My grandmother, and many like her, kept an account book for household spending. This was not the product of an overbearing marriage or mistrust on anyone’s behalf – it was simply how things were done at a time when habits had been formed during rationing after the second world war, and banking was manual and slow.
I spent a lot of time observing her kitchen on childhood visits. It was where my lifelong obsession with cooking began, and I can still recall a sense of balance in how she shopped and cooked; she was fond of naughty treats and lavish cuts, but she kept a stock pot, knew her way around basic butchery and was reluctant to let anything go to waste.
Later, as head chef in busy restaurants which relied on close control of tight margins to stay in business, I also kept a daily account book. We didn’t call it that, of course: day sheets, GPs, margins and P&Ls are the head chef’s stock in trade. But all we are really doing is keeping an account book, staying on top of incomings vs outgoings.
It was during a recent conversation with friends, all chefs or restaurateurs, that chatter turned to the increasingly complex task of running restaurant kitchens in the current climate – i.e. one where costs of ingredients, labour, rent and rates have all gone skyward, and the very task of finding people to work in hospitality has become Herculean, all while real household incomes and disposable spending are declining. As we talked, I wasn’t the only one at the table whose mind went back to our grandparents’ kitchens.
Just before the nexus of too many beers drunk, we felt we landed on a list of genuinely useful, practical tips and tricks that we as chefs use to make things go further, taste better and cost less to produce in the running of our kitchens. All of them could either be traced to the kitchens of our grandparents, or wouldn’t have felt out of place there; and all could be drawn on now in home kitchens up and down the country in order to better cope in the current climes. The list below is not exhaustive, but hopefully it acts as a catalyst or inspiration.
Cook from scratch
That’s the first and last commandment. As any chef who has tried to trim a gross profit margin will tell you, eradicating anything premade from your kitchen is a surefire way to buy yourself some financial headroom. There is a time cost, for sure, but the economies are plain to see, especially when taken in conjunction with the next tip…
Learn to love waste
Unlike in most home kitchens, in professional kitchens (and my grandmother’s kitchen) trimmings, peelings, leftovers and waste are relished. The odds and ends of one thing are often the foundations, or catalyst at least, for another. Stock is the most obvious application here, but I would argue it is actually the least useful in an economising kitchen. Pickings from bones and carcasses can become pie and sandwich fillings, bits of joy in pasta sauces or little luxuries stirred into curries, soups and stews. The peelings and skins of many vegetables can be kept and blitzed, cooked down with onions and other aromatics, and turned into veggie fillings in the same way as above. Stems of items such as broccoli, cauliflower and kale should always be kept: chopped through and sweated down in butter or oil, they are full of goodness and often more delicious than the rest of the vegetable. Any bread left at the back of the bread bin should be turned into croutons or breadcrumbs.
Learn to roux
This is a classic technique where relatively cheap fat and flour are cooked together to give a nice thick sauce that can magnify flavour. It was often pressed into service in my grandmother’s kitchen, and is a staple in kitchens in the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal. If you’ve been keeping your crusts and turning them to crumbs, you can have a croquette in no time, perhaps with the ends of cheese or a few pickings from yesterday’s roast chicken or pan-fried sausage chopped and stirred through. Similarly, cauliflower cheese, macaroni cheese, chicken and leek pie and many more all rely on a good roux to create cheap ballast and sauce and turn a scrap or leftover into a treat to be celebrated.
Get to know your butcher and your fruit and veg shops
The ease of supermarkets makes them compelling to us as time-poor consumers, and their commercial heft and buying power makes them compelling to us as cash-poor consumers. But sometimes having a relationship with your smaller local shops can lead to taking advantage of gluts and unsold stock. While a supermarket is duty bound to throw away labelled stock that falls foul of its official shelf life, a fruit and veg shop has the freedom to offer cut prices on (or even give away for free) fruit and veg it knows need using sooner rather than later. In restaurant kitchens, chefs have a constant dialogue with their suppliers – if you don’t ask you don’t get, and a friendly enquiry as to what a supplier might have as ‘seconds’, or on the turn, usually results in great-value seasonal bounty or bits and bobs for free. My grandmother’s canvas might have been jams and chutneys, but her method was the same.
Stop cooking just for tonight
Cook for tomorrow, and the day after that too. Chefs will often cook at least part of a dish in bulk before it breaking down and using it in multiple ways or for multiple dishes. What we mean by this for the home cook is moving away from, say, frying specific small portions of meat or fish for one meal, and instead poaching or boiling a relative bulk. You end up with plenty of cooked meat or fish, some of which can be tarted up in a frying pan for tonight’s supper and the rest of which can be used in myriad applications throughout the rest of the week. Similarly, you’ll also be the proud owner of a stock or sauce resulting from your one act of cooking, which again can insinuate itself into dishes throughout the week. Our prediction: as we go ever deeper into this cost-of-living squeeze, we’ll be seeing more boiled beef, fish stews, poached chicken, pork in milk and other frugally-inspired dishes gracing restaurant menus. The home cook should follow suit.
Know your flavour bombs
Any restaurant chef worth his or her salt knows instinctively that small applications of big flavours can salvage tough, cheap or harder-to-cook dishes. The home cook can take this one step further. Increasing ‘flavour bombs’ can mean relying less on more expensive meats and fish while still ending up with a dish that packs a serious punch. Having a cupboard stocked with anchovies, fish sauce, Worcestershire sauce, tomato puree, sun-dried tomato puree, harissa paste, chipotle paste and many more like these enables you, at the flick of a teaspoon, to elevate something basic into something mouthwatering, with minimal cost.
Give up on the oven
It’s an inefficient beast, takes a long time to heat up, guzzles fuel and is often overkill when all you want is to cook a few sausages or a piece of fish. Learn instead to love the stovetop. Alternatively, if the oven is going on, fill it right to the brim – ram it chock full of trays with anything from your fridge that might respond well to a nice roasting. It doesn’t matter a jot if you’ve no plans to eat it there and then: as above, store it and use it later. Cooking in a pan over a flame is cheaper and more efficient than heating the oven. Having a fridge full of pre- or par-cooked bits and pieces that can become a curry or part of a sauce or a stew throughout the week is how it often works in restaurant kitchens, and it’s certainly closer to how my grandmother navigated the week. Save yourself the cost of that air fryer or pressure cooker you’ve been eyeing up, and instead consider making better use of the kitchen you’ve already got.
Simmer down
A lot of the things many of us cook all the time – pasta, rice, potatoes and greens, for example – need enough water in the pan to just cover them, and only require temperatures of about 80°C to cook. This means that that big pot of water running at a rolling boil on the back of the stove for your spaghetti could be about half as full and bubbling at a much slower rate. Similarly, sauces and stews just need a gentle simmer; running pans of something tasty on high heat is a waste of energy.
Buy more frozen food
Or, more broadly, freeze more food. Frozen meat, fish and veg have endless benefits to the scrimping shopper and home cook: frozen at peak freshness, i.e. when just slaughtered, caught or picked, they benefit from being subject to less wastage, meaning both that wastage isn’t costed into the price by the retailer and we’re not as likely to waste the thing at home when we do buy it. Win-win. There’s no need to pander to any age-old snobbery surrounding fresh vs frozen food. As a chef friend’s grandfather is said to have uttered: ‘A well-stocked freezer means a well-fed geezer.’ We can’t say fairer than that.
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