Into The Frying Pantheon

My friend Sara is a food goddess. I've seen her work. I remember she was right here in Dave's kitchen when he expressed his culinary philosophy ("I have no fear of butter"). They bonded instantly.

Sara can go into a market, a roadside stand, or, probably, a clean dumpster, size up the possibilities in a nanosecond, do an efficient flavor triage with her big brain, nab this off the shelf and pluck that out of the ground, bang everything into a series of pots, and invent something swoony every day of the week. Recipes do not alarm her. She’d think nothing of pestling a trilobite in a homemade mortar, whimpering it in wine, reducing, draining, and severely beating it into a juiced raisin vinaigrette, just to make a thimbleful of the first of twenty ingredients in a dish. She could make a salad out of lawn clippings and you'd beg for seconds. Look. If Sara had been in the Donner Party, everyone would've looked forward to the funerals. All right?

And, this being the age of the internet, she's also inclined to post photos of what she's eating, just some perfect thing she dashed together out of scavenged items. Lentil entrails. Eau de dough. Whiskey barrel scrapings. She's not lazy.

So if she posts a picture of something yummy that doesn't look quite out of my league, I'm tempted to try it. This happened recently with her Courgette Fritters. Oh! I had questions. One, what's the recipe? And, B, what's a courgette?

Fortunately, the internet came through for me in a way my six years of French classes did not. She was frying zucchinis. Oh boy, I thought. Zucchinis, I can come by. Zucchinis will waltz right into your house if you don't lock up. Sara was particularly fond of the "favoured Nigel Slater version." I should've been forewarned by the bonus "u" but I went ahead and looked it up in all confidence, even though I've never Nigel Slated in my life.

Well, shit.

Mr. Slater has an entire barking pack of courgette fritter recipes. He has regular ones, and auxiliary ones, and traveling ones, and ones for the Queen, and spares. I checked again: Sara had specified his buttermilk courgette recipe. All righty then!

Trouble. Right away trouble. Sure, zucchinis are easy to come by, but this recipe also called for milliliters and grams, and they are in short supply around these parts. The oil needed to be heated to a temperature that doesn't exist in this country. Also, the courgettes were to be sliced into rounds no bigger than a pound coin.

I search my memory, which is breezy territory. I lived in London for nine months, almost fifty years ago. I do remember that when I came home, I thought our coins looked like play money. So the pound coin was substantial, for currency, if not squashes. I went ahead and decided my zucchini fritters should be about a quarter-inch thick, which dimension I, as a quilter, am very intimate with, and also that it doesn't matter because I'm not a dab hand with a knife anyway and they'd just have to come out how they come out. Whatever points I lose by being short of grams would be made up for by my tossing off "dab hand" like that.

Nigel Slater might be a big deal with a gang of recipes watching his back but I doubt he has a single quarter inch in his kitchen. Or even his kitcheun.

I Do Too Cook

Shortly after we met, Dave was standing slack-jawed in my kitchen, watching me cook my dinner. I had stripped the label off a can of peas, cracked the lid, and was holding it on the burner with a pair of pliers. When it was heated through, I strained the peas through the lid, opened it up the rest of the way, stirred in some mayonnaise and dug in. My can was ready to recycle and I'd only dirtied one spoon. I figured the look on his face was one of admiration.

Dave has been responsible for virtually every meal we've had since, and it's been thirty-four years. He's gifted. When he goes away for a few days, I peer into the refrigerator and come up with nothing. I eat peanut butter and when he returns, I tell him there's nothing to eat. He starts pulling out this and that, and in no time at all he has assembled a delicious and attractive meal, and if all the neighbors happen to drop by at once, he'll feed them too. Jesus never did any better.

Once Dave fell ill and lay moaning on the sofa for days. I polished off the peanut butter and then asked him if I could make him a little something. He allowed as how he might be able to get down a piece of dry toast and a poached egg. I looked up "poached egg" in the Joy Of Cooking--most people don't bother--and it said to bring five quarts of water to a rollicking boil and stir it into a "mad vortex," at which point you drop your egg into the center. Well, it takes a while to get that much water boiling, don't think it doesn't. And when you drop your egg in, the whites go flying off at a tangent to the mad vortex and settle out as shrapnel on the bottom of the pot. I served Dave his by-now cold piece of toast with an egg like a golf ball on top, and said, "there, I hope you like it--it took me forty-five minutes to poach that egg." Well, it was almost a miracle. He was up and cooking again in no time.

But I still contribute. I like to put a little of myself in all my efforts. The Pot Roast with Diced Root Vegetables and Fingertips in Plasma Sauce was splendid. The Lemon Custard With Knuckle Zest turned out pretty well; hardly anyone can guess the secret chewy ingredient in the oatmeal cookies (shredded rubber spatula. It's never raisins. If you see raisins in my cookies, they flew in on their own.) Crunchy Mousse is even good for you: eggshells are loaded with calcium.

I've learned along the way. If something calls for being beaten "until soft peaks form," that means just a little after the point when pigs are observed to fly. If you have a liquid on the stove and are instructed to cook "until reduced by half, about one minute," figure on a half hour. In the case of custard, which you are to cook over low-medium heat until thickened, you can go ahead and do that all day if you want to but then you have to crank the bastard up to high and swear like a sailor. If you then pitch in a cup or two of cornstarch, you can get that puppy to stand right up and bark.