ratatouille

This fragrant and velvety late summer autumn vegetable stew has a knack to it. If you aren’t careful you end up with a uniform vegetable mush, or else a collection of vegetables floating in a watery liquid. The knack is to get rid of all the moisture from the tomatoes and other veg without overcooking everything else.

I did some research. Elizabeth David slices and salts everything first, puts it all under weights (between two trays with heavy cans on top) and draws out the liquid before starting the cooking.  This seems too fiddly and contrived to me. The BBC good food recipe suggests cooking all the vegetables separately and then only putting them back together for five minutes at the end. It seems a shame to lose the magical alchemy of flavour that happens when all the vegetables are cooked together and become more than a sum of the parts.

I find the answer in a beautiful cookbook my sister gave to my dad once and which seems to have ended up at my place (thanks Miranda!), called Provencal The Beautiful Cookbook by Richard Olney and published in 1994 by Welden Owen. Here, the veg are cooked all together, and then at the point where you want them to stop being cooked (soft but not mushy, intact but not crispy) you take them off the heat and drain them in a colander, put the liquid back into the pan by itself and cook until reduced to a thick syrupy pot of deliciousness. At this point stir the veg back through and serve. Perfect.

• 

• 

• 

Use equal quantities of onion, fresh tomatoes, zucchini, aubergine, and capsicum. And a head of garlic, smashed and peeled.  Chop the veg into uniform pieces so they cook at the same speed. Put ½ cup olive oil in the pan and add the vegetables in this order: onions and garlic first (until softened), then all the rest except the zucchini. Cook for 30 minutes then add the zucchini until the veg are melting but not mushy, about another half an hour. Drain the mix, reserving the liquid which you return to the pan and reduce by simmering gently until it is thick and syrupy. As the veg continue to drain, more liquid will be released, so keep adding this to the pot. When you judge it to be about right (you want it to surround the vegetables in unctuous deliciousness without them swimming in it), add the veg back to the pot. Salt to taste. As a final flourish, stir through another ½ cup olive oil and some fresh basil leaves.

Yum.