Some Basic Recipes and Techniques

 Credit: Janette Watson

Most of these recipes are for the tyro cook, but one or two may be of interest to more experienced people because of the voyaging overtones, which reduce washing up, and so on. I know that some of my methods are not quite pukka, but they do seem to work.

BASIC WHITE SAUCE

Basic white sauce is needed for Welsh rarebit, custard or lasagne. Proper Sauce Béchamel is made by lovingly stirring 2 tablespoons of white flour into 2 tablespoons of butter over a low heat for three or four minutes. It’s then cooled and a cup of scalded milk is added. Into the pan goes a small onion studded with 2 or 3 cloves and half a bay leaf. This is then cooked until thick and smooth, after which it’s put in a moderate oven for 20 minutes, before straining and seasoning. If you’re in a hurry, you can simply stand and stir it until the sauce has thickened and all the floury flavour has gone. I believe sailors usually have other things to do and go for a lowbrow, non-gastronomic alternative, using cornflour. It’s incredibly easy to make well in one pan and yet cookery writers insist on making a big issue of it, with suggestions for double boilers, pre-heating the milk, etc, etc, which is a lot of trouble and results in extra washing up.

The simplest of white sauces consists of milk, cornflour and either salt and pepper or sweetening. After that, all sorts of goodies can be added, but let’s start from zero. The following recipe makes enough sauce to coat a lasagne, provide four servings of custard, and make a generous amount of Welsh rarebit for two.

Basic White Sauce - and Variations

CHEESE AND YOGHURT SAUCE

This is a very lazy, and very effective way of making a thick sauce to go over pancakes, lasagne and so on. I would be a little bit careful using it in the pressure cooker, however, because it might separate. If you make your own yoghurt (see recipe), you will usually have some on board. This recipe assumes that you have thick, Greek-style yoghurt, but if yours is on the thin side, use all yoghurt or add another egg.

Cheese and Yoghurt Sauce

QUICK CURRY SAUCE

I’m sure no Indian cook would own this one; however it is useful for extending some leftovers or mixing in with a can of beans. If you cook some rice in the pressure cooker while you’re making this, you get an almost instant meal.

Quick Curry Sauce

HOLLANDAISE SAUCE

Perhaps this isn’t exactly a basic recipe, but it’s a lovely one to have in your repertoire. Typically, it’s served with fresh fish such as salmon, but it also goes superbly with fresh asparagus, which is anyway such a luxury, that it deserves the best of treatment. It’s also very popular poured over poached eggs on toast.

If you’re unacquainted with this sauce, the best way to describe it’s like hot mayonnaise, but somehow, even richer. I haven’t tried making a vegan version of this.

Hollandaise Sauce

TOMATO SAUCE

For some reason, North Americans invariably refer to this as marinara sauce, which always sounds a bit pretentious to me! Whatever you choose to call it, the easiest way to make it is with a can of chopped tomatoes. However, if fresh tomatoes are cheap and full-flavoured, they are also very good, so long as you don’t mind little bits of skin in it.

If you want to skin the tomatoes first, immerse the tomato in boiling water for 1 minute and then immediately plunge it into cold water to stop it cooking. A bowl of seawater is fine for this. If you pierce the skin first, it is easier to start the peeling process.

Tomato/Marinara Sauce

PASTRY

Before proceeding any further, let me say that I do not claim to be anything of a pastry cook. This is partly because on a boat, it’s usually difficult to have everything cool. It’s also due to my reluctance to use expensive butter or unpleasant-tasting margarine and the fact that I dislike ‘rubbing in’ pastry. I suspect that I simply don’t have the touch to produce good pastry. However, whenever I serve it, people always seem to enjoy it, so I can at least assert that if you use this recipe, the results are edible!

The following recipe is easy and foolproof. It’s cheap, because there’s no butter in it and it’s made with wholemeal flour. While it doesn’t produce light and flaky results, it rolls out easily. It makes sufficient to make two decent-sized pasties, a 230 mm (9 in) frying-pan quiche, a 200 mm (8 in) flan tin quiche or to cover a pie.

To be honest, if I make anything with ‛pastry’ these days, I nearly always use Calzone dough instead.

Pastry

COOKING PASTA

In a cool, damp place, or when, as is usually the situation on a boat, you’re watching your water consumption, the conventional way of cooking pasta is far from satisfactory.  The instruction tell you to fill a large saucepan with water, bring it to a full rolling boil, plunge in the pasta and boil it, uncovered for the apppropriate length of time.  In anywhere that isn't actually hot, with all the hatches open, this method steams up the boat and in any situation, it uses far too much water. I have two ways of cooking pasta, which both yield very acceptable results without resulting in a steamed-up boat or using excessive amounts of water.

 

Even North American cookbooks bottle out and resort to ounce measures when including recipes for pasta because it's usually fiendishly difficult to guess how much to make.  a thrifty voyager doesn't not want to waste pasta and it's one of the least useful leftovers unless you happen to have a passion for pasta salad.  Of course, if you have a new pack, you can work out that you need a quarter, or whatever, for 2 servings, but many voyagers – and I am one of them – decant their pasta into large, plastic containers to save them from weevls.  Moreover, once you've taken out the first serving, it becomes more and more difficult to divide up what's left, let alone remember how many servings have already been removed. I am therefore assuming this is the situation and as we can’t use scales underway, I am giving my measurements by the handful. I generally use about 4 handfuls of pasta for 2 people, assuming a generous amount of sauce, because this is a main course, rather than the smaller amounts used more to flavour the pasta, of traditional Italian cuisine.  I have small hands, but after experimenting, I reckoned that a handful is about the equivalent of a cup. Of course, this only works for small pasta, but if you follow the same plan, I’m sure you’ll soon work out what is appropriate for you.  I'm afraid it will be a matter of trial and error.  With spaghetti, or linguine: pull it out of the container and make a column of pasta with a diameter of about 25 mm (1 in). this seems to be about right for two.  You can actually get sticks with holes in them for measuring long pasta, and they're very good.  I've had two in my time, but both got thrown overboard (not by me!).  I generally use Method 1, but Method 2 is useful when preventing the cabin from steaming up is really important.

 

Voyagers' pasta