Don't Sweat the Aubergine

vegetables that flavour the sauce and that are also part of the finished dish. After two hours , the sauce, not the vegetables, will contain the flavour. The carrots, as anyone who has eaten overcooked specimens of this vegetable knows, will be particularly dull.
    The recipe tells you to use pepper. But ground pepper, if simmered in liquid for some time, becomes acrid.
    The consistency of the sauce might also be a problem. The recipe tells you to add water if the dish is in danger of drying out; but you are more likely to find that water from the vegetables and juices from the meat, with only a dessertspoon of flour to thicken them, produce more liquid than you want. Perhaps you’re meant to leave the pot uncovered, to allow the sauce to reduce; but have you noticed how often recipes omit this important detail?
    Lamb cutlets with Mediterranean vegetables belongs to the largest genre of recipes in books and magazines: ones so elaborate that even keen cooks will shy away from them, except perhaps on special occasions. Yet, in important respects, such recipes are not elaborate enough. They are long on instruction, short on help. Those aubergines with the rack of lamb, for example: you are going to have to fry them in batches, while they absorb a great deal of oil. Will they really cook through in five to eight minutes? I’ve never managed to get a sliced aubergine tender in that time. (You may wonder, too, why the recipe does not tell you, as most recipes do, to salt the aubergines in advance. We’ll come to this controversial topic later.) What about the cooking time, ten minutes or so, for the lamb? How rare do you want it?
    So we resort to a simple recipe, such as the stew. But it turns out to be too simple, as are many of the recipes in the book from which it comes, Keith Floyd’s otherwise enticing
Floyd on France
. Again, it ignores the problems the cook is likely to encounter. A bit of extra work will produce a nicer dish. The sauce would benefit from the removal of the vegetables, and possibly of the grease too – even if you’re going to eat the stew, as Floyd recommends, in the Cheltenham racecourse car park on Gold Cup day. One might add some freshly cooked, glazed turnips and carrots as garnish instead.
    Here are some annoying things that authors of recipes do:
    They tell you to take a piece of roasted meat out of the oven and leave it ‘in a warm place’. Such as where? Your airing cupboard? A warm oven with the heat switched off might suit; but you are likely to have other food cooking in it. Unless you are the happy owner of a double oven. I am not.
    They tell you to make a sauce, set it aside and keep it warm while you perform five further stages of the cooking process. See above.
    They tell you to peel and slice 1kg of potatoes, and fry them in a pan ‘large enough to hold them in a single layer’. That pan would be the size of a dustbin lid.
    They tell you to brown onions, then to add cubed meat or mince and brown that too. You have to turn up the temperature to brown the meat, which you leave undisturbed in order for the browning reactions to take place. Meanwhile, your onions will burn.
    They think that you have enough patience to wash rice until the water runs clear.
    They continue to base instructions on handed-down, questionable assumptions: you must salt aubergines to ‘draw out the bitter juices’, fry meat to ‘seal’ it, or wash rice to ‘get rid of the starch’.
    Have you ever tried making ratatouille according to a supposedly authentic recipe? It takes for ever. You’ve got to cube aubergines and salt them. Then you’ve got to rinse and dry them. Then you fry them; even salted, they absorb a lot of oil, they stick to the pan, and they remain determinedly firm. Then you’ve got to chop and fry, separately, onions, peppers and courgettes. Then you assemble the ingredients with tomatoes, which you have skinned and deseeded. Life is too short to stuff a mushroom, Shirley Conran said. Stuffed mushrooms are convenience food compared to ratatouille.
    The point I’m making is that we’d be better off, more relaxed, happier, better read, if we didn’t follow recipes so much. What we want for the cooking we do from day to day, and even for the cooking we do when we entertain, is a set of techniques that we know will work. Then we can improvise – as we always have to do, because of the vagaries of the cooking process – without worrying that we are committing solecisms.
    Julian