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I grew up with what I now call a “house meal.” It was rice and beans, and it kept our family of four happy and fed and hustled off to bed as many nights as all other meals combined.
I imagine this sounds terribly repetitive today, when, upon short perusal of recipes and a few shrewd clicks, you can have ingredients for Thai green curry on Monday, Korean bulgogi on Tuesday, Parisian glazed salmon with leeks on Wednesday….
It never seemed repetitive to me. I remained, until several years ago, unaware of the presence of any pattern at all, when all along there was one—the house meal—that I had to thank, as a child, for home-cooked dinners instead of microwaveable ones, and now, as a grown-up, for meals with neither microwaving nor perusing websites and clicking.
But perhaps I should explain what a house meal is. It is a meal that one automatically falls back on whenever there is no other plan. This sounds immeasurably broad, but there are a number of prerequisites that narrow the field somewhat: The first is that it be intrinsically easy to trim and change into various meals whose roots in common stock are impossible to discern by anyone but the cook. Rice and beans, as my mother treated them, were sometimes pigeon peas and rice stained yellow with annatto; or Middle Eastern Madjadara, a one-pot meal of lentils, fried onions, and rice; or black beans with chiles; or Indian basmati, dotted with nigella seeds, and spiced green peas. Each tasted different and new but had the same basic mechanics as the others, allowing my mother to switch on her rice-and-beans-toggle and fairly painlessly manufacture a dinner.
Second, a house meal should be made of common ingredients, so that you are likely to have them. Third, it must be fast to make. Fourth, it can’t demand too much skill, in case some part needs to get handed off. My childhood memories are full of images of my younger brother on a stool dumping and stirring the six ingredients of our black beans: onions, garlic, canned chilies, canned beans, fresh thyme, salt. The last, perhaps debatable, criterion, by which I stand firm, is that a house meal should be, according to your own opinions and philosophy, healthy. It should be as healthy—by your priorities—as it can be while still being something you want to eat. That is my fleshy definition then: A house meal must be adaptable as a chameleon, made of basic ingredients, fast, culinarily undemanding, and seem neither a sin nor a charity to consume.
Why one needs such a meal is perhaps evident—because having to become inspired and think and plan and shop each time one wants to eat a home-cooked meal is a tall order.
But maybe it is when one needs it that makes its value even clearer. In my personal experience, the times when I would benefit most from a meal cooked at home are often, paradoxically, those when there are obstacles to making one. The most common example is it being close to dinnertime and my husband and my both being tired and quite hungry. The next is when one of us is too weary, physically or spiritually, to cook, and a meal that can be made automatically by one makes it easier for the other to rest. Another, particularly germane this time of year, is when it seems as though recent meals have been so festive that one’s digestive system cries for a simple combination of chlorophyll, protein, and little else. And what about when a friend feels bad and needs to be cooked for? Then a house meal, whose ingredients can be quickly purchased en route to the visit and assembled on site, can be a finer dinner than the city’s finest restaurant might provide.
Our house meal now is eggs and greens, an odder couple than rice and beans, but auspiciously rhyming.
Most often, it is made as follows: Four to six eggs are placed into “the egg pot”—a small saucepan with a handle that makes it easy to drain—which is filled with water and put to boil (though it mustn’t boil other than for an instant, then be turned off and left for five minutes). One or two bunches of kale-or-other are stemmed and chopped and swept into a sink full of fresh water, then scooped out and sautéed with garlic and chili flakes in a promiscuous amount of good olive oil. The oven is set to 400° for toast; if there is no frozen bread, it can be turned off and the toast replaced with leftover sweet potatoes, or boiled potatoes, or Wasa crackers. While this is happening, someone rummages through the cheese drawer and locates the jar of pickled chiles. This version has versions of its own. Alongside the end of a wheel of La Tur, I might discover bacon and add it to the greens or fry it separately. The roasting juice from an earlier chicken might be unearthed and warmed to pour over the eggs. Or maybe there are some good marinated anchovies to be laid in filets over egg halves. (We don’t eat all the eggs; it is always nice to have a few extra for the next day.)
Some days, rather than boiled, the eggs are cracked, whisked, and scrambled at the unseemly and delicious ratio of a tablespoon of butter per egg. This must be done after the greens are finished cooking, then spooned on top of them—all of it blanketing a thick piece of toast. But if the greens are young and tender—arugula, or spinach, or very young kale—they won’t be hard-cooked with garlic and a lot of olive oil but briefly sautéed in a small bit of oil and sprinkled with sherry vinegar and turned onto plates for a warm salad. If there is any leftover rice, another model of the meal emerges from the greens and eggs becoming fried rice, which has been cooked with onion and garlic, then squeezed with lime juice and sprinkled with fish sauce at the end. But, basically, our meal many nights is eggs and greens, greens and eggs, which makes shopping easy and the decisions behind most meals so obvious they are unconscious.
Such a template has saved me from the sadness of takeout and anonymous restaurants during times when a personal meal—one that left the kitchen full of the good smells of cooking—was needed. This has held, in my life, in all circumstances except when I very literally needed it most: when I was pregnant. For three months, I attempted to bring myself to cook or even just eat eggs and greens, and I found both repulsive. During that time, my husband made the house meal for him alone, and I sat across from him, for more nights than I care to count, eating the only food that soothed me: Cup-a-Noodles, a taste for which disappeared as curiously and quickly as it arrived, leaving me again with greens and eggs, eggs and greens.
Tamar Adler is a contributor to Vogue and the author of An Everlasting Meal.