The best cookbooks are like the best of friends: you might not see them for weeks, months, years even, but, when you do get together, it is a combination of familiarity and joy as you pick up just where you left off.
It had been only a few months, but I had one such reunion with Alastair Little’s Keep It Simple recently, a book so good that I want to ingest it in much the same way as all the recipes inside. Not that it was always this way. When first given a used first edition with a makeshift Chinese print wrapping paper cover, I was obviously pleased and excited about cooking what were certain to be good recipes. But it didn’t seem a book to be read and relished, more the practical sort that would become a useful acquaintance. Then I did read, standing at the counter but soon finding a chair and a pencil, underlining bits so as to remember them better, my pencil doing a sort of yes, yes, YES. It is a practical book – good ones generally are – and also full of wit and wisdom from a chef who is self-taught and so possesses the spirit and mind of a home cook: a real kitchen companion.
Like all the best cookbooks, it is not just the recipes that become regulars – Orvieto chicken, risotto with asparagus, cod with tzatziki – it is the methods and bits of advice that etch themselves on to cooking consciousness: that mayonnaise is best made with a whisk; that onion to have with liver should be a compote, not caramelised; that mise en place is key (I am working on this). There are also the ways of seeing, that oxtail is a food of reassurance and reaffirmation, that aioli is a moveable feast, the vital trivia that precedes Little’s recipe for rabbit with home-dried tomatoes: that it was a rabbit head exiting though John Hurt’s stomach in Alien.
It is the advice from Keep It Simple that plays like an advert jingle when I pan-fry chicken: get it out of the fridge well in advance, season with abundant salt and pepper, rubbing well into the skin, arrange the pieces skin down in a large saute pan with a little olive oil, then fry without touching for 25 minutes until the skin is crisp and golden, before turning and cooking for another 10 minutes.
Best books are also like best friends in that they know they won’t be usurped. Alastair’s chicken tips meeting a Jessica Seaton recipe was an essential collaboration; Jessica’s recipe needs an oven and we don’t have one at the moment (or, rather, not one that doesn’t involve running down a flight of stairs, and across a communal garden, and back up two more flights). Having pan-fried the chicken pieces – a small (1.6kg) joined chicken or four thighs/legs – you remove them from the pan, pour away most of the chicken fat, replace it with a big knob of butter and chopped shallot, and let that bubble and foam before adding half a litre or so of light chicken stock. Once the stock is simmering, you use it to poach spring/summer vegetables chopped into manageable pieces and added in a (roughly) estimated order of cooking time – a big handful of sprouting broccoli first, then green beans, broad beans, then lastly peas and leaves that only need moments. Once the vegetables are cooked – tender but still vibrant (it is nice to have the vivid green) – return the chicken pieces to the pan and simmer a few minutes more.
The chicken should be tender and with deep-golden skin, which contrasts with the brothy spring vegetables and beautifully flavoured broth itself. Serve with boiled potatoes, or simply with bread – con pane, the root of the word “companionship”.