Accent on Living

COOKERY has a way of creating profound obsessions in those who are at all interested in it. We know too well the cook who is spice-happy, or who likes to drown everything in red wine or stew it in beer. Even as I write this I find myself thinking hungrily of les carbonnades flamandes, beefsteak in beer, as experienced from The Penguin Cookery Book, page 164, but there are cooks who, after a success of this sort, would cause beer in half-barrel lots to engulf the whole menu. Others are cracked on the use of sea salt, curry, tomato paste, or sour cream. A man may decide — probably after reading the leaflet surrounding the bottle — that food is always the better for a dash of Angostura, an attitude which I discarded immediately on finding out what a dash did to the omelette I made under the leaflet’s guidance. Some cooks specialize in nationalities; the traveler home from Scandinavia becomes a smorgasbord nut, and it’s rum or nothing for him who is just back from a trip to the West Indies.

These preoccupations are harmful to good living, for their result, more often than not, suggests that one might fare more contentedly with the heat-’n-serve offerings of the supermarket’s freezers. To be interested in food, judging from the accomplishments of the fanatics, is a waste of time and money and a blight on social conversation as well. (Perhaps society will someday settle the hash of the man who invented that apostrophe-n midsection for the drip’n-dry, heat-’n-eat trade.)

It is a relief to find so authoritative and inventive a cook as Peggy Harvey, whose excellent book, Season to Taste, was recently published by Knopf. She is a member of no cult, expounding neither fad nor hobby, but bringing us all sorts of new and sumptuous recipes. Having just experienced a dozen or more dinners based on Season to Taste, I believe Atlantic readers would find the Peggy Harvey approach well worth testing in their own kitchens.

It must be admitted that some of Peggy Harvey’s entrees represent quite a lot of work. They are not difficult but simply painstaking, and there is, of course, a case for the singlehanded, no fuss-’n-bother (it’s getting me) man who argues that it’s easier to pop a good leg of lamb into the oven than to venture with broth, a roux, and ingredients to mince and sauté and simmer. True enough. Yet a forenoon spent on Peggy Harvey’s modestly titled chicken casserole yields a dinner dish fit for the fanciest occasion, while watching this entree develop into all its ultimate richness is downright good fun. It would be unkind to give away Peggy Harvey’s formula, but the main components will give you an idea of it: chicken, mushrooms, rice, butter, cream, and one pint of raw oysters, this last a characteristically Harvey twist.

She seems to simmer more chicken dishes than she roasts, a practice all too infrequent nowadays in most households, and her chicken Suzanne is another simmered production of great distinction, this one enlivened by a half cup of good bourbon at the finish, which provides a subtle flavor that stumps even the old hands. For some reason Peggy Harvey leaves the bones in for chicken Suzanne but discards all such in her casserole recipe. I discarded all the debris in preparing both dishes, and I should add that one way of making sure that no bones, fat, skin, and gristle turn up in the final product is to do the discarding yourself.

I shall long remember the moment when the host of a fantastically expensive restaurant in New York, whose hospitality I have always mistrusted, was giving his rather mechanical greeting — the No. 2 bow and smile, I judged — to the man who was taking me to lunch there. The menu seemed unexciting, and I had settled for a coquille of chicken breast. Just as the maestro was condescendinghis nod and “I-hope-all-isto-your-satisfaction-gentlemen,” my teeth crunched on that great cap of cartilage and bone which resides at the upper end of a drumstick and which had no business being in the dish anyhow. I managed to exaggerate, in pantomime, the problem of extracting this outrageous substance from the mouthful that I was munching and my amazement at encountering it in such surroundings, and the great man quickly found business elsewhere.

So, in the security of one’s own kitchen, Season to Taste discloses many schemes worth trying. Of its grilled leg of lamb Dekker, which calls for broiling a boned leg of lamb seasoned with powdered sage and garlic, Peggy Harvey writes: “The odd thing is that the meat does not taste particularly like lamb. . . . The meat ... is of varying thickness and, if the cooking time is, as I recommend, between forty-five and fifty minutes, there will be some rare meat, some faintly pink, and quite a lot well done. If there is no one in the group who cares for underdone lamb, the cooking time for the cut side may be extended for ten or fifteen minutes.” Ours came out well done and wonderful, and just as good cold the next day.

We were charmed also by Peggy Harvey’s Creole pot roast, a venture with olive oil and seasonings. Of this recipe she predicts, and correctly, “The liquid from the cooking provides a thin gravy,” and on this count I found that adding a handful of barley resulted in a thicker gravy more to our liking. But the “thin gravy” produced by her recipe for beef in milk is a faultless accompaniment to rice or a baked potato.

Season to Taste undertakes only relatively few categories and is not the comprehensive cookbook. It is divided into eight chapters: First Courses and Luncheon Dishes, Sauces, Entrees, Vegetables, Salads, Desserts, Souffles, and Menus. What it lacks in volume it makes up in the author’s own standard of what a good meal ought to be and in her great gift for telling the reader all that he needs to know besides the recipe itself.