of the more plutocratic readers positively

pine for simplicity after being forced to dine out in

fancy restaurants and at corporate dinners.

Even simplicity has its price. For one thing, if you are

going to make minestrone, it will taste better when

made with the freshest and most beautiful vegetables.

For another, the cook has nowhere to hide. The

acquacotta is so ridiculously simple, a poached egg

in a little vegetable stew, that you might read the

recipe three times and still wonder what it is about.

This is cooking stripped of artifice: it is about making

something out of very little, out of the first few bits of

stuff from the kitchen garden, out of a few leftovers

from your veg box – the one that gives you a cabbage, a

parsnip, a couple of purple carrots and six broad beans

– and coming up with something fresh and nutritious.

Just try it for a light lunch or a Sunday supper.

Faites simple. That was Escoffier’s dictum: every

chef claims it as their lodestar and most disregard it

totally. And you can see why. People don’t always

want simplicity: they crave novelty and ‘originality’

and that usually means chucking an extra ingredient

or three into the mix.