Nigella Lawson - Forever Summer

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Text 2002 Nigella Lawson
Photographs 2002 Petrina Tinslay
Landscape photographs Art Directors and Trip Photo Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in paperback in 2005 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain in 2002, and simultaneously in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lawson, Nigella
Forever summer / Nigella Lawson.

eISBN: 978-0-307-36398-5

1. Cookery. 2. Summer. I. Title.

TX829.L39 2002 641.564 C2002-902096-4

Design and Art Direction: Caz Hildebrand
Cookery Assistants: Hettie Potter with Angela Boggiano
Additional Research: Skye Gyngell
Stylist: Helen Trent

www.randomhouse.ca

v.3.1

Also by Nigella Lawson

HOW TO EAT

THE PLEASURES AND PRINCIPLES OF GOOD FOOD

HOW TO BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS

BAKING AND THE ART OF COMFORT COOKING

NIGELLA BITES

FEAST

FOOD THAT CELEBRATES LIFE

NIGELLA EXPRESS

GOOD FOOD FAST

NIGELLA CHRISTMAS

FOOD, FAMILY, FRIENDS, FESTIVITIES

KITCHEN

RECIPES FROM THE HEART OF THE HOME

In the ideal world inhabited by the chef, there may indeed be a place for the lyrical insistence on using only those ingredients that the month in hand offers up to the market place, but my kitchen, my home, the way I cook, resist such purist strictures. For much as I love the idea of wandering out to the shops, basket dangling from my arm, to gather each new seasons freshly ripened produce, I neither have the time to shop that way, nor the discipline and, frankly, I baulk at such loftily imposed restraints. I shop and cook much as I eat, with greedy opportunism.

Seasonal cooking is anyway better suited to those who live in sunnier climates. The rest of us need to make the most of what warmth is offered, and much of the time this has to emanate from the kitchen rather than from the skies outside. Summer, then, is an idea, a memory, a hopeful projection. Sometimes when its grey outside and cold within, we need to conjure up the sun, some light, a lazy feeling of having all the wide-skied time in the world to sit back and eat warmly with friends. I am not talking about creating some overblown idyll of perpetual Provenal summer, but of extending that purring sense of sunny expansiveness.

Summer food, even when eaten in deepest winter, contains within it the idea of simple cooking. But the best recipes are never blueprints, only ideas hungrily mooted. The ones in this book have come to me the way they always do, plundered from friends, from family, grown out of an idea of what might go with what. As the Australian food writer Maggie Beer has written, cooking is all about osmosis a mental note made about a flavour combination or a technique, a memory of a dish. Cooking is not just about applying heat, procedure, method, but about transformation of a more intimate kind; none of us cooks without bringing our own character to bear on the food in front of us. Just as the recipes that follow have been toyed with, changed, fiddled with to become my food, so I expect them to be remodelled in your own kitchen.

I have only one rule when I decide what to put in, what to leave out. However successful a kitchen experiment might seem to be, if I dont feel the urge to cook something again, and soon, I ditch it. The one-off spectacular is not my style, nor ever could be. And, if at any time Im still wondering if this or that particular recipe is worth keeping, I set myself a scene: a friend, a reader, a fellow-mother at the school gates, is coming up to me, telling me that tonight shes going to cook my..... If Im not filled with impatient, evangelical enthusiasm at the imagined exchange, if that recipe doesnt inspire that same, unwavering, bossy confidence, then out it goes. I want to write only about the food I love, and I want you to love it, too.

Life has its difficulties, why add to them in the kitchen? And for all that my title archly conjures up that starlets gushing hope from the premire scene in Singing in the Rain that if Ive brought a little cheer intoyour humdrum little lives, it aint all been in vain for nothin, it is not because I believe there is nothing but endless, unclouded blue sky in Nigellaland, but because I still believe the kitchen is not a place you escape from, but the place you escape to.

Fresh, innovative, versatile and delicious, its summer all year round and from all over the world with Nigella. With all the style and class of her earlier books, and a whole new concept, this is a wonderful and wide-ranging book of summer recipes which can be eaten at any time from irresistible Italian antipasti and Greek mezze to Californian cuisine, from beach picnics to Indian summer evenings at home, from light lunches to seductive suppers. This gorgeous book, written with all Nigellas characteristic flair and passion, ties in with her Channel 4 TV series and contains 40 or so additional recipes added exclusively for the book.

Nigella Lawson is the author of bestselling books How to Eat (may just be the best cookery book ever Daily Telegraph), How to be a Domestic Goddess (British Book Awards 2001), Nigella Bites (WHSmith Award 2002), Feast (a voluptuous and delicious piece of food writing Guardian), Nigella Express (no. 1 bestseller with over 1 million sales), Nigella Christmas (everything to make your Christmas sparkle Independent) and most recently Kitchen (another blockbuster hearty and wholesome Daily Express) which, together with her successful TV series and her recent iPhone App, Nigella Quick Collection, have made hers a household name around the world. She lives in London with her family.

CONVERSION CHARTS

List of Recipes

Barbecue

Beef

Bread

Dips

Cheese

Chocolate

Curries

Desserts

Drinks

Eggs

Fish and Seafood

Fruit

Ice Creams and Sorbets

Lamb

Nuts and Pulses

Pasta

Pork

Potatoes

Poultry

Rice and Noodles

Salads, Snacks and Sides

Soups and Stews

Vegetarian

CROSTINI DEL MARE

Ive been harbouring a memory of these for eight years now, but this is the first time Ive actually cooked them myself. I came across them while I was on holiday in Porto Ercole, at a little restaurant called Il Greco over the way in Porto Santo Stefano. I sat by the waters edge, voluptuously savouring the menu while the waiters brought plates of lozenge-shaped toasts covered with the still warm meat of finely chopped mussels and clams, deep with garlic and sprinkled with parsley. It was when I was cooking the pasta with mussels for the book shoot that the briney, winey smell of the steaming seafood made me desperate to recreate these. And yes, theyre fiddly, but so very, very good.