Don't Sweat the Aubergine

easily. A gentle heat preserves the succulence.
    3 • Grilling and baking . Among grilling tools, a barbecue works better than an overhead grill. A barbecue’s heat may appear to be very fierce, but it is usually less aggressive than a grill flame, which has a tendency to dry out sausages and toughen their skins. Another advantage of the barbecue is that, as fat leaks from the sausages, it spits back at them, forming a tasty crust. Don’t put sausages on a ridged grill pan: they’ll stick. The oven has its advocates. I have sometimes produced succulent sausages from the oven; more often, I have got dry ones, and I haven’t worked out how to guarantee the best results. The problem, I think, is that the oven’s heat is too strong; but, if you turn it down, you don’t get much browning. My best advice is to warm a little olive oil or lard in a roasting pan, add the sausages, and put them in a gas mark 5/190°C oven for 15 minutes, then turn them over, and cook them for another 10. If they’re already nicely browned when you first look at them, turn down the oven a couple of settings. Don’t add the sausages to scorching hot oil: you’ll be lucky if they don’t split. Olive oil or lard is my preferred fat here: butter will burn in the oven, and I am not so keen on the taste of sausages cooked in sunflower or vegetable oil.
    I’ll keep trying the oven, because it’s often easier to cook sausages that way than to fry them; but gentle frying, in order to retain as many juices as possible, is my preferred method. No, you don’t have to spend an hour doing it. But, if you want to cook sausages at a higher heat, turn them regularly, or the skins might char and split before their contents are properly cooked.
Bacon
    Cheap bacon is pumped full of water. As you fry or grill it, a slimy brine floods the pan; the meat contracts and curls. A good deal of the salt remains behind in the bacon, too, in concentrated form. You get a piece of meat that is dry, rubbery and salty. You may think that the quality of bacon matters less than that of other meats, because all you want it for is a cheap and cheerful sandwich with lots of ketchup and mustard; but good bacon – which is still pretty cheap – is worth the extra money.
    I prefer streaky to back bacon. Back is more expensive, because it is leaner; but because it is leaner, it is inclined to become very dry when you cook it.
    I prefer to fry bacon, in a little oil and over a low to medium heat, or to put it on to a ridged grill pan, than to cook it under an overhead grill, which produces a drier and tougher rasher.



 
    A FISHMONGER – IF you’re lucky enough to have one within reach – can be the most daunting of food shops. The conceptual gap between the creature on the slab and a plate of food seems, to the inexperienced cook, too large to bridge. Those scales, fins and gills don’t advertise edibility; nor do those shells and pincers
.
    Fish, with the possible exception of the Japanese ones that kill you if you don’t prepare them properly, need not be alarming. They will respond to a brief subjection to one of the basic cooking methods: poaching, steaming, baking, grilling, frying. (Oily fish such as mackerel are not suited to poaching or steaming – that’s about the only exception you need to know.) The fancy part of the process is making a sauce, but the home cook may want to leave elaborate sauces to fancy kitchens. It seems pretentious to make something complicated when, cooked simply, it is unimprovable.
    You could take home one of those daunting fish, without even knowing what species it was, and simply wash it, season it, brush it with a little oil, and put it in a gas mark 6/200°C oven for 15 minutes or so; it is likely to be delicious. You could put your unnamed fish under the grill. Or you could wrap it in foil, with some chopped shallots, parsley and a few tablespoons of white wine. Or get the fishmonger to fillet it for you. Keep the heads and the bones, and make a stock with them ( see here ). Poach the fillets in the stock; then reduce the stock and swirl in some butter and cream to make a sauce. Or fry the fillets, accompanying them with the fish stock sauce.
    The biggest headache is the size of the fish. One person will eat an entire sole; how, then, are you going to fry, grill or even bake enough for six? You might manage it for four, using two frying pans, frying a sole in each, and keeping them warm in a low oven while the other two