Don't Sweat the Aubergine

customers with appearance – because they know that an enticing colour will convince people that the taste is delicious.
    I’m prepared to lose a little colour by steaming vegetables. The key factor to get right is the cooking time: broccoli may need no more than 3 minutes, for example. (Make sure that the water is boiling before you put the vegetables in your steamer.) Test it with the point of a knife; it should be tender but not soft.
    The hardness of your water will affect your vegetables. I have noticed that green vegetables go greyer in soft water areas than they do when I cook them at home, in the hard water that comes out of London taps. It may be that some soft waters have a higher acidity, which draws out greenness, than does the stuff that Thames Water provides. Acidity slows cooking too, as anyone who has tried softening potatoes in tomato sauce will have discovered. Another technique is to put vegetables into just enough water to submerge them, and to cook them, uncovered, until the water has evaporated. It works well with broccoli, cabbage and carrots.
    Steaming and water reduction are more difficult to manage if you have a large quantity of vegetables. Piled on top of each other in a pan, they will cook at different rates according to their exposure to the steam. If you’re attempting the water reduction method and you have a substantial mound of carrots, you will need a lot of water to cover them; by the time it has evaporated, the ones at the bottom will have overcooked.
    Salt in boiling water, Harold McGee tells us, speeds the softening of vegetables; it also reduces the loss to the water of salts and sugars.
    I abandon best nutritional practice when I cook potatoes. Put in cold water and brought slowly to a gentle simmer, they hold their shape better than they do if steamed. Parboiling potatoes for roasting expels surface starch and helps to rough up the exteriors, which crisp in the fat.
    Grilled and baked vegetables are fashionable, in part because we associate them with the Mediterranean, and in part because we assume, not always correctly, that they retain their goodness better than do vegetables cooked in water. In fact, an oven-baked potato loses more vitamin C than does a boiled one. Nutritional considerations apart, baking often works better than grilling, which is not efficient at getting many vegetables tender.
Asparagus
    Like most vegetables, asparagus is widely available all year round. Like others, but to an exceptional degree, it is superior as native, seasonal produce. The time to buy asparagus is May or June. Restraining yourself until then has a psychological as well as a culinary benefit: you’ll feel that the expense, because indulged rarely, is justified.
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HOW TO COOK IT
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    If there is a big contrast between the tenderness of the asparagus tip and the woodiness of the thick end of the stalk, you probably won’t want to eat the thick end. So there’s not much point in investing in one of those upright asparagus steamers, designed to cook the spears evenly. Cut off the bits of stalk you’re not going to eat and put the asparagus above boiling water in an ordinary steaming basket; check to see if they are tender to the point of a knife after three minutes, even though they may take longer. Eat hot or cold, with vinaigrette ( see here ), mayonnaise ( see here ), hollandaise ( see here ) or simply melted butter.
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VARIATIONS
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    Method 2: turn in a little olive oil, season, and bake in a gas mark 6/200°C oven. About 15 minutes.
    Method 3 (from Richard Ehrlich): pour a thin film of olive oil into a saucepan. Lay the asparagus spears on top, in a single layer (you may have to cook several batches). Turn the heat on the hob to low/medium, and wait till you hear the first sizzling. Cover the pan tightly and cook, without disturbance, for 6 or 7 minutes.
    Baked asparagus, which has a more intense flavour than does steamed, goes well with pasta, in salads (perhaps with a few other greens, some new potatoes and some lardons) and in risottos.
Aubergines
    Nowhere in the literature of cookery is the sway of received ideas more evident than in the treatment of aubergines. Routinely, recipes advise you that aubergines should be salted, rinsed and dried before cooking. You leave them, sprinkled with salt, in a colander, perhaps with a plate on top to squeeze them a little, for half an hour or so; or, more rarely, you use the technique given in
Classic Turkish Cookery
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