In these notes about stewing I have concentrated on meat, but fish makes wonderful stews. Mix various types of sea fish to make bouillabaisse and various types of fresh-water fish to make matelote. If you are inventing a stew, beware of oily types of fish. Put the softest sort of fish pieces in last because they will cook more quickly. For best results have a little of various kinds. In any case fish stews will cook in less than half an hour, so go ahead, there’s time to invent a stew.
BOILING AND POACHING
Both words mean cooking in water on top of the stove, but the temperatures are different. The French are more precise in their words: when water is heated enough to shiver – frémir – it is just right for poaching – pocher; when it gets hotter there will be a bubble now and again at the same place. That is called mijoter and as far as the cook is concerned the water is boiling. (Beware, the cook seldom wants anything boiling.) If the water gets very hot it will go into a great rolling boil – bouillir – which is fine for reducing the volume of liquids but not for very much else.
Many dishes are called boiled but very few are actually boiled. (This word usually indicates that the liquid in which the food is cooked will not be served with it, i.e. boiled bacon, boiled mutton, etc.) Foodstuffs that are actually put into boiling water include eggs in their shells, vegetables, dried vegetables, cereals, and a few flour mixtures like pasta, suet puddings, and dumplings. Of these only the flour mixtures wouldn’t be just as good if cooked more slowly. (That’s because there are air particles which must be kept hot or they will collapse just as in baking pastry or cake.)
Most foods are best poached, i.e. kept at that gentle simmer or frémir as in poaching an egg. In English cookery it is very often the salt meats that are cooked in this way: salt beef, salt pork, bacon, and ham; that’s because immersion in water takes some of the salt taste out of them. Originally such foods were salted for the winter as a way of preserving them. By the time they were used they were very salty and needed a soaking in cold water before they were cooked. If you take my mother’s excellent advice about salt meat you will choose a suitable piece of meat and then ask your butcher to salt it in his brine tub. This will take about three days. After this brief salting it shouldn’t need any soaking, just go ahead and cook it. Don’t buy salt meat at random from the brine tub because the butcher sometimes consigns his old unsold meat to it and if it’s been in there too long it will be excessively salty. The standard rule for cooking salt meat: twenty-five minutes per pound plus twenty-five minutes. However I find that long cooking improves it and I suggest a four-hour minimum for any large piece. You need a pan big enough for the meat to just float and the water to circulate freely.
The French cook is not fond of salt meat; perhaps that has something to do with having a less severe winter and therefore not having to slaughter the animals at the winter solstice. More likely it’s because the liquid in which salt meat has been cooked is quite unusable as stock. With unsalted meat, however, the cooking liquid is served alongside as a soup; see pot-au-feu (pages). Clever frugal French. There’s more about poaching on pages.
CUISSON AU BAIN MARIE
If you put a basin of water inside a saucepan of boiling water, you will find it very difficult to bring the water in the basin to the boil, no matter how furiously you heat the saucepan. The basin will remain at the same temperature, 180º–90ºF., which is right for most cookery; so you can braise, poach, or stew using this type of gadget. All the double-boiler does is make braising, poaching, or stewing easier. It’s a way of cooking delicate mixtures, e.g. egg custard and those sort of thick stews that are too solid to circulate (that daube on page would be too solid). In fact that type of stew is commonly called a hot-pot because it stands in a saucepan of water. The terrine on page is also a type of double-boiler.
This is one of the most perfect ways of cooking. It requires very little attention – just making sure the saucepan doesn’t boil dry – and because the rate of cooking is slow the time factor isn’t too vital. Sometimes the inner container has a tight-fitting lid. (In the case of apple pudding and steak pudding the food is encased and sealed in suet pastry.) Because blood, being protein, curdles at 176ºF. this is the way jugged hare should be cooked. Superior types of stew can be cooked this way, so can eggs en cocotte (page); in fact anything can be cooked this way, even large pieces of meat.
Some ovens can be adjusted to give heat below the boiling point of water – 212ºF. – and obviously a pot inside such an oven will get exactly the same sort of heat as a double-boiler. Such cooking is called étuver. It is often used for vegetables cooked with butter.
STEAMING
The process of steaming provides a vivid chance to see the difference between heat and temperature. Put your hand into the hot air of an oven at 212ºF. and you’ll feel no more than discomfort but I advise you not to plunge your hand into water that is at this (boiling) temperature. Hot water is more violent than hot air and more violent than steam. A potato cooked in the dissipated heat of a steamer will take longer to cook than one that is boiled.
Steaming is done by putting food into a perforated container and placing that over a saucepan of boiling water. Only the steam touches the food. Sometimes egg mixtures – like custards – are steamed and they are much better than the same mixture boiled. Sometimes cooks making a pudding in a basin will stand it in simmering water so that the bottom part of it cooks double-boiler method and the top – pastry – part steams. Diabolical English cunning this. (Because this is a popular way to prepare English steak and kidney pudding, cooks often say steamed when they really mean this two-part way of cooking.)
PRESSURE COOKING
Pressure cooking is a special way of cooking at high temperature (226ºF.). Although it will cook fragile things, it is at its best when neither overcooking nor violent movement of air will affect the food. Soups, stocks, stews, and vegetables that will end up as a purée (e.g. swede, potato, turnip) are particularly good. So are any dried fruits or vegetables or suet puddings. A pressure cooker – marmite à pression – is a valuable tool for any cook who is short of time, even if it’s only used to make soup and stock. Read the instruction book that comes with it.
Although I like pressure cookers it must be added that a good cook should plan in advance, and stock that has simmered for five hours without attention is scarcely more bother than a pressure cooker that needs close attention for thirty minutes. The simmered stock will be far better and less cloudy.
Finally In the section on steaming, a paragraph or so back, I described how a steak pudding can enjoy being half steamed and half double-boiler cooked. That’s a clever and logical way to cook that dish because it is two entirely different foodstuffs being cooked in a method suited to each, i.e. pudding steamed, meat double-boiler cooked. However there are many other combination methods of cooking that stem from muddled thinking and are not logical or clever. For instance, it’s not logical and clever to have a joint of meat standing in a tray of fat in a hot oven: if you want it baked, then why have it in a tray of fat; if you want it fried, why have it in the oven? Another muddled cooking method is braising (see Very moist heat, page) which has