I’m dreadful at using up leftovers. Occasionally I make stock from a leftover roast, but then a week later I still haven’t used the stock for anything and it’s growing cloudy in the back of the fridge. I bake at a rate of about 120% of our household baked-goods consumption rate (and then booby-trap the baking trays, to decrease the chances of other housemates contributing to the problem), and the last slice or two of any given cake ends up in the bin. When I do manage to use leftovers, as often as not it’s in a more expensive meal than I would have cooked otherwise, after I’ve spent twenty minutes searching for recipes with everything I have to use up (kale, roast beef and banana pasta?), and then another fifteen running down to the supermarket for half the ingredients.
Obviously this is a bad thing and I need to to get better-organised, and also more local friends who eat a lot. Also obviously, it’s the result of the historically and socially unlikely luxury of being able to easily get more food than I need. Certainly the idea of using leftovers appeals to me immensely, but I’m unlikely to start rinsing the dressing off uneaten salad and freezing the carefully dried leaves, or rubbing old tealeaves on the bathroom mirror to clean it (apparently you have to buff it with a soft cloth afterwards to, er, wipe the tealeaves off). I do enjoy and use wartime advice like “if only a small amount of [lemon] juice is needed, prick one end of a lemon with a fork. Squeeze out the amount needed and store the lemon in the ice-box” (from the 1940s Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them); but modern squeamishness has me cringing at the same book’s chapter on gelatine. (Gelatine is good for using up leftovers in a number of ways, all of which boil down to “get a load of gelatine, mix it with a lot of leftovers, leave it all in a mould to set, slice, optionally give dish a name including the word ’surprise’.” This technique is consistent regardless of whether the leftovers are fish, fruit, cheese, rice, or coconut and celery.)
The use of leftovers I find most startling and delightful comes from the bijoutiers. Perhaps everybody knows about them except me, but I’d never even heard of them until yesterday, and they’re brilliant. They worked in Paris, particularly around the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but existing in some form until the middle of the twentieth, and they would walk around to embassies and restaurants and oversupplied wealthy houses, collecting the leftovers, tossing them into a basket: pie-crusts and boiled eggs, chicken wings, scraps of raw pastry, squashed fruit, nuts, uneaten vegetables. Back in the markets, the bijoutiers would arrange the leftovers on tiny plates, in jewel-like patterns, and sell them on; sometimes to hungry passers-by, sometimes even to restaurants, who would add them to their own menus.
In Versailles the waste was even more extravagant, and elaborate meals would be sent from the royal table untouched. The leftovers market differed correspondingly; no bijoutiers to collect the scraps, but rather the Versailles kitchens setting everything out in the market themselves:
The foods that come from the King’s table, and those of Princes, are barely touched when they go on sale. The bourgeois are not embarrassed to serve them since anything that was on a Prince’s table is said to be both delicious and safe to eat. At least a quarter of Versailles lives off of the food once served on the royal table and the cooks of his Majesty are, in fact, preparing foods for lowly stomachs for which these culinary masterpieces were never intended. Huge fish go untouched from his Highness’s table, or that of the Count of Artois, to a hat maker’s table, to the delight of his little family, who feed on succulent dishes and no longer need to cook for themselves.
This is the sort of leftover even I could eat consistently: elaborate delicious meals with absurd ingredients, available cheaply and conveniently. As it is, though, the only sort of leftovers I manage to use up with any regularity are egg whites and egg yolks, and that’s not much of an accomplishment: the solution to “oh, I have some leftover bits of egg” is usually “RAPID EMERGENCY CAKE: INITIATE BAKING PROCEDURES NOW”. Reasons to bake are not something I generally need more of, so egg-yolks become ice-cream or dense and gooey cakes, while egg-whites become friands, uneconomically (almond meal is not a cheap way of using up anything) but deliciously.
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