If you wanted to bestow a name on the type of food Erica Drum cooks, you might say that it is scarpetta cooking.
Why so? Because with the dishes Erica unveils in Dinner, you are going to use any little shard of bread to fare la scarpetta: to mop up every last bit on your plate.
Dinner is packed with mop up dishes. It is a brilliant synthesis of every modern food trope, intelligently edited and delivered, and it is packed with essential little truths that make all the difference: use grated Pecorino with carbonara, but Parmesan with meatballs, and ricotta salata with pasta alla Norma. Pre-slice your spanokopitta before baking. Don’t be afraid to crumble Tayto cheese ‘n’ onion crisps on top of your chicken and broccoli bake, and Easi Singles or slices of American cheese are what your smash burger needs.
Erica’s mum kept a “Guests and Menus” notebook when she had friends around for dinner, back in the ‘80s and 90’s, recording what she cooked, who was invited, and what they ate and drank. Truly, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, because Dinner reads like a notebook from Erica’s kitchen, recording what she might make when it’s a date night, or if she has had a crappy day and needs a Crappy Day Dinner to make everything better, or if she just fancies a black bean burger.
The instructions are tight as a drum, moving quickly and effortlessly from concept to execution. Chances are that you will wind up cooking every single dish in this book, and you will fare la scarpetta, night after night.
What marks Dinner out in particular is its tangibility, the sense of vivid experience that lies behind the dishes. “In January 2019, we were super skint, jobless and trying to figure out how to eat and pay bills without going further into the red.” That’s the kick-off for Saturday Night Satay, a cheap-as-chips concoction that actually began the process of the book. Don’t you just love that “super skint” pairing, as Erica reveals her inner John Donne, and reminds all of us of those moments when we teetered on the edge of the Precariat, nervous, uncertain, and hungry as hell.
Erica’s experience also shows in the way in which the book is inviting, and never didactic: “I tuck little pillows of mozzarella into the meatballs, which is outrageously delicious, but you can skip that step it it’s been a long day and you can’t be arsed…” That’s the best sort of CBA get-out: you do you, and don’t fret about it.
Erica Drum incarnates the culinary zeitgeist, and she knows exactly what we like to eat, in all its polycultural dizziness. In the age of protein obsessions, Dinner is positively protean, shifting from mode to mode, from noodles to mash, with dazzling speed and certainty. It’s a killer.
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