REPERTOIRES AND RITUALS - Bee Wilson 🌞

REPERTOIRES AND RITUALS

‘The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until
they are too strong to be broken.’
Samuel Johnson


For years, when we had guests coming to dinner, I would go into
a blind panic and think: but I don’t know anything to cook! This
was, objectively speaking, crazy. I knew plenty of things to cook.
But I didn’t feel that any of the dishes I knew were good enough
to offer to other people. I would skim through all my cookbooks,
doubting every choice before picking something difficult and
extravagant that I had never made before. I felt exposed and
terrified, as if I were starting completely from scratch. This did
not increase my sense of calm as I waited for the knock on the
door.

If you want to be more relaxed as a cook, it helps to start to build
a modest repertoire of your dishes that you actually look forward
to cooking and eating, dishes that make you feel more yourself
the minute you start to cook them and that you know so well you
can rustle up on autopilot. It helps if you start to jot down favourite
dishes that you make during each season of the year. This can
become a comforting reference point when your dinner-planning
mind goes blank.

A good repertoire will include dishes that are simple enough to be
made on a moment’s notice but special enough that you feel
happy serving them to company. These don’t have to be the most
perfect or impressive dishes in the world (as if such a thing exists).
They are ones that reflect your own tastes and that you find low-
stress to cook. What these dishes are will obviously vary from
person to person. Know your limitations and be kind to yourself.

When pondering what to cook, I sometimes find it comforting to
think about house wine. When you order house wine in a good
restaurant, you are making the decision to shut off all the
countless other wine options in the world and trusting – for now
– that this wine is the only one that need concern you. You are
putting your faith in the restaurant’s taste and saying:

I know there are fancier, pricier options out there but for tonight,
this one is good enough for me. Your only choice is red or white.
OK, sometimes house wine is a bit ropey but there are nights
when, with the right company, ropey wine drunk from a tumbler is
perfectly fine.

It’s a useful exercise to try to find your own ‘house foods’ –
reliable ones that you can reach for any day without too much
thought, that suit your tastes and your way of life. If life is made up
of days and days are made up of meals, it stands to reason that
these kind of cooking routines can help you enjoy life more.

One of the main ways that traditional cooking varied from
cooking today is that good home cooks in the past tended to make
a much more limited set of dishes, often patterned in some way by
the days of the week or the month. Everyone knew how these dishes
were meant to taste and through repetition they became so familiar
that cooks could make them almost on autopilot. My brother-in-law
Gonzalo, who is from Argentina, says he will always think of the 29th
of the month as gnocchi day. Traditionally, the 29th was the day
before payday, so Argentine families would make potato gnocchi –
a very inexpensive dish consisting of little but potatoes and flour –
and put a coin under each plate in the hope of prosperity for the
month ahead. Gonzalo learned this gnocchi tradition from his
mother in Buenos Aires, just as he learned almost all the dishes that
he makes on a regular basis, such as steak with chimichurri sauce
and Milanesa with purée: breaded escalope (either veal or chicken)
served with very smooth mashed potatoes strongly flavoured with
nutmeg. When I talk to my niece and nephew, Frankie and Luke, they
can recite the dishes their father makes like the words in a much-
loved song.

There is a particular kind of solace that comes from ritual meals:
ones that take the same form on the same day of the week, like
fish on a Friday. In our house, Wednesday breakfast is ‘Waffle
Wednesday’, a tradition that originally sprang up when my
youngest son always used to get hungry after school on a
Wednesday because he didn’t like the school lunches that were
served that day. But over time, the tradition took on a life of its
own, as traditions tend to do. The beauty of Waffle Wednesday –
or Taco Tuesday, as the case may be – is that it’s one fewer
decision to make.

Building a list of recipes to cook on repeat isn’t just about
flavours; it’s also a way to give rhythm to your week and to
anchor yourself to certain people or places. It’s easy to flit
through our cooking lives from dish to dish without ever
settling on the ones that really matter to us. But the idea of
a culinary repertoire can focus the mind on the dishes you
really need to hold on to, the ones that tell us who we are
when everything else falls away. As I began to think through
my own culinary repertoire, the dishes I can rely on with
absolute faith even in an indecisive mood, I realised that
they were all connected with people that I love. When it
comes to it, what dishes mean enough that you would want
your friends or family to remember you by.

*****************************************

Anthea’s Apricot Sponge (Ed. Cake)

My friend Anthea Morrison was the kindest person
I ever knew, a retired academic who lived alone in a
spotless bungalow with tulips in her garden. She
never forgot a birthday, and, after her death, it was
discovered that her birthday card list stretched to
more than 500 people: she sent more than one
thoughtfully chosen birthday card for every day of
the year. When we used to visit Anthea for morning
coffee or afternoon tea – which happened a few
times a year – she always gave us exactly the same
assortment of sweet treats, beautifully arranged on
tea trolleys. There were chocolate biscuits and Café
Noir biscuits and freshly made scones, half of them
spread with lemon curd and half with honey. There
was strong Costa Rican coffee, about which she was
very particular, made in a brown jug; and for the
children, there was milk or Ribena in a mug. The
centrepiece of the meal was her Victoria sponge cake,
spread with apricot jam rather than the usual strawberry.
I can never eat this very English cake without thinking of
Anthea sitting and beaming in her pale blue Liberty-print
blouse and tweed skirt, like a sweeter Miss Marple.

Adding a tiny bit of vegetable oil and cornflour to the
classic sponge cake formula makes for a tender and
more delicate crumb.

Serves 8–10

260g (9 oz) plain flour
2 tablespoons cornflour
1 tablespoon baking powder
225g (1/2 lb) unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for the tin
250g (9 oz) caster sugar (but granulated is fine too)
5 eggs
120ml (4oz) milk (preferably whole)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
150g (5oz + 1/2 tablespoon) apricot jam
Icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350 F) fan. Rub butter on the inside
of two 20cm sandwich tins and line them with baking parchment.
Whisk together the flour, cornflour and baking powder. Put the
butter and sugar into a mixing bowl and beat together with an
electric whisk until creamy (or beat in a stand mixer if you have
one). Crack one of the eggs into a cup, pour it into the butter and
sugar mixture and beat well. Then add a tablespoon of the flour
mixture and beat well. Continue to alternate an egg and a
tablespoon of flour until all the eggs are used up.

The reason for going slowly with the eggs and adding the flour
in between is to stop the mixture from curdling. Now add the
remaining flour mixture and fold it in thoroughly but gently with
a spoon, followed by the milk, vegetable oil and vanilla. Using a
spatula, divide the mixture evenly between the two tins and bake
for 18 minutes or until golden and risen and a skewer inserted
into the middle comes away clean. Leave the cakes in their tins
for 5 minutes before turning out on to a wire rack to cool.

When they are cool, put one of the sponges flat side up on a
plate. Using a palette knife or spatula, spread it all over with
apricot jam – Anthea’s preferred jam was Wilkin & Sons Tiptree
– and top with the second sponge. Sift icing sugar over the top.

If you really want to gild the lily – for a birthday, say – you
could forget the sifted icing sugar and instead spread a layer
of chocolate ganache over the top. Put 200ml (7oz) of double
cream into a pan with 2 tablespoons of sugar or golden syrup
and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat and whisk in 150g
(5oz + 1/2 tablespoon) of chopped dark chocolate until it is
smooth and glossy. Wait a few minutes before spreading the
ganache on the cake.

To make this more dessert-like, skip the jam and fill it with a
layer of sweetened whipped cream topped with sliced fresh
apricots or peaches cooked with apricot jam (see the recipe
for *Jammy Plums) – let them cool before you add them to the
cake.

*Jammy Plums

I sometimes think that jam – including marmalade – is the
most underrated fast ingredient for dessert. The point is
that it already tastes delicious without you having to do
anything extra. You can use jam to glaze fruit tarts, to fill
cakes or to make these glistening sugarplums, roasted in
minutes on the hob.

Serves 2

½ tablespoon neutral oil
4–6 plums (depending on size), halved and destoned
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon plum or damson jam (or any jam you have)
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
A pinch of ground cardamom
Rose petals, dry or fresh, to serve

Heat the oil in a medium frying pan – preferably cast iron –
and cook the plums for a minute, cut side down. Add the
sugar and continue to cook until the plums catch at the
edges and go caramel-brown. Add the jam and gently
continue to turn the plums in the pan until they are
thoroughly glazed. Sprinkle with the cinnamon and
cardamom and once plated, the rose petals.

From "The Secret of Cooking'
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77264998-the-secret-of-cooking

Me, I'm ready for some Jammy Cake! How about you??