Don't Sweat the Aubergine

worried about grittiness in the sauce, scoop the mussels from the cooking vessel into a warm bowl, and strain the sauce over them through a sieve. Scatter on the parsley. You’ll lose any shallot or onion you didn’t pick up with the mussels, unfortunately.
    You could add a couple of tablespoons of double cream to the cooking liquid at the end.
----
WHY YOU DO IT
----
    1 • Alive, alive-o . Mussels, as you probably know, are alive – or should be – when you put them in the pot. If they don’t close when you tap them, or open when you cook them, they are probably dead, not worth eating, and potentially harmful.
    2 • Quick cooking . Mussels toughen, as do all protein-rich foods, if overcooked. It’s a lot easier to deal with a moderate quantity of them: they should be ready at the same time. Crowded in a huge pile, they get varying access to the heat. When you cook more than a kilo of mussels, you may need to remove to a warm bowl the ones that open first; you’ll protect them from toughening, and hasten the opening of the others .



 
    CAKES AND PUDDINGS sit a little oddly in this book. I’ve been trying to show you why, for the cook operating informally at home, recipes for most savoury dishes – certainly for most of the ones here – are merely templates, guides to the kinds of things that produce good results. We shouldn’t need to get out a recipe book or the scales every time we make a pasta sauce or marinate a piece of chicken. If we know what works and why, we can save ourselves the effort and anxiety of feeling that we need to follow, to the letter, what the experts tell us to do
.
    However, in the world of puddings, recipes rule. A certain number of eggs will set a certain amount of liquid; a certain proportion of flour, eggs and liquid will make a batter. You cannot improvise your way around these determinants.
    I take a recipe to be something that you attempt to follow with accuracy. In that sense, there haven’t been many recipes in this book so far. But there are a few in the following pages.
    I’m not saying that you have to obey them to the letter. You may prefer more sugar than I suggest, or less. I’ve left up to you the quantities you use of flavourings such as cinnamon. But I wouldn’t advise you, for example, to be too liberal in your interpretation of the proportion of milk to eggs in the custard.
Sponge cakes
    If a net is, according to Samuel Johnson, ‘holes tied together with string’, a cake may be described as bubbles contained by batter. You create the bubbles in three principal ways:
    Beating (creaming) butter and sugar.
    Incorporating a raising agent, either by using self-raising flour or by adding baking powder (and/or, in some recipes, bicarbonate of soda, an ingredient of baking powder).
    Creating an egg foam.
    The recipes here involve various permutations of these methods. But let’s start with the technical stuff, some of which applies not only to cakes but to other sweet things in this chapter.
----
HOW/WHY YOU DO IT
----
    1 • Equipment . Springform cake tins of 20cm and 23cm will cover a good many recipes. If you’re making a sponge sandwich, you’ll need two 20cm tins.
    2 • Lining and greasing the tin . Place the cake tin on a piece of greaseproof paper, draw round it, and cut along the pencil mark. Smear a very small piece of butter on the base of the tin, stick the round piece of paper on top, and smear a little oil on the surface of the paper and round the sides of the tin. Oil works better than butter as a non-stick agent, because the solids in butter can be adhesive.
    3 • Creaming . Generations of (mostly) schoolgirls suffered arm ache as they spent domestic science lessons – as they used to be known – mashing margarine, butter or some other shortening ingredient into sugar, and laboriously working away at the mixture until it lightened. These days, chefs tend to use hand-held mixers or food processors. Both machines require some manual intervention during the creaming process, because the mixture clogs up until it becomes properly amalgamated.
    A creamed butter/sugar mixture, the texture of double cream, contains lots of air bubbles. It also separates the grains of flour, preventing lumps. This is why fats are known as ‘shortenings’: they interrupt the formation of gluten, which is a long chain of protein molecules.
    4 • Sifting flour . Unnecessary, despite what recipes may say. You are unlikely to find weevils left behind in your