{"id":355,"date":"2011-11-06T05:22:33","date_gmt":"2011-11-06T05:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrsbutterfingers.com\/wp\/?p=355"},"modified":"2011-11-06T05:23:37","modified_gmt":"2011-11-06T05:23:37","slug":"how-i-learned-to-cook-from-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mrsbutterfingers.com\/?p=355","title":{"rendered":"HOW I LEARNED TO “COOK FROM THE HEART”"},"content":{"rendered":"

MY FATHER’S LITTLE BLACK BOOK\u00a0\u00a0 MORE ABOUT LEARNING TO COOK FROM THE HEART<\/strong><\/p>\n

I learned to cook in the traditional way.\u00a0 At my Father’s knee; literally.\u00a0\u00a0 I was seven or eight years old and I loved to get up early and work with my Dad in the kitchen.\u00a0 \u00a0I wasn’t tall enough to work on the kitchen counter so he made me a pastry board on\u00a0 our children’s\u00a0\u00a0white and red\u00a0nursery table.\u00a0 Just the right height to learn\u00a0 to make pastry.<\/p>\n

In those very early days\u00a0of leaning\u00a0 it was not \u00a0recipes or cook books.\u00a0 It was all about techniques and the understanding of what you were doing and why you were doing it.\u00a0 Take this amount of flour, add this amount of lard (always the best for the flaky pie crusts), now sprinkle it with this bit of water and mix pushing aside the combined flour mixture.\u00a0\u00a0 And while I struggled with the heavy rolling-pin to make one pie my Dad would have two dozen pie crusts rolled and waiting to be filled.<\/p>\n

My Dad had a very clear idea of\u00a0what food should taste like.\u00a0 When I asked him why he didn’t strain water from cooked vegetables into his gravy he asked me “are we making gravy for roast beef or are we making vegetable soup?”<\/p>\n

He taught me\u00a0how to buy beef.\u00a0 Not all nicely wrapped\u00a0 but chosen from great sides of beef hanging in the butcher’s cold room.\u00a0 We would walk\u00a0back and forth between the sides looking for the most perfectly marbled side of beef.\u00a0\u00a0You learn a lot about beef when you stand beside someone cutting the meat into just the right sized steaks and roasts, and grinding the trim into hamburger.<\/p>\n

My father was a renaissance man.\u00a0 He was an artist with sugar.\u00a0 He would decorate cakes with a delicate filigree\u00a0 of sugar lace, lush sugar roses\u00a0 and pagodas of dazzling white sugar.\u00a0 I still have the metal nozzles he used to create magic.\u00a0 When we opened our first restaurant, Bassett’s Fancy Desserts,\u00a0the memories of Dad whispered in my ear – do this do that\u00a0 as I whipped gallons of French butter creams and decorated my beautiful cakes.<\/p>\n

At nine years I told my Dad I wanted to be a chef.\u00a0 He said “it’s a difficult job for a woman, they can’t lift the big stock pots”.\u00a0 With all the wisdom of my nine years\u00a0 I told him “I’ll use smaller pots”.<\/p>\n

And what of the famous little black book?\u00a0\u00a0 It was a small notebook that just fitted into the pocket of my Father’ s chef jacket.\u00a0It was his secret reference book \u00a0filled with\u00a0spidery handwriting;\u00a0ingredients, notes,\u00a0baking times of hundreds of recipes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He said it was foolish to expect to remember all the recipes one used.<\/p>\n

My Father always cooked the Sunday dinner; a\u00a0traditional English roast done in an enormous deep blue enamel roasting pan.\u00a0 It was surrounded by potatoes, carrots, turnips, parsnips\u00a0roasted to a crusty golden brown in the rich beef fat.\u00a0\u00a0 The fat was poured off into a baking pan for Yorkshire pudding; baked to impossible tender heights then deflated into tender morsels we would smother with the mahogany brown gravy.\u00a0\u00a0 In the summer we would bundle our dinner into\u00a0 baskets and drive across the river to the Great Northern Forest.\u00a0 We would picnic beside the Little Red,\u00a0a whisper of a stream.\u00a0 There were rustic tables we would cover with tablecloths and\u00a0\u00a0eat in style.<\/p>\n

As the shadows lengthened we would explore, crossing the rickety swinging bridge looking for woodland treasures.\u00a0 A fire smelling of wonderful burning pine bark drew us back for the final treat of the evening;\u00a0\u00a0home-made marshmallows.\u00a0\u00a0 Another treat from my Fathers “little black book”<\/p>\n

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