Extreme Cuisine: What you don't eat the night before can still taste good the next day or the day after, writes Hadyn Shaughnessy
The one occasion when I've managed to use Paris for its intended amorous purpose, my partner, the next morning, served lightly toasted but stale baguette for breakfast. A comment on the night before, maybe, but I prefer to think of it as the natural culinary insouciance of the French.
Insouciance of course sounds like an ingredient, and indeed it is. The coffee was great and leftovers are part of the eating experience. Besides things can only get better through the day.
I was reminded of this experience recently when reading the food diary of a 19th century Atkins. The dyspeptic William Banting suffered extreme weight and digestive problems until he gave up eating any kind of bread unless age had stiffened it. Even then he would grill the bread twice and create a thin, delicate toast melba.
Banting destroyed the bread before he ate it but that seems to be appropriate once we strip away the glamorous verbal packaging (wholemeal, wholegrain). Bread goes off quickly so best to burn the parasites and gestating mould.
Being a forerunner of Atkins, Banting ate the melba with abundant portions of meat. He lacked insouciance, in large portions. He was in many ways a man of today - eating copious amounts of meat, eggs and similar proteins. A worrier, too. In fact he is a hero of the conscientious Atkins-ites.
It goes against the instincts of an increasingly affluent society but the scraps rather than the choice cuts have a special place in our lives, and while it might now be called the bin, it used to be the morning fry, the soup bowl, the stew and even the paella. The Mexicans apparently enjoy refried beans for dinner (I never fry mine in the first place so can't really work out why they should be refried).
Soup is the leftovers' dish par excellence. The art of soup making is lost, partly because the supermarkets stock it by the tonne (and add salt with the sugar to make it addictively pungent) and partly because of the liquidiser. Liquidising vegetables in a litre of water along with a few herbs and a stock is the junk food of the leftovers' universe.
As part of my recent reading I looked at an encyclopaedia of Belgian cookery. The Belgians know almost as much about food as do the French and for them soup making is a day excursion.
A typically conscientious Belgian soup begins when the carcass of last night's meat is placed on a baking tray and roasted for a further 40 minutes or until brown. This draws more fat from the carcass and dries the bones, leaving them less impervious when they go into the stockpot.
After 40 minutes in the oven the carcass and the juices from the bones go into a pot of water with leeks, onions carrots and herbs where they simmer for three hours. At the end of this marathon, the liquid is a dark brown broth that could go either way between gravy and soup. Liquidising vegetables into it would be a crime. Far better to use the old fashioned method of simmering a few carrots and a potato, there to be eaten as seen.
The Ukrainians go a step further and use fermented vegetables. Borscht, beetroot soup, is rarely made this way today but I have it on the authority of an émigré friend. An authentic recipe took some finding but for those interested one is on the internet at: http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/.
And finally the reason I have leftovers on my mind is I have just arrived back from a short trip to Spain.
Spanish supermarkets are full of garbanzo (chickpeas), old sausages and leftover cuts of ham, typical also of many French supermarkets.
Rillettes, the meagre pickings of meat from an old carcass preserved in fat, have begun to make their way into Irish delicatessens. But it is the fate of the paella that bothers me most.
Today the paella is one of those dishes that encourages chefs to increase the size of the bill. The mere presence of a few prawns has that effect on many dishes.
The paella has become a celebrity dish instead of what it really is - a place to throw the scraps.
The paella is humble. It originated in the countryside where poor farm-hands would begin cooking lunch by bringing some rice to the boil, adding a few scraps of meat, snails found in the grass, a few vegetables and on lucky days a rabbit or chicken.
Of course in areas close to water fish would also go in too. And it is a barbecue dish rather than a refined restaurant dish - the presence of wood smoke is part of its original appeal.