Cookbook Thriving: Elisabeth Luard, European Peasant Cookery
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
Now and again—and what better time than the season of giving—I’ll profile a cookbook whose place on my shelf is secure.
Elisabeth Luard’s European Peasant Cookery, published in 1986, is one of the first cookbooks I owned. My first cookbook was the Silver Palate and also the Frog/Commissary Cookbook, both of which I’ll write about here sooner or later, but the Luard book I picked up while living in London during the first stage of my dissertation research. By the time I left to come back to the US before moving on to Zimbabwe for the second part, I was so devoted to the book (which is rather large) that I somehow made room for it in my bags full of notes and scholarly books. (No laptop back then!)
I ate a fair amount of prepared food during that time, since my teeny one-room bedsit had only a small stove and refrigerator in it, but I wanted to keep improving my cooking and you can only eat so many Marks & Sparks meals and/or fish and chips before it gets boring.
The Luard book is also rather scholarly in a good way, so I enjoyed simply reading it—and it was good for thinking about the fairly substantial number of dishes in modern European cooking that have been subject to some amount of fine-cooking snobbery of the “you must have racasse or it is just not bouillabaisse” variety but which really are old standards shaped by adaptive practicality. When you think of the list of dishes and drinks which have been annexed by gourmet cooking or high-end marketing that didn’t start that way, it’s pretty dizzying.
Luard guided me through buying and eating some things I hadn’t had before, like black puddings and salt cod.
The book was also a good one to have up there in my little one-room flat in that the recipes are mostly exceedingly simple both in the ingredients and in the preparation. I think I had one pot, one oven pan, one frying pan, and one casserole dish with a lid, in addition to a paring knife and two sets of silverware and that was pretty much it. So I made dishes from the book like cock-a-leekie, which is what it sounds like: a chicken in water with some leeks. There’s bacon pancakes, which are pancakes with some bacon in them. Sausages and mash. And so on. A lot of dishes that I made with some regularity.
Some of them I don’t cook from recipes any longer but that’s just because I’ve long since absorbed the basic idea that I first learned or experienced through using the book. I still turn back to it for a few once-in-a-while treats. Near the end of my first stay in London, my bedsit lease was up and I only had about three weeks left before going home. I would have had to renew for another four months and I didn’t really have the money, nor did it seem to make sense to do that. My aunt stepped in and allowed me to stay in a flat she was renting at the time because she was only going to be there a few days during that interval. She had an Italian room-mate at the time who was also only there part of the time. Near the end of my stay, both of them were going to be back, so I resolved to cook something special. The roommate came back from Italy with fresh sausages (that he wasn’t supposed to bring but he got away with it, back in a more innocent era of air travel) and white beans and made an incredible meal for us with nothing but that and a bit of tomato sauce, rosemary and wine. So I decided to dig in my my dwindling wallet and buy some quail and wild mushrooms to cook a really great sounding recipe in the Luard book—the quail are braised in a tomato and wine broth with the mushrooms and some olives in it and then you serve them over toasted bread with a bit of the braising liquid. It was amazing, and every time since that I’ve made it, it’s been equally great.
The really staple dish that the book taught me appears in lots of cookbooks, but I learned it from Luard. You take a whole chicken, put it in a pot with a fair amount of olive oil, a huge number of garlic cloves still in their skin (but broken away from the whole head), some fresh herbs in the oil, and you put it in the oven on relatively low heat with the pot sealed as tightly as possible. Then you take the chicken out of the pot when it’s cooked through, strain the hot oil into a bowl and reserve the garlic cloves. You get a bunch of crusty bread (you can toast it but I don’t bother). Cut the chicken meat off in big chunks, put that on a platter, put the warm oil on the table, and the garlic cloves in another bowl. You eat it by taking a piece of bread, spooning a small amount of the oil on the bread, then squeezing a soft sweet confit garlic clove or two on the bread, then some chicken. It’s one of those meals that makes you feel alive—and it’s incredibly simple. I love that I can pretty much make it for friends almost anywhere at any time under almost any conditions. Plus the leftovers make the world’s best sandwich—you spread a bit of cold, solid oil on bread, then some tapenade (black olive spread), then a bit of chopped parsley, a garlic clove, and some of the chicken. If you can panini it, that makes it even better.
So that’s what I’m doing tomorrow. I know the recipe by heart now but I have this book to thank for that. (Tonight I have to stick to soup and soft food for someone who just had a bit of dental surgery.)