BOOK EXTRACTS: Daisy Garnettis obsessed with food, but it hasn't always been so. Her voyage of discovery began when she was 30, sailing across the Atlantic on a small boat. Her first book, about food, family, and friends, is anecdotal and full of smart advice. Here are a few edited extracts ...
WHY I COOK
MY SISTER (I am lucky enough to have two) Rose has just returned from Rome - a half-term trip with her two small sons, George and Frankie, her husband Tom and a friend of all of ours (an adopted brother more or less) called Will. The trip was very much a success.
"I ate the best pizza in the world," she says to me on the telephone, immediately on her return.
"Of course you did," I reply. "You were in Rome."
"Yes," she says, "but even by Rome standards it was something else." She pauses. She knows she has my full attention. "That wasn't the only thing," she says, then pauses again.
I can hear her silently remembering the other thing.
"Yes?" I respond.
"A discovery," she says. "But you probably already know about it."
"Probably, but what is it?"
"Pine nut ice cream," she says, letting the words hang between us.
"Really?" I ask. "That good?"
"Oh my God, Daise. Better. Like nothing-you've-ever-eaten good. You've never had it? Nor had I. Will ordered it. I never would, would you?" Rose continues to talk like this about the ice-cream experience. She is doing it more for my sake than hers, but even so I only half listen. Mostly I am thinking: "Well, it makes sense: think of pistachio ice cream or hazelnut, only with pine nuts. You'd toast them first. And make a paste, probably sweetened with honey. Could it really be better than pistachio ice cream, though? The novelty adds something of course; the surprise." Then I think: "Do I have time to try to make it this afternoon? How many pine nuts do I have? Do I have cream for the custard base? Can I start now or do I have to ask more questions about Rome?"
"I wonder," Rose says, her tone changing from reverie to pointed curiosity, "how easy it would be to make? That's by the by though. The point is, next time you're in Italy, pine nut ice cream. That's my tip."
My sister doesn't have to say anything else. She knows that soon, when it is hot, and we are all together in Somerset, where we grew up and where my parents still live, and where there is a garden and an ice-cream maker, she will be eating pine nut ice cream again. I will serve it without fuss or announcement, so that she and any others around the table (and usually there are 10 or 12) will welcome it well enough as vanilla. But it won't be vanilla. It will be pine nut. And the end of lunch will be lifted by that fact alone, never mind how good the ice cream may actually be.
A little bit of Rome will have made it into the meal, we will laugh, and I will take some shit for obsessively having had to reproduce it. Will anyone really care whether I serve pine nut ice cream instead of vanilla? Of course not. But why not snatch a little bit of Rome to enjoy on a Somerset afternoon? Why not, for me, fess up to obsessiveness? Why not, for them, indulge in it? I cook as much as I can for all kinds of reasons: because it needs doing, because I enjoy it, because I am interested in what it reveals about our values and history and culture and environment and economy, our fads and our fashions, and the easiest way to understand more about all this is by doing it oneself.
But I also spend time and take care cooking because it produces instant, often alchemical results around a table. It produces food, of course, but also a sense of ritual and a reason to celebrate our everyday good fortune in being able to sit down together - or just sit down alone, and feed ourselves.
Have you ever made Omelette Arnold Bennett for someone? Try it. I swear the only thing that beats sharing this unbelievable delicacy is cooking it first. I don't want food to stand in for love or intimacy, or to be used to relieve boredom or anxiety (although it has done all of those things for me at one point or another) but I do think - and this is hardly a revelation - that a meal eaten together can help with all those things. What was a surprise to me was how much the actual process of cooking, this meditative, often rhythmic, sometimes frustrating, occasionally challenging, deeply satisfying and rewarding activity, helps, too.
I am into food. Although, it wasn't always thus. Or, at least, though I have always liked eating, I used to pay less attention to what went into my mouth - as long as there was quite a lot of it. And though, occasionally, I threw some pasta into a saucepan, I rarely, if ever, cooked. Now, I spend half a summer conquering pine nut ice cream because my sister tasted it in Rome and considered it a delicacy. Now, I lie awake at night thinking: if I get up an hour earlier than everyone else then I'll have time to make Iles Flotante for pudding at lunch, and if no one sees me then they won't think I'm weird . . .
Daisy Garnett's mother, the writer Polly Devlin, makes puttanesca sauce, even when it's not needed. Her influence is warmly evoked throughout the book.
MUM'S PUTTANESCA SAUCE . . .
When I asked Mum [how she made her puttanesca sauce (and, after all, she is an expert) there was a long silence.
"You can go whistle for Dixie," she said. "Sauce is right. You've laughed at me for years, and now you want the recipe?" She paused for quite a long time so that I could hear her heavy breathing.
"Fine," she said at last. "All right. Here is what I do. First of all, I don't use vegetable oil, I use good olive oil, though not extra virgin." (It drives Mum mad when we use extra virgin olive oil for cooking. She believes the world is about to run out of olives and so she buys good olive oil in quantity, but hides it in the larder ready for the olive apocalypse. In the meantime, she releases it into the kitchen one bottle at a time labelled boldly with magic marker: "PRECIOUS olive oil. For dressing ONLY.")
She continues: "I cut up the red chillies and take out the white things" (those would be seeds, Mum). "And I go completely according to whim on how many chillies I use, but probably two for a good-sized pot of sauce. And I cut up garlic - but I make sure the garlic doesn't have brown bits on it." (Thanks, Mum.) "About two cloves I'd say, and actually I use the pink garlic that I get when I go to Lautrec, which is most important." (OK, Mum.)
"And I put those things in the saucepan with the olive oil, which is hot, and I really keep an eye on it so nothing burns. Then I add a lot of basil. Really, a lot of basil. It disappears and later I add a lot more, but this first lot of basil is to flavour the oil. Then I add black olives. I use big ones that still have their stones in because the ones that you buy with their stones taken out loose their flavour, and I chop them up pretty small. They are already knocked about because of taking the stones out, but I do that with a little machine I've got. Have you got one? Should I get one for you? And with the olives I put in anchovies - two small tins - I don't chop them up but I do add them separately, one by one, and capers. How many? About a tablespoon. I cook all that together, quite delicately, and then I add tomatoes, enough to make it saucy. It's easy to see how many you need. About 10 normal-sized ones I should say. I use fresh ones that I peel and chop up. Once the tomatoes are in, I always add freshly ground black pepper, but never salt because the anchovies and capers are salty enough.
"At the same time as the tomatoes, I add the second load of basil and a good squeeze of tomato purée, either from a tin or a tube. I've found that if I don't add the purée, the sauce isn't as rich. I cook it all very slowly for about half an hour. And I've found that it's best cooked the night before. You don't have to, of course, but the flavour gets richer, and it sits very happily in its saucepan in the larder over night. You can also keep it in the fridge, practically forever . . ."
It was in New York, Garrett writes, that she learnt that cooking can be a pleasure.
I went to New York on a whim when I was 23 years' old and stayed there for nearly eight years. I had enormous luck. In the space of a week I found work as a journalist, a place to stay, and made a true friend. It was a bit more complicated than that, but not much. Work as a journalist is not the same as a full-time job (that came later), and to supplement the short pieces I wrote for American Vogue I worked for an artist called Diana Michener. It was through Diana, an extraordinarily generous woman, that I met Laura "Nell" Campbell. And it was through Nell that I got to know New York; through Nell that I met Michael, the skipper of the boat I would later sail home across the Atlantic in; through Nell that I met Rose Gray, who gave me my first cooking lesson; and through Nell that I met many other people who became important to me in New York, and indeed my life beyond the city.
I owe a lot to Nell, not least a great many delicious meals. Nell has a Louise Brooks hairdo in red, which is always shiny, and the legs I would most like to have in the world: perfect dancer's legs that her body sits on squarely. But her legs are nothing to her wit. But then Nell is a dancer, as well as a writer, journalist, and mother, and, when I first met her, she was running, with her partner Eamon, two restaurants and had just finished running a nightclub, that was reckoned in its 10-year-long heyday to be the best in the world. It was called Nell's.
I met Nell at a party thrown by Diana. There was a magician at the party who made a $20 bill vanish and reappear on the other side of the room inside a lemon, but he was nothing compared with Nell, who made me, and everyone else in the room, laugh all night.
"Come to dinner on Thursday," she said to me, and I did. Dinner was at Nell and Eamon's beautiful Eastern and Oriental (E&O) restaurant, which had a small bar and dance floor below its dining room.
I had dinner with Nell at E&O almost every Thursday, and at each dinner I'd meet two or three people who would invite me to another dinner (New Yorkers are generous like that) and thus, over sea bass wrapped in banana leaves and steamed with ginger and coriander, I formed a New York life.
(If you want her recipe for New York stew, you'll have to buy the book!)
Cooking Lessons: Tales from the Kitchen and Other Stories, by Daisy Garnett, is published by Quadrille, £12.99
Random tips from an avid cook
'I read cookery books before I go to sleep and keep files and files of recipes both on paper and on my computer. One of the computer files, updated often, is called general tips.
When is a cup not a cup?
General tips is where I type into my computer that a pound is equal to 455g and a pint is 568ml, a stick of butter is 120g, a cup is 225g and a tablespoon is 15g. (American cookbooks use these measurements. A cup to measure rice or sugar, I understand. But sticks of butter?)
Monkfish cheeks
It is here that I have written down: "The fresher the veg, the quicker it will cook," and, on fish: "Always ask your fishmonger to remove the membrane as well as the skin from monkfish, and ask him to include the cheeks, because then he'll know you are serious about fish and he'll give you the freshest monkfish in the shop. If you're poaching monkfish (and a chunk of monkfish is called a collop) then use one teaspoon of salt for each 1.1 litre or two pints of water. For salmon, make it a tablespoon."
Stocks and shrimps
The rules and tips that I have gathered in this file seem to be quite random. "Use cold water for stock; it draws the flavour out of the bones," leads into instructions on shrimp, which "should be lowered into heavily salted boiling water and are done when they are coral-coloured all the way through, with no sign of grey on the back." The computer also says that they freeze very well once cooked, and they do. I know this because the things written in this file are lessons that I have learnt, often in the order I have learnt them, which also explains how they fall. "The liquid from cooking the shrimp is salty but quite good," I now know. "Freeze it for when you do a fish soup, and do the same with the shells. To use the shells, break them up with a hammer. Toast them in olive oil, white wine, a dash of brandy, a tin of tomatoes, carrots, onion and a bouquet garni and simmer for a long time, then pass through a sieve. But simmer a fish stock that uses bones and heads - halibut and turbot being ideal - for 30 minutes only. Any longer and the bones will break down so much it will become bitter."
Boil, braise and simmer
"New potatoes go into boiling salted water, whereas for making mash put the potatoes, with their skin on (to keep water out) in cold water and bring up to the boil, then peel the potatoes once they are cooked.
"When braising, the meat must first be sealed. Braise in an inch of liquid. Stewing requires meat to be almost covered.
"A simmer is a definite bubble." And so on.'
MY NEW YORK FAMILY