Costa - Margaret Costas Four Seasons Cookery Book

This new edition published in 2008 by
Grub Street
4 Rainham Close
London SW11 6SS
www.grubstreet.co.uk

Text copyright Margaret Costa 1970, 2008
Copyright Grub Street 2008
Illustrations by Owain Kirby
Design by lizziebdesign
First published in Great Britain by
Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd 1970

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Costa, Margaret
Four seasons cookery bookNew ed.
1. Cookery
1. Title
641.564
ISBN 978-1-906502-05-8
PRINT ISBN: 9781902304205
EPUB ISBN: 9781909166639

The moral right of the author is asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Publishers note:
All the royalties from the sale of this book go to the Alzheimers Society

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Professional chefs are notoriously bad at giving recipes for domestic kitchens. They are unable to think in small quantities for a start, they are maddeningly vague about times and temperatures, they use words which create total, unreasoning panic in the mind of the ordinary cook: dglacer, dgorger, tomber, revenir, beurre mani no wonder we lose our heads.

Even the words we think we recognise blend, beat, sieve all mean something different to them because they use different equipment. And then they are used to having things to hand. Garnish with truffles, they cry, cook in clarified butter, stuff with a duxelles, finish with a spoonful of hollandaise. The sauce? Oh, just a simple jus li with the addition of a little demi-glace.

None the less I have learned a very great deal from my husband who is a professional chef and, because he is entirely free from that rigidity of mind that is the occupational risk of being trained in a strict and classic discipline, he says that he has learned from me. He is indeed always very surprised to watch me doing things the wrong way and find them turn out all right and very occasionally even spectacularly successful like the souffl which he gloomily prophesied wouldnt rise and which pushed the bars of the shelf above it right up to the roof of the oven.

But I have learned more from him. If I had met him earlier in life it would have saved me temper, tears and time. For it is not so much the elaborate recipes which can only really be reproduced satisfactorily and relatively cheaply with the resources of a large kitchen and a skilled brigade that have enlarged my horizons, the techniques that I cannot hope to emulate. It is the short cuts. The professional way of doing things which, as always, is the best way, the simplest and the least laborious once you have got used to it. Some I have learned haphazardly and at random through the years but most I have learned from watching him the best of all ways of learning anything. I love to see how gently but unhurriedly he sets about complicated tasks, like coaxing a curdling sauce back to creamy smoothness, and how quickly they are accomplished.

As a result, I have learned both to be more confident of success and how to prevent disaster or rescue a failure at the eleventh hour. I almost never panic in the kitchen now. I remember that in a first-class restaurant kitchen you must wait a little for almost everything. The steaks and chops are not even cut until ordered, nor the fish filleted, and I have learned that at home too every dish, however simple, needs time and care; that it is always slower in the end to try to hurry the preparation of a meal. And I try to pass on what I have learned.

More than this: I have found a new joy in cooking, menu-planning, entertaining and keeping a good table. A great many people who cook a great deal and dont dislike it, dont always, I think, get as much pleasure out of it as they could; because it is something they do every day they dont treat it as a pleasurable occupation. Fine cooking is as different from day-to-day meal-providing as delicate embroidery is from darning socks but not so difficult. It doesnt demand a very high degree of skill and expertise except, perhaps in the highest reaches of the confectioners art but it needs enthusiasm and imagination, time, patience and practice. To set aside a few leisure hours each week in which to enjoy cooking, to prepare an interesting new dish or bake an unusual cake with all the care it deserves, will reward you as this sort of loving care always does, and it will improve your everyday cooking out of all recognition. When I am not rushed, I find cooking the most restful and soothing of all occupations; to beat and baste, to peel and chop and slice, to taste and test and stir and skim is therapy, what in the old days they used to call joy.

When keeping a good table becomes as important to you as this you may find that you seem to spend a little more on it: you may invest in a battery of good knives, for instance, or you will use perhaps a little more butter and cream, buy mushrooms and lemons and olive oil more often, get vanilla pods instead of vanilla essence, fresh garlic instead of garlic salt. You wont hesitate to use a little wine and brandy in the kitchen if you have it in the house. But very often you spend less in the end because these little extravagances help you to make the very best of simple food and you will find that you are using only fresh food in full season at its best and cheapest.

For the best kind of cooking doesnt depend on exotic and expensive ingredients, only upon the best and freshest of whatever you decide to use. And upon the importance of taking time and trouble. Trouble that isnt really trouble, but love, care, thought; time that isnt so much time, as organization, method, planning, thinking ahead. A real interest in cooking well, presenting food attractively and keeping a good table is something really fundamental which many people share. Exchanging ideas about it has been the beginning of many stimulating new friendships: and indeed for me it has brought me everything that makes mine a very happy life.

FOREWORD

It is with very great joy that I reintroduce this book to you. A book that has in many ways been the best kept culinary secret in the entire history of British cooking. A cookery book for those in the know so precious that it would cause them to scour the countrys second-hand book shops in the hope of finding a copy. I well remember a couple of years back our most talented chef and cookery writer, Simon Hopkinson, lamenting how he had searched in vain and not been successful. I remember too, the look on his face when I presented him with a spare copy of mine for his birthday it was a look of profound joy and gratitude that he had at last obtained such a desired treasure.

To begin at the beginning, its author Margaret Costa was, back in the sixties and early seventies, a very popular cookery writer whose articles and recipes appearing in the Sunday Times colour magazine were in themselves collectors items. What made her so special and in my opinion set her apart from her contemporaries at the time, was her ability to communicate good food and good cooking, not in a lofty high-minded way which can isolate people, but with a natural enthusiasm that was always contagious.

Her other great virtue was her ability to write with such charm. I have often quoted her in my own books and TV programmes first take the smoked trout out of their mackintoshes or hard tart little gooseberries, brilliantly green which rain into the pan like hail.