An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

by Tamar Adler

All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender spring pea would be narcissistic to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It’s not so: it doesn’t reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.

Vegetables are done when a sharp knife easily pierces a piece of one. If you’re cooking broccoli or cauliflower, test the densest part of each piece, which is the stem.

I boil eggs by putting them in a pot of cold water, bringing the pot to a boil, then, as soon as I see the first bubble, turning the burner off. I let the eggs sit in the water for about four minutes, meanwhile setting up a bowl of water with ice in it nearby.

I soft-fry and I soft-scramble. Fried eggs should be cooked at a gentle sizzle, which keeps their whites from toughening, and scrambling should just be a series of persistent nudges.

Hot vegetables is a doctrine every bit as encumbering to good vegetable eating as pressure to leave them raw until right before dinner. Room temperature is the temperature at which most vegetables taste best.

Parsley, in particular, has long been called into duty when things were fading: in ancient Greece, anyone or anything on its way out was said to be “in need of parsley.”

Parsley leaves stay good, picked off their stems and stored in a closed container, for weeks.

To make dark green, lovely parsley oil, chop the leaves off a bunch of parsley, smash a clove of garlic to a paste with a little salt, and douse both in olive oil.

Marjoram or sage make especially delicious oils for drizzling over beans or meat, or try mint, which is good anywhere. Add the zest of a lemon to make it brighter.

Scientifically, herbs are classified into the carrot family and the mint family. The first has feathery leaves: parsley, cilantro, fennel, dill, chervil. The second contains basil, thyme, mint, rosemary, oregano, savory, sage, and tarragon.

I’m not a “salad is health food” person, but if ever there were a food designed to straighten out squiggly lines, it would have to be a salad of bitter greens from the chicory family—escarole, frisée, radicchio—or bitterer ones yet, like dandelion greens, dressed with a vinaigrette with enough bite to match.

Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio. We were better off when things were worse. —fifteenth-century Tuscan saying

Beyond the indelible stain the poor little things will never shake, the distaste we feel for beans is not unfounded either. Our beans are rarely as good as they can be. They’re usually so bad, in fact, that basing an opinion of their merit on prior experience is very much like deciding you don’t like Bach after having heard the Goldberg Variations played on kazoo.

Romans and Tuscans value spare eating and living. Both of their legislative histories are peppered with sumptuary laws limiting the length and content of meals, passed whenever their citizens’ affection for simple living got flabby.

Those odds and ends are as crucial to pots of beans as fresh water. Your pot will benefit from a piece of carrot, whatever is left of a stalk of celery, half an onion or its skin, a clove of garlic, fibrous leek tops. If you must decide what to save for your chicken pot and what for stock and what for beans, save your fennel scraps with pots of beans in mind.

The best instruction I’ve read for how long to cook beans comes from a collection of recipes called The Best in American Cooking, by Clementine Paddleford. The book instructs to simmer “until beans have gorged themselves with fat and water and swelled like the fat boy in his prime.” The description is so perfectly illustrative I don’t think anyone should write another word on the subject.

A condiment recipe from the first known cookbook, Apicius’s De re coquinaria, calls for mixing the yolks of two eggs with celery salt, the squeezed juice of the celery-like plant lovage, and ground peppercorns.

‘heaven and earth,’” the name of a local specialty of potatoes simmered with apples.