Soaking up the juicy morsels of our lives

An essay and a recipe for fennel risotto. Words and photographs by Claire-Louise Bennett.

Good morning and welcome to Cooking From Life: a Vittles mini-season on cooking and eating at home everyday.

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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our tenth writer for Cooking from Life is Claire-Louise Bennett

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Soaking up the juicy morsels of our lives

An essay and a recipe for fennel risotto. Words and photographs by Claire-Louise Bennett.

Carrots have very clear boundaries. You can tell that by looking at them. The same with celery. The corrugated circumference of a stick of celery announces quite emphatically that it is not an especially receptive vegetable. Carrots and celery are hardy, and hardy entities – people included – aren’t inclined to take much in or give much out. In order to get anything out of celery or a carrot you have to turn up the heat and make them sweat. Potatoes aren’t like that. It doesn’t take much for a potato to fall apart, and if you plop a few of them, raw and halved, into a tomato-based vegetable stew the starchy nubs will wallow away beautifully, thickening the glossy juice while at the same time taking on its vibrant flavour.

Indeed, spuds can take a lot. Which might well explain why they are frequently referred to as ‘humble’, and why they are renowned for their soakage skills. I know of a man who (many years ago, it should be said) horsed down a packet of Smash before heading to the pub for a rake of pints. Apparently he had nothing else in the cupboard. And so impatient was he to get down to the boozer, he neglected to prepare the potato flakes properly. Apparently they swelled up, in the intended fashion, deep inside his gut as he perched pleased as Punch on a barstool, blithely pouring pint after pint down his gullet. Apparently the flakes fluffed up and expanded so much he eventually fell from his perch and was carted off to hospital where he had his stomach pumped. The nurses couldn’t get over how much mash came out of him. Scoopful after scoopful, apparently.

Cooking risotto follows a similar principle, yet employs a very different technique (it is always advisable to hydrate the rice grains gradually in a pan rather than in the belly); though, as we will discover, beer might well have a part to play in this more refined approach. Most risotto recipes specify that cooking the rice involves adding stock ladle by ladle, stirring continuously, and takes sixteen minutes. I’ve never known risotto to be ready in sixteen minutes. And I wouldn’t want it to be ready so expeditiously, because that would spoil the fun. Risotto tastes lovely and has a comforting texture and all the rest, but the real point of making it is that it takes ages for the stubborn little arborio grains to succumb to the broth. Consequently, in the meantime, you can fill your boots with booze, smoke your head off, and embroil yourself in deeply emotional conversation, and it doesn’t matter a jot – the meal won’t spoil, or burn, or toughen or anything like that; in fact, it’ll just keep getting scrummier and creamier. That’s the real beauty of it, and it’s why I invariably end up preparing it, avec fennel, whenever I see my good friend Rose. Which isn’t that often because she lives in France, so we always have a lot of catching up to do, and the best place to catch up – properly, giddily, meaningfully – is shoved up against the kitchen counter, either side of a steaming pot of softly bubbling rice, chuffing on roll-ups smattered with olive oil and guzzling Italian white wine – something peachy from Friuli, perhaps.

A glass of wine should of course be decanted into the pan right at the beginning of proceedings – I recall, however, that on more than one occasion Rose’s impassioned protestations prevented me from going through with this crucial step: wasn’t there something less exquisite I could throw in instead, she intervened, and so actually, I must confess that, in order not to put a dent in our supply of the finest stuff, I’ve emptied a range of bog-standard beers, and even a can of lager, onto the hot hard beads of toasting rice, and can report that the risotto turned out just fine – much to our amusement, we hardly knew the difference in fact.

I can’t help but feel that what causes the rice to swell so slowly, so sumptuously, is not entirely down to the depth of the stock or the quality of the grog, but the hot air building up above it – the heated conversation between me and Rose, in other words. I think, probably, the rice deliberately holds off from softening up too soon because it wants to soak up the juicy morsels of our lives for as long as possible – and the longer we talk, the juicier it gets, naturally. There it is, in the pan right beside us, taking everything in! And what a brew! Confiding and confessing, puffing and imbibing, stirring and finessing – indeed, why would any vital element in this sultry triumvirate want the operation to be over and done with in sixteen minutes?! More often than not we don’t sit down to eat before ten o’clock. Bundles of chopped parsley are added to the mix before serving, plus some lemon zest – both brighten things up. Some Parmesan too, of course, though not as much as you might imagine – by this point the rice is already silky and butyraceous from all the time and all the stirring and all the talking. Once we’ve sat down the drinking and the talking stops. Regardless of the hijinks that accompanied its creation, those first mouthfuls of risotto at the table are a serious matter, requiring our full attention. The silence is always broken by Rose, who will declare with a groan that this is the best one yet. She says it every time, and with so much solemnity that her verdict sounds practically catastrophic. Which makes me think, fool that I am, that she means it – every time.    

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Fennel Risotto

Serves 4    

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, finely diced
3 fennel bulbs, tough outer layer removed, thinly sliced
2 or 3 garlic cloves, crushed or finely grated                         
c.300g Arborio risotto rice           
A glass of white wine or ½ bottle of Italian beer, such as Birra Moretti or Peroni
Chilli flakes, such as Kashmiri
c. 1–1.25 litres good chicken or vegetable stock
Grated zest from 1 lemon
A couple of handfuls of parsley leaves, roughly chopped
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Salt, to taste
Grated parmesan, to taste
and – imperative – a close friend you haven’t seen for a while

Optional extras:
Butter
Fennel bulb, roughly sliced and roasted
Red pepper, roughly chopped and roasted
Walnuts, toasted and roughly chopped      
Feta cheese, crumbled      

To serve
Green salad

Method

For instructions on stock, see note at the end.

1)    Add olive oil to a wide pan set over a medium heat. When it’s hot, add the chopped onion and fennel and cook gently, stirring constantly until it starts to soften     .    

2)    Once the fennel is slightly softened and the onion is golden, add the garlic and cook for a minute or so. Don’t let the garlic brown or it will taste bitter.

3)    Pour in the rice and stir, coating with the fragrant oil. Toast the rice for a couple of minutes and then pour in the wine or beer. Stir constantly until the liquid more or less disappears.

4)    Sprinkle in a few chilli flakes if you like – it adds some warmth.

5)    Turn the heat down to medium-low, and begin ladling in the stock. Pour yourself another drink, light up, launch into another unbelievable bit of news. Stir, pour, ladle, smoke, chatter. You can stop stirring from time to time, and you can turn the heat right down if you think the rice is in danger of being ready too soon.

6)    Once the rice can absorb nothing more and is tender, add lemon zest and parsley and season generously. At this point you can fold in some butter, but generally a little grated parmesan is sufficient. If I’m finishing off with optional extras – roasted fennel, roasted red pepper, walnuts, feta cheese – then I skip the parmesan. 

7)    Let it cool down a bit before serving with a green salad.  

Note

If you’d like to make your own stock, as I do: Make the stock earlier in the day. I often use home-made chicken stock, but if cooking for a vegetarian I’ll make one that is suitable for them, using carrot, celery, onions, peppercorns, bay leaf and so on. I add a couple of whole tomatoes to the pot too, and a few unwaxed or scrubbed lemon wedges, and the stems from the parsley. Let that simmer away for a while. And gently reheat it just before you start cooking the rice. It shouldn’t be boiling. 

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Credits

Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Claire-Louise's fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including White Review, Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper's Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Literature, and New York Times Magazine.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. The recipes in Cooking from Life have been tested by Ruby Tandoh.