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Friday 30 July 2010
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Pâté de campagne. Photograph: Tim Hayward
There's no great dearth of terrines, no dreadful famine of chicken liver parfait and, as far as I'm aware, the meatpaste market still thrives in its own quiet way, but where oh where are the great slablike pâtés of my youth?
When I was a kid, as the 70s crept by smelling of Brut and patchouli, I seem to recall my parents whispering the word like a mantra. They talked of dinner round at Martin and Sue's where there had been smears of it on Ritz crackers: Mike and Jenny served it with roughly torn 'French stick'. For a while it was an impossible aspiration, distant and somehow not for people like us - like a stereo or shagpile carpet, but when the time came that they felt confident enough to entertain, pâté would be as proud on the menu as the bottle of Bull's Blood, chambreeing gently on the coffee-table. Pâté was less socially awkward than wife-swapping and it represented international sophistication in a single slab of greying pork mince.
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Tuesday 29 June 2010
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The emotive power of hummus all over the Middle East cannot be overstated, being the focus of some serious tribal rivalries. It is, of course, an Arab dish that has its variations all over the wider region from Persia to Greece, adopted by the Israelis as one of their national treasures and turned into an obsession.
The Hummusia, a simple restaurant specialising almost only in hummus and normally just open for a late breakfast or an early lunch, is, like the English chippy, an institution. Yet, typically for the region, it carries with it much stronger sentiments. Not a month goes by without a national paper or website conducting a survey of the best hummus in the country. Continue reading...
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A bowl of saffron. Photograph: StockFood/Getty Images
How would you describe the taste of saffron? It's sweet but bitter. It smells of hay, the ocean, diesel, bonfire embers and well-rotted apples. Its aroma is gentle but overpowering, as delicate as a surgeon and as sharp as a bitch-slap. Although people use turmeric to approximate its colour, it has no substitute flavour, no lemon-to-lime or cod-to-pollock neighbour. It dominates the dishes it appears in but acts as a mere backnote to other ingredients. Nothing in the kitchen is as full of paradox and subtlety as this singularly beautiful, weepingly expensive spice.
It's the stigma of a very pretty crocus native to a strip of west Asia. The modern plant is sterile, the hard-won result of cross-breeding and human-led Darwinism. Every year, people have to dig it up, split the bulb-like corms that form part of its root and replant them. The flowers bloom in October, pushing out two or three fragile, wispy stigmas that you can only harvest by hand, and pickers work through the night to catch these at their coy, alluring best.
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Monday 28 June 2010
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Bistrot Bruno Loubet at the achingly hip Zetter hotel in London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
The French are back. Perhaps they've never really been away. After all, the (very British) Galvin brothers have been keeping the tricolour flying at the Galvin Bistrot de Luxe and La Chapelle, and there's the remarkable Terroirs on William IV Street. But now, suddenly, the capital's kitchens are being re-populated by some of the golden French culinary kings of the past.
Wunderkind of the 90s Bruno Loubet, once of Bistro Bruno and L'Odeon has come back from 8 years in Australia to take up residence at The Zetter on Clerkenwell Road. Joel Antunes, whose chocolate soup with pistachio cream still haunts my dreams since I ate it at Les Saveurs in 1995, is the power behind the kitchen door at the Park Plaza in Westminster and the grizzled legend of La Tante Claire, Pierre Koffman, has decided to get back where he belongs permanently after his stint at the eye-poppingly successful pop-up restaurant on the roof of Selfridges. Koffmann's, on the site of the Boxwood Café in the Berkeley Hotel, is set to open on 15 July.
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Friday 25 June 2010
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'For pity's sake, help us dig - it's our only hope of escape.' Photograph: Alamy
If we are to believe the lifestyle magazines, this summer is already laid out for us: we will be picnicking at the beach. There will be hampers, adorable children with 1930's hairdos scampering in and out of the water with shrimp nets while daddy and mummy unpack the crustless sandwiches onto an immaculate tartan rug in suspiciously soft focus. We will be holidaying closer to home this year … but not just 'in Britain'. Apparently we're going to be in small coastal towns at least five decades ago and there will be lashings of ginger beer.
Many people will buy into this collective delusion, many will feel an aching nostalgia for the hazy days of summer in their blue remembered youth. But not me. I grew up in a seaside town, I spent most of my summers picnicking on the beach and, unless the intervening years of abuse have turned my brain into a wizened nut of misrecalled bitterness, it was horrible.
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Thursday 24 June 2010
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The kitchen at the re-opened Pétrus. Photograph: Katherine Rose for the Observer
I went to Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant Pétrus the other night, not an entirely happy experience. But I was particularly bemused by the staff's insistence at the end of our meal that I might like to visit the kitchen and meet the chef. I declined (read: ran screaming for the hills). I have simply no idea why anyone – me, the waitstaff, the kitchen brigade – would think this is a good idea.
I said at the time that it was disturbingly akin to the Victorian habit of gawking at Bedlam inmates; not suggesting for a second that kitchen staff are lunatics – although I've worked in enough restaurants to not deny this altogether – but more for the whole freakshow element of this curious practice.
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Chilled gazpacho, just the thing for a hot summer's day. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
In my early 20s I attended a dinner party with some pretensions to grandeur, which kicked off with bowls of cold Happy Shopper tomato soup garnished with cucumber slices, cayenne pepper and the piece de resistance, a large green pepper of the sort all too familiar from the kebab van. "It's gazpacho," the host, freshly returned from a year in Spain, assured us proudly. "Great," the boy to my left replied. "Where's the microwave?"
Us Brits have long been suspicious of chilled soups – they seem unnatural somehow, in a climate more suited to tartan vacuum flasks and steaming broths. But just as we've taken tapas to our hearts and embraced the pungent joys of goat's cheese and garlic, we've grudgingly come to see the virtues of a cool, liquid lunch in our occasional warm spells. Elizabeth David quotes the 19th century French writer Theodore Gautier on gazpacho: "At home, a dog of any breeding would refuse to sully its nose with such a compromising mixture." But the "hell-broth" works its magic even on this superior Parisian: "strange as it may seem the first time one tastes it," he continues, "one ends by getting used to it and even liking it." And so it is with us.
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Wednesday 23 June 2010
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Need new ideas for everyday ingredients? Photograph: Alamy
There comes a time of day, usually in the late afternoon, when thoughts drift to the imagined delights of that evening's dinner table. Questions are tweeted, inspiration sought from desk mates and strangers, buck-passing phone calls are made to partners, wheedling tone at the ready, "any ideas for tea tonight?" (or is that just me?). But sometimes inventive colleagues, patient friends and long-suffering partners are not to hand and we're left juggling the contents of our fridges around our imaginations by ourselves. Inevitably, in these moments, many of us turn to the internet.
We've spent some time browsing the many great recipe searches you recommended, thought about how we all search for inspiration at tea time, and today we are pleased to be adding our own ingredient-led recipe search to the mix. Continue reading...
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There's one group of people who enjoy a World Cup more than football fans, and that's ad men. Selling a product normally involves identifying core, substantive truths about it and communicating these to the public in a clever way, but during a World Cup they can employ a much simpler formula:
Product + Football Context = Sales
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Tuesday 22 June 2010
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Boiled beef with horseradish. Photograph: Foodcollection/Getty
Of all the many reasons this country's food continues to suffer such a dismal reputation abroad, our supposed taste for boiled meat is among the first, "the paradigmatic emblem of loathed English blandness" according to one American writer. Mrs Beeton recommended plunging mutton legs into fast-boiling water so that the "surface ... coagulates, forming an envelope, which prevents the escape of the internal juice". Balderdash, and a sure path to tough, inedible meat. (Ruinously, Beeton also warns against resting meat because "boiled meat, as well as roasted, cannot be eaten too hot".) The grisly, gristly spectre of an ashen Victorian joint – a lump of cracked cement flanked by dismal sprigs – remains for many countries a typical English dinner, as dry and politely tasteless as our sense of humour.
Boiled meat will never win any marketing awards. It speaks of cabbagey kitchens and bones poking out of stockpots, of puritan blandness and the unfashionably old-fashioned. I'd never tasted boiled lamb or mutton before, though it's meant to be one of the great national dishes, so I'm making some while writing this. It's cooking gently as we speak: just the odd glop-glop across the kitchen. It smells of turnip, Tom Brown's Schooldays and pious frugality.
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Monday 21 June 2010
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A Gloucester Old Spot sow - "a large meaty animal with a broad and deep body and large hams". Photograph: Robert Dowling/Corbis
Let us praise pigs. And not just any old pig, but the Gloucester Old Spot pig in particular. The breed has just been awarded protected status, specifically Traditional Speciality Guarantee designation, by the mandarins of the EU. Pork from this splendid beast joins West Country farmhouse cheddar cheese, Melton Mowbray pork pies and Cornish sardines (aka pilchards, for a pilchard is nothing more than a grown up sardine) in the roll call of honour of British foods.
When all around is change and decay, of rather change at the speed of light, there is something immensely comforting about the shape and size and purpose of the pig. The Gloucester Old Spot is the antithesis of the principles of modern industrial farming. The British Pig Association website describes it as "a large meaty animal with a broad and deep body and large hams". Such poetry. That's why it was once the bacon pig of choice. The GOS tends to carry a greater depth of fat than your modern industrial meat machines, and where there is fat, there is flavour to savour. Continue reading... -
Friday 18 June 2010
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A packet of tangy cheese Doritos. Photograph: Roger Tooth for the Guardian
I'm not a big fan of crisps. My parents didn't encourage them when we were kids and I've never really acquired the taste. I can see the appeal in the abstract - fried starch, what's not to like? - but if I need something to nibble with a drink I'd usually prefer nuts. The last time I ate a bag of anything crisp-like was in the playground when the new Pickled Onion Monster Munch were considered The Wonder of the Age.
For this reason, many of the untold technological advances in the constantly innovating world of snack products have passed me by; in fact, until about a month ago, I had never eaten a Dorito. Sure, like any card-carrying Guardianista I'd dipped my fair share of tortilla chips in guacamole - one needs something to soak up the South African Sauvignon blanc - but I had avoided their meretricious offspring.
O, how wrong I have been, how misguided, for I was hooked, dear reader, at the very first bite and what did it was the cheese powder. Continue reading...
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A £2,100 leatherbound Theo Fennel silver fish and chips companion set - the ultimate in manliness?
Sunday poses a dilemma. New parenthood means that my other half is now a dad. For the first time in a long time, I must join many sons, daughters and wives in acknowledging Father's Day. We're all agreed, I hope, that food is the only way to mark anything of significance. Some kind of celebratory feast is required, and it must ooze – nay, sweat - manliness.
But is there such a thing as a gender food divide? Men of my acquaintance suggest that the difference is psychological. Everyone likes burgers; men may just be more accepting of the consequences - love handle-wise - of eating them. Then there is the mistaking of manliness for machismo. Eating competitions, roadkill and live snakes form part of a separate issue.
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Thursday 17 June 2010
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Felicity Cloake's perfect home made ice cream with strawberries. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
I don't know much about international diplomacy, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that it probably doesn't make enough use of ice cream. There's something innocently joyful about the stuff – how can anyone be angry when holding a double cone with a flake on top? If James Bond has never disarmed a baddy with a Mr Whippy, then it can only be because of the difficulties of safely transporting a 99 in a Savile Row suit.
Ice cream is too light-hearted a foodstuff for snobbery – even the much-derided Mr Whippy can raise a smile on a hot day – but it is worth making yourself, for two reasons. The first is that, as yet, even the poshest supermarkets don't tend to stock the esoteric flavour combinations that characterise the modern ice, which is a pity, because Waitrose could make a killing with my plum & Earl Grey. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, people tend to be really, really impressed when you serve homemade ice cream.
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Wednesday 16 June 2010
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Tesco's lasagne sandwich, aka the lasandwich.
Not since the Italian Ministry of Agriculture cosied up to McDonald's for a marketing campaign earlier this year has the good reputation of Italian food been so sorely tried. Tesco's lasagne sandwich (let's call it the lasandwich) is described as follows in the accompanying press release:
"Between two thick slices of white bread, you'll find a generous filling of diced beef in a tangy tomato and herb sauce, layered with cooked pasta sheets and finished with a creamy cheddar, ricotta and mayonnaise dressing."
As many people will attest, a chunk of crusty white smeared with a dollop of homemade ragu is an undeniable joy, so how does this effort measure up? Continue reading...
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