Leftovers forever: In praise of making more than a little extra

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served nothing but leftovers. The original meal was never found.”
— Tracey Ullman

The British comedian Tracey Ullman’s insight into home dynamics (if not economics) came up in an interview in May 1999 with London’s Observer newspaper. It feels like something out of her sketches. I searched online to find the original interview, but could not access it. [I have to admit I was curious because the quote has appeared in collections attributed elsewhere, including to Calvin Trillin.]

Leftovers can get a bad reputation — the phrase itself is suspicious — but I am a fan of them. In fact, a big part of my approach to meal preparation has long been predicated on there being enough to leave over for at least one other meal.

More than that, there are definitely recipes (a good stew for instance, and a type of Bolognese sauce I often make) that get better after that first day. The more complex the flavours, the more you appreciate them the next day.

There’s a certain shabby-chic love for particular leftovers. Personally, I like pizza when it’s hot and fresh and not long out of the oven, but I certainly know people who crave morning-after-the-night-before pizza, ravenously downed as part of a strategy, maybe, to stave off a hangover.

When we got out for a great feed at one of our favourite Asian restaurants, we purposefully order more than we need. Ooops! We’re just going to need some takeaway boxes (yep, plural) to take the noodles, etc. home. Martha and I both find everything improves the next day, and what’s more fun that instant takeaway on day two?

As for cooking, I’ve found myself making some recipes the way I always do: that is, based on the fact that all three of us are at home. Nick, however, moved out a couple of years ago, and I’m getting used to a new base setting for what we actually need. That may explain why I made this week the usual amount of a favourite recipe: a sausage-mushroom-pasta that’s been a weekday staple for years. (Here it is, as published in BBC Good Food magazine; I’ve amended it over time.)

We wound up with more than enough for our supper. More than enough, indeed, for two lunches each over the next couple of days. No complaints here: there was not a whiff of the idea that we had to eat up the dregs of the fridge.

There’s another approach to leftovers, too: eating up the fridge. Martha is quite good at taking something (some leftover chicken or meat, say, and in the case a healthy bit of cold Basmati) and whipping up something like the fried beef recipe we feasted on a few nights ago. To complete it we just needed to forage around the vegetable crisper and knock out a blob or two of this and that in the pantry.

This kind of thing is sublime: we had had everything on hand, and at no extra expense felt like we had splurged at some place fancy.

Incidentally, the anecdote about realizing we had been regularly overcooking since becoming empty nesters is a story with an echo.

My own parents lived through this after I moved out in the fall of 1985. I had an opportunity to work in Ottawa, and I grabbed it, putting my degree on pause and hustling out of town rather quickly. My mom told later than she had continued to buy the same amount of groceries as usual, and after a few weeks was wondering why there were, say, multiple boxes of uneaten corn flakes. “Ohhh … John’s gone,” she told me. She said it took a while to scale things back and to cook for two (and not including my considerable appetite).

We are reframing how we cook, but not entirely. With some dishes (curries, for one), I still cook in bulk, and divvy up for the freezer. Is there nothing nicer than (as I did this morning) to pluck supper from the depths and let it thaw through the day?

Meanwhile, here’s a funny moment with Tracey Ullman and food, from one of her series.