In 1958, when I was 13 years old, the days of the midweek seemed to melt aimlessly into each other. Saturday night couldn't come fast enough: winkle-pickers, drainpipe trousers, hanging around Golders Green bus station eyeing the birds and doing a bit of back-combing. But I didn't need a diary to tell me how far away the weekend was. The evening aromas coming from the kitchen as I struggled with my Latin verbs would check off the days.
Wednesday brought a pungent sheepy smell emanating from the greyish lamb and barley soup my mother optimstically called Taste of the Garden of Eden. Expel me, please. Haddock in the air? That would be Thursday. Eaten cold, two days later, for breakfast, it wasn't all that bad. When the fried flakes started to glow with a slight morning iridescence, the thing turned edible. The faintest whiff of roasting garlic? That would be what my sister and I uncharitably dubbed Friday Night Memorial Chicken; a venerable object smeared on the breasts with a dab of marmite meant to cheer the bird up as it emerged defeated from the oven. Rattling inside the brittle cavity was that one solitary clove of garlic; the exotic knobble that my mother conceded as a romantic touch amid the iron regimen of her unvarying weekly routine.
So when I learned to cook in the 60s, the discovery of food was always about experiment: an aversion to routine of any kind. There were certain trusty books at hand; my guides and mentors - Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking and Italian Food, and Simone Beck and Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And I quickly learned that there were some things I did better than others - bouillabaisse, soupe au pistou, stufato di manzo (Italian beef stew) - but I shunned anything resembling a familiar repertoire: a bistro edition of my mother's kitchen. So I would recklessly take chances with dinner parties on dishes I had never tried before. Sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn't.
Zwiebel, an Alsatian onion tart from Elizabeth David, had exactly the buttery-golden texture and voluptuous ooze running to the walls of the pastry shell, but a beef wellington served up to impress historians was a glutinous ruin. Undaunted, the riskier the combo of pastry and whatever it was, the more I was up for it. It took a few disasters with a classic Russian salmon koulibiak, but on the third try at a summer dinner party in my neo-brutalist Cambridge don's rooms, I pulled it off, passed the vodka and watched as conversation stopped and guests forked their way to quiet joy.
Years later, with small children running round my American kitchen, cooking was still ordained as adventure. Living in New England, the family was going to eat seafood - and I didn't mean fish fingers. In late February, the very first tiny, intensely sweet shrimp of the season would be driven down from Camden, Maine, by a ruddy-faced fisherman who would park his van on a suburban hill, pack a huge plastic tub of them for a few dollars, and we would gorge through the weekend, sucking the meat from the delicate shells. Then there was lobster, the scariest imaginable food for children, which we educationally set before them. We cracked a claw open for my four-year-old daughter, who was leaning towards the glistening oily white flesh when a cry of horror came from my smaller son sitting in his high chair. "No, Chloe! Don't put it in your mouth," he wailed, staring in horror at the lurid marine co*ckroach. She did.
But, even as I turned into an unstoppably crazed gazeteer of world cuisine - Maghrebi maqluba (upside-down aubergine and rice casserole), Burmese beya kwaw (split-pea fritters) that fell apart in the pan, I knew it was unfair to recruit my kids as fellow gastro-explorers in the name of principled eclecticism. Small children are nature's little conservatives. They are warmed by fulfilled expectations. They have favourites in the kitchen - and why deny them? So I developed some dishes that could satisfy my longing for complicated exercises in flavour fusions but still be food that the children loved: a lemony-chickpea chicken stew first encountered in Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern books, and the much-requested raan, a kashmiri roast lamb dish in which the joint is marinaded in three separate coats: a garlic- and-roast-spice rub; a paste of saffron, crushed pistachio and almonds blended with yoghurt; and finally, a sumptuous drizzle of honey. After two (or preferably three) days tight-wrapped in film in the fridge, out it comes and slow-roasts (or rather disintegrates beneath its nutty-spicy-sweet golden mantle of flavours) and you have something that's both main course and pudding all at once.
Raan was all very well for the weekend (marinade Friday night; eat on Sunday), but the more hectic family life became, the more I needed a range of dishes that would make them happy as they smelled the cooking when they came in from lacrosse or science lab on a bleak muddy evening in February, or while they got stuck into homework. They had to be dishes that wouldn't take an age to prepare (though dinner was usually around eight, two hours after most American kids had eaten, allowing their friends to stop round for a second supper). And it had to be a meal I wanted to shop for, after a day's teaching or writing.
Getting to know the shopkeepers makes a difference, turns a transaction into a gossip with friends. At the Korean greengrocer I want to know when the New Jersey asparagus might show up in May, but also how Monica is doing off in Montana with her one year-old. At the butchers in Chappaqua, they'll find me a rabbit for a pasta sauce but I worry how Tony manages after losing his wife in a battle with cancer. At Harold's place they'll be smoking sturgeon and whitefish and complaining it's been too long since they saw me, while across the street at Mount Kisco Seafood I'll talk cricket with Pauly from India but baseball with Brian and Joe even though they're Yankees fans and I'm a diehard Red Sox loyalist. We switch to Pink Floyd or politics and they tell me the copper river salmon from Alaska is in - and only for a precious two weeks. So I'll take a long beautiful fillet and power-roast it in the oven with a light crust of fine-chopped fresh herbs.
The trick is to set the roasting pan, liberally greased with butter (olive oil if you must) and a layer of herbs, in a fierce oven, say 225C, until the green stuff is on the turn of crisping. Then you set the fish on top, skin-side up, for just four minutes for a piece about 1.5cm thick, until the skin peels off with just the touch of a knife. Turn, season and cover the now exposed side of the fillet with more herbs (parsley, coriander, thyme, even tarragon - just not rosemary) and roast for another four. The fish cooks perfectly, buttery and golden-crispy on the outside, perfectly juicy inside. Kids of all ages, even fish-haters, love it.
So the herby salmon became an item in the repertoire I swore I would never have. But actually family cooks need these staples; together they make a kitchen portrait of their table life together. And with any luck, as they grow up and leave home and start their own kitchens, the children will take those food memories with them. There is an Italian meatloaf - polpettone - that I made a lot, which, before he became a vegetarian, my son liked so much he wrote his college application essay about father-son bonding in the hunt for the perfect meatloaf recipe, ending with the triumph of the polpettone rustica. It's a homely, lovely thing; a coarse blend of veal and beef, into which you knead some chopped-up stale white bread, soaked in milk, a few grams of finely grated parmesan, a beaten egg and that's about it. But then instead of packing it into a loaf tin, you make a freeform swiss roll or big sausage of it, roll it in flour and carefully set it in a casserole of foaming butter or oil together with a couple of sprigs of thyme, a bayleaf and a sage leaf. You let the roll bubble and brown a little, add a glass of white wine or (better for some reason, dry vermouth) and then put it in a 180C oven with the lid off. After 30 minutes take the pot out, and carefully turn it over with spatulas (wooden are best as non-flexible) and let it cook another 30-40 minutes. Serve with some saute potatoes and a salsa verde and you can guarantee supper bliss.
There are other indispensable items in the Schama repertoire: a wonderful simple dish of flattened chicken fillets dredged in paprika and cayenne cornmeal, fried and set on a bed of rocket that has been doused in chopped summer tomatoes, their juice marrying with some good olive oil and a little sherry vinegar, the whole thing crispy and sloppy, hot and fresh, all at the same time. Then there are swordfish steaks marinaded in an Asian blend of soy, mirin, grated ginger, garlic and chopped spring onions, and barbecued for seven minutes a side.
But what the kids moaned for, craved, especially in dark winter months, was the simplest of all: a cheese souffle. Simple? Yes, it could hardly be simpler, and also virtually infallible as long as you have a dependable oven. The prep takes perhaps 20 minutes; the cooking, filling the kitchen with luscious, toasty-cheesy aroma, another 25 to 30 minutes, during which time you can make a salad or a pan of spinach to cut against the voluptuous ooziness of the souffle. So the whole thing takes maybe 45 minutes - a doddle for hard-pressed cooks in midweek. And though souffle cooking scares people off - what if it fails to rise? (it never does) - the only art you have to learn is the difference between mixing and folding the cheese-yolk mixture into the beaten whites.
Once you've tried it, you'll know there's nothing to it and, unless you're a cholestorol timebomb, it will be at the heart of your very own family repertoire too.
Simon Schama's recipe for foolproof cheese souffle
