Points to Remember

Appears in

How To Eat

By Nigella Lawson

Published 1998

About

Don’t take short cuts with dishes that ought to be cooked slowly, to infuse and blend, to be cooled and added to. Choose instead food which is meant to be, has to be, cooked quickly, such as liver, fish or escalopes of meat.
Remember to think not just in terms of actual cooking time in the oven, but of the amount of effort it will take you to put dinner together. I like shopping for food, and I don’t work in an office: but on days when I’m really fraught, it’s the shopping not the cooking that finishes me off. And when you’re really exhausted, the easiest thing to cook is a roast chicken: it takes a while in the oven, but demands a minimum of interference and energy from you.
Quick, last-minute-assembly food can be the most stressful cooking of all. Its popularity is in part due to the influence of restaurants on our culinary imagination and repertoires. Restaurant cooking has to be quick; food has to be made fast, to order; chefs and their minions have to conjure up the finished dish within minutes. The constraints of cooking at home are entirely different: what makes life easier for a chef can make life hell for the domestic cook.
I shy away from recipes which, however quick they may be to cook, require too much detailed attention in the preparation. Stir-fries are an example. In delicate moods, the idea of having to shred finely, dice, mince and slice into juliennes 7 different sorts of vegetable – even if the dish takes a mere 3 minutes to cook – could reduce me to tears.
If you hate cooking, don’t do it. You can certainly eat well enough just by learning how to shop. You can buy food that you don’t need to cook – picnic food, cold food, things to heat up. Of course, trimmed vegetables and packaged salads are pandering to laziness and inviting extravagance on a ludicrous scale, but be grateful for them. If they taste good, don’t worry about it. No one has to make themselves miserable over cooking.
Make use of your store cupboard and fridge. You can rely on bought pasta sauces, on tins of white beans, anchovies and good tuna (in olive oil only) as well as small glass bottles of tapenade, green olive paste or goat’s cheese in oil. Bacon is the easiest thing for the quick cook: grilling a piece of bacon is hardly cooking, and a few salty shards crumbled over or chopped into a pile of mashed potato, or mixed with beans and spinach, or chick peas and chilli-fried tomatoes and topped with a poached egg, make a better dinner than anything more elaborate and expensive from the chill cabinet.

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