To fillet the anchovies, hold an anchovy under cold running water. Pull off the loose muck near the head and at the belly. Rub the outside to remove any remaining salt or hard bits. Keeping the anchovy under the water, gently work a fingertip along the belly to start to separate the fillets. Gently pull the fillets apart – this should be easy, especially once you get the hang of it. Drape the now-boneless fillet over the edge of a bowl to drain. Pinch the backbone and gently pull it away from the second fillet; discard it. Put the second fillet next to the first, and do the same with the rest of the anchovies.
POTATOES
I almost always rinse my potatoes after I chop or peel them, to wash some of the starch away. Doing so helps prevent potatoes from discolouring, keeps mashed potatoes from becoming gluey and sticky, and is just generally a good practice. Here’s how I do it: give the peeled potatoes a rinse under cold running water. Add them to a good-sized pot, run more water over them, and pour it off; repeat if necessary until the water runs clear.
TOMATOES
Nothing gets me grumpy like rubbish tomatoes. You know the kind – bland, crunchy, and paler than my English legs. You don’t want to go near a fresh tomato in the winter. And even when you use lovely ripe tomatoes, you should still be fastidious about them, trimming away any pale or hard bits you might spot inside.
I’m equally persnickety about tinned tomatoes. I urge you to buy the best quality you can. Any brand of good quality tinned tomatoes you find to be consistently bright in flavour and deep red throughout is a keeper. I also always mean for you to drain off the liquid they come in (unless you’re buying those fantastic but expensive jarred tomatoes packed in clear liquid). I find the liquid tastes artificially sweet and salty. Finally, I trim off any horrible bits: yellowish patches, skin, and the tough ‘eyes’. I suggest you do the same.
In several recipes, I call for fresh tomatoes to be blanched and peeled. Here’s how to do it: bring a large pot of water to the boil. Use a knife to make a shallow X through the skin in the bottom of each tomato. Working in batches of tomatoes of similar size, carefully plunge them into the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds for larger tomatoes, about 10 seconds for small ones. Transfer them to a big bowl of ice-cold water. Drain them and pull the skin off the tomatoes. You can gently scrape them with a knife to loosen any stubborn skin. Cut out the tough core, unless you’re working with cherry or grape tomatoes.
BEANS
Buy the freshest dried beans you can find. The idea of ‘fresh dried beans’ might sound like a contradiction, but many of the dried beans you find on supermarket shelves have been dried for so long that they take forever to cook and never achieve the same lovely texture as fresh dried beans. You can identify old beans by looking for bags where lots of beans have begun to crack and split. But your best bet is buying from a reliable source, a brand or shop that has sold you nice beans in the past.
MALDON SALT
When people ask me to name my favourite ingredient, I think about fresh beans and ramps, artichokes and parsnips, tomatoes and Parmesan, but in the end I always go with Maldon salt. Made by a 200-year-old company, the clean-tasting, delicately crunchy flakes of salt are carefully gleaned from the Blackwater River estuary in Essex. I use it to season just about everything, whether at the last minute, so as to preserve a bit of the salt’s crunch, or earlier on. Really, the only times I prefer sea salt are for seasoning meat (a sprinkle of Maldon crystals would tumble right off) or salting pasta water or a brine (who can afford Maldon salt for that!). That said, if you don’t have it on hand, another flaky sea salt will do.
BREAD
Filone, a crusty Italian loaf with an airy crumb, is my bread of choice. But if you can’t find it locally, you can substitute any bread with similar qualities when you make the following:
Breadcrumbs
When I call for breadcrumbs, I mean stale bread (two days or so old) pulsed in a food processor until it’s coarse (about the size of lentils) or fine (slightly larger than grains of sand), depending on the recipe. If you don’t have stale bread, you can replicate the texture by popping the bread into a low oven for a bit, until it’s slightly dried out but hasn’t coloured.
Toast and Bruschetta
The crunch and heft of toast and simple bruschetta provide perfect contrast to countless dishes, including many in this book. To make toast, I like to grill or griddle slices (about 1cm thick) of crusty rustic bread until they’re crunchy on the outside, but not dry and brittle. To make bruschetta, rub one side of each toast liberally with a raw clove of garlic, drizzle with good olive oil (ideally a grassy, peppery oil), and sprinkle with Maldon or another flaky sea salt.
Croutons
I make croutons from stale rustic Italian bread, the crust removed, with a light, hole-riddle crumb, for Caesar Salad (see recipe, here) and Roast Chicken with Tomato-and-Bread Salad (see recipe, here). The toasting process is the same, but I like croutons of a slightly different shape for these recipes. For the Caesar, I tear enough of the crumb to make two generous handfuls of irregular bite-sized pieces. For the bread salad, I tear the crumb of a large loaf into long strips of different lengths. It’s nice for them to be about the same width (2.5cm), so they toast evenly.
To make the croutons: spread the bread pieces on a tray in one layer and bake them in a 200°C/400°F/gas 6 oven, shaking the pan and tossing the pieces now and then, until they’re golden brown and crunchy all the way through, 10 to 15 minutes; they shouldn’t give at all when you squeeze them. Keep a close eye on them to be sure they don’t get too dark.
EQUIPMENT
MEAT MINCER
I’m a big fan of mincing my own meat. It gives you control over the cuts of meat you use for burgers and meatballs. It also lets you be sure that the minced meat you cook with hasn’t been overworked, which can make the results dense and unappealing. I have the proper mincer at the restaurants, but you can buy a mincer attachment for your stand mixer. Before you mince, I suggest you pop the meat and the mincer attachment into the freezer until the edges of the meat go crunchy. Several recipes in this book ask you to mince meat along with other ingredients, like breadcrumbs and herbs. I suggest that you make the effort and do it yourself, but sure, you could ask a nice butcher to do it for you.
MORTAR AND PESTLE
I’d trade all the fancy blenders and mixers in the world for a granite mortar and pestle. I use mine often for pounding toasted spices to a powder, smashing garlic to a paste to make aioli, and much more. You can get by without one – whizzing spices in a grinder, chopping and scraping ingredients to a paste on a cutting board with a chef’s knife – but nothing else is quite as satisfying.
PANCAKES WITH BACON AND CHILLI
Shrove
