What’s for dinner? Leftovers. Please don’t groan. Think of it as an encore.
Historian Helen Veit’s recent article in The Atlantic, “An Economic History of Leftovers”, considers how new the very concept of leftovers is. In Colonial times and before, the cycles of food in the kitchen were more integrated—trimmings and waste went into the soup pot, or, perhaps, the pig trough. They were also, crucially, unrefrigerated, requiring food preservation methods like fermentation, pickling, and smoking for large quantities of food to be viable for long-term storage.
Enter the icebox, and instead of being re-formed into another dish, prepared foods that weren’t consumed the first time could simply re-emerge a few days later, thus embarking on a resounding chorus of “meh.” I’m sure you’ve lived through such a scenario one end or the other. “The truth was that by the 1960s leftovers were becoming a joke to a lot of people, with a grumbling husband and a mystery casserole playing stock roles. That humor was a direct result of abundance,” writes Veit.
This dismissive attitude toward leftovers indicates an abundance of something besides cheap food: time. To dine every evening on a brand-new recipe requires a kicked-up level of planning, shopping, and cooking, as any primary feeder of a household knows all too well. The ascent of convenience foods made it possible to bring forth a parade of ever-changing casseroles and skillet suppers, many of them depending on the ease of opening a can of condensed Cream of X soup (mushroom, chicken, celery, what-have-you). The leftover became a pariah, and it was a sign of wealth and privilege to be dismissive of them.
This attitude continues today; if you want to see evidence, come hang out at my house for a few days. But leftovers are the original convenience foods, a way to double-down on both labor and food cost, and in some absolutely wonderful cases, leftovers are actually better the next day. We felt they needed some love, so here’s an ode to the foods we look forward to eating again once they rise Christ-like from the chilly tomb of the refrigerator.
Chili
Show me a batch of chili—vegan or thick with meat—that doesn’t taste more sorted-out after a day or two has passed, and I’ll show you something that isn’t really chili. In fact, nearly all long-cooked soups and stews benefit from a day of rest so their flavors can meld and deepen. But getting back to chili, it makes a great filling for quesadillas, and it’s particularly divine when stirred into (junk food alert!) a box of prepared macaroni and cheese. Also, there’s always the freezer, that modern convenience I think of as my own food bank—one that allows appropriate gaps in time so that leftovers are forgotten, then remembered, then embraced as new.
Big Slabs of Roasted or Grilled Meat
Leftover steak, thinly sliced, can top any number of salads. Shred the meat up with your hands and cook it up with garlic and spices for taco filling. Throw diced leftover beef or pork into a big pot of chili (see above).
Meatloaf
One word: sandwich.
Rice
Leftover steamed rice itself isn’t stellar, but it’s begging to be made into fried rice—and handily, cold cooked rice makes much better fried rice, anyway. You can make nearly any type of cooked rice (save sweet sticky rice or risotto) into a mean fried rice; I like to strive for a ratio of 1 part fried rice to 1 part vegetables. A scrambled egg or chopped up bits of cooked meat never hurts, either.
Baked Potatoes
Back in my lowly prep cook days, I handled seemingly thousands of day-old baked potatoes, and what shriveled and sad things they were. Thus, middlebrow family restaurants invented fattening and cheese-oozing loaded potato skins to solve this problem. A much more healthful way to use them up at home is to dice them and make hash, or an inauthentic but still very pleasing tortilla española.
Roast Chicken
Ah, the pleasures of gnawing on a cold drumstick. Beyond the primal instinct, there’s also the many possibilities of cooking with the meat picked from the chicken carcass—and thanks to those rotisserie birds so ubiquitous at today’s supermarkets, there’s an entire genre of recipes requiring the picked meat of a fresh rotisserie bird, thereby forgoing the entire step of it being left over.