The master’s apprentices
NOT content with feeding us in her restaurants, or through her cookbooks, including the signature The Cook’s Companion, which is in half a million Australian households, in 2001 Stephanie Alexander established a foundation to teach primary school children to grow and cook food.
Now, more than 1500 Australian schools have introduced the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden program. Most of her recent books have been aimed at kids in the kitchen. In her new book The Cook’s
Apprentice (Lantern, $45) she writes for an older age group of new cooks. Stephanie’s aim in this book is to have people enjoy cooking without anxiety.
She explains the “hows” and “whys” of cooking and engenders confidence. Unlike Stephanie, I was not instructed in cooking at my mother’s elbow and well remember my first cooking in a shared flat. I could follow the casserole recipe from a magazine but had to ask for how long potatoes were boiled.
Experts can very easily skip over tacit knowledge they take for granted and leave a student unable to progress far because they haven’t mastered the basics.
Stephanie does not assume that you know what “making a well” in dry ingredients means, or deglazing, or knocking back. She tells you how to make oldfashioned gravy, and boil an egg.
For techniques that are easier to understand by watching someone, demonstrations on such things as rolling pastry and blind baking and tying meat into a firm roll are available at stephaniealexander.com.au.
She also helps us avoid blushes with simple renditions of tricky pronunciations — beshah-mel and you-mar-me for instance, and the one that always gets me, bruschetta: broo-skettuh. Experienced cooks will also get some who-knew moments — that if you brush “inside” pastry for sausage rolls with egg it will help avoid the gap between meat and pastry.
And also some now-whydidn’t-I-think-of-that flashes. Such as, instead of putting balls of leftover pastry into the freezer, roll it and line a flan or tartlet tin, wrap it in plastic film and slip it in a freezer bag. It can be blindbaked straight from the freezer.
And then there are the 300 recipes, each one with a degreeof-difficulty rating and references to the techniques and unusual ingredients used. The little sister of The Cook’s
Companion is organised in the same alphabetical format. You could not have anyone better to hold your hand as you venture into cooking.
Yotam Ottolenghi is not exactly in the classroom, but has made things less daunting for the cook in his latest book
Ottolenghi SIMPLE (Penguin Random House, $49.99).
And yes, he has seen the raised eyebrows and heard the jokes, but no, he says Ottolenghi and simple is not a contradiction in terms. Simple means different things to different cooks. To him it means buying a couple of things at the greengrocer on the way home and having something ready in 20 or 30 minutes.
Such recipes in the book are marked with S for when you are short on time. Recipes requiring 10 ingredients or fewer are labelled I. And when an dish, or components of it, can be made ahead the recipes bear an M.
When the simplicity lies in all the ingredients being available in the pantry (an Ottolenghi pantry includes sumac, za’atar and pomegranate molasses) it is marked P.
Those marked L are for lazy cooks, who want a meal to look after itself — slow-cooked stews, one-pot and one-tray dishes.
And when a dish is easier than you think (trout tartare with pickled shallots, burnt butter and pistachios for instance) it bears an E.
And there is one recipe in the book that ticks all the boxes and is S I M P L E: Iranian herb fritters.
In common with other Ottolenghi books, you will have a long list of recipes you would like to eat, but this time there are rather more than usual you will be confident to execute.