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Wednesday 25 August 2010
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Chef Mark Hix. Photograph: Jason Lowe
How the acclaimed chef and British food enthusiast answered your questions on all matters surf and turf
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Stella Artois Black.
Curious news from Stella Artois. This autumn, Stella's parent company,AB InBev, will launch Stella Artois Black, which isn't - much to the consternation of beer blogger, Pete Brown - a dark lager, but rather a 4.9% Stella deluxe for, what Marketing Magazine, calls "posh" drinkers.
Brewed in Belgium, as opposed to the UK, where (despite the continental branding) standard Stella Artois and its 4% variant are made, this new recipe, golden beer will also be matured - or lagered, the process that imbues lager with flavour - for longer than normal; a fact which will be central to the SA Black marketing push.
The lack of transparency, however, is laughable. Continue reading...
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Tuesday 24 August 2010
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99 Flake ice-cream. Photograph: foodfolio/Alamy
When I was growing up, I always assumed that the 99 Flake was so called because it cost 99p. Indeed I think it did for most of my childhood, in what seemed an unusually sensible way for grown-ups to have done things, and perhaps also a nifty reminder of how much to cadge off them to get hold of one.
I doubt there's a single British child that hasn't lapped at the sweet spumy lather of a 99 Flake. It's welded to our youth like chicken pox and bullying. The gentle jingle of Greensleeves from a garishly converted van, a beefy-armed vendor, crisply anaemic cone, turdy curly ice-cream and chocolate spike: it's all a happy reminder of sandy summers and shrieky, milk-smeared faces.
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Monday 23 August 2010
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Italians shop in a food market in Tuscany. Photograph: Alamy
Due to the incredible power of the internet and an editor who can't quite grasp the concept of 'holiday', I'm writing this under an umbrella in France. To be more precise, I'm writing it from a cafe terrace overlooking the Pont Du Gard. Many of you will have been lucky enough to visit this place, many more will have seen it in pictures or on video. It's a staggering piece of Roman civil engineering, built by enslaved Gauls and richly deserving of its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It stands to reason. Like so many other monuments and natural features the combined bridge and aqueduct is part of our international history and culture; it belongs, in some way, to the whole world, and we should all help look after it.
Strange, then, to be told in such a lovely place that the Italian government is pushing to apply UNESCO World Heritage Status to "the Mediterranean diet". Yes, if the vote goes through in November this year, fresh fruit, veg and grilled fish will join the UN's special list of "intangible cultural heritage".
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Horseradish. Photograph: Getty Images
As we discussed a couple of months ago, most of us, even the most ardent food lover, have at least one food that they just can't bear. Offal is a common culprit (though I suspect a lot of that is about the idea of it, rather than the taste), as well as fish that's too fishy and the much-maligned sprout.
The flavour and fragrance of coriander is disliked to such an extent by some that it is capable of turning otherwise gastronomically adventurous types into overgrown toddlers, clamping their mouths shut and making scrunched up faces at the very thought of a sprinkling on their chilli con carne.
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Friday 20 August 2010
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Burning books in a frying pan. Photograph: Kevin Summers/Getty Images
I've recently been asked to speak at the Abergavenny Food Festival (It's brilliant. Go.) and preparation has occasioned another of those lingering searches through the bookshelves. What are my all-time favourite bits of food-writing and why? It's a question that comes up quite often, as it did in Observer Food Monthly's 50 best books piece last week, and causes all sorts of disagreement, as it did then.
But then, during a tea break in the browsing an awful thought crept up on me. Some of the spines of these books didn't fill me with feelings of warm happy nostalgia at all; some of them, not to put too fine a point on it, pissed me right off. Why, I wondered, does nobody ask the opposite and more interesting question: what are the food books we most loathe and why?
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The Heart Attack Cafe, San Diego County Fair, California. Photograph: Simon Majumdar
Usually a fan of the deep fat fryer, Simon Majumdar finds himself balking at fried butter balls and asks, is there anything people haven't yet deep fried?
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Thursday 19 August 2010
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Sometimes it's easy to eat British. Photograph: Julian Finney/Getty Images
There are times when you would think eating locally and with the seasons couldn't be easier, say at the prospect of that first delicious crunch of the British apple season, the pleasing snap of a pea pod, the yielding sweetness of a British berry. But ... I'm consuming only British food for the month of August, and after a couple of weeks I'm already thoroughly fed up of berries.
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Felicity's perfect meringue. Photograph: Felicity Cloake
Sometime in the last decade, meringues morphed from a frothy, slightly naff, 1980s dessert associated principally with Charlene Robinson's wedding dress, to a chic edible accessory; the natural heir to the cupcake craze of the turn of the century, and the macaron of recent years. The great, towering, glossy confections created by Yotam Ottolenghi, so impressive they stop pedestrian traffic outside his north London shop, can be held to some extent responsible – they look about as much like the chalk-white nests of yesteryear as Kylie Minogue resembles that fresh-faced, poodle-permed teenager.
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Wednesday 18 August 2010
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Kellogg's Coco Pops: not the best start to the day. Photograph: Martin Lee/Alamy
I had porridge for breakfast this morning. Well, summer seems to think it is the new autumn and a bowl of oats is as good a vehicle for berries and a dollop of cream as any summer pudding. My children had porridge too, but according to a recent survey they might soon be in a minority with a full third of their contemporaries already skipping the most important meal of the day.
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Tuesday 17 August 2010
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A bottle of malt vinegar. Or is it non-brewed condiment? Photograph: Getty Images/Dorling Kindersley
If you date the birth of human culture to the discovery of alcohol – as proud a moment as any, in my book – then vinegar is as old as civilisation. Nobody had to learn how to make it: it turned up on its own, an immediate and subsequently persistent reminder of how tenuous and fleeting is our hold over nature. Vinegar develops when airborne bacteria settle on booze (beer, wine, fermented fruit juice, whatever) and turn the alcohol into the sharp, punchy overkill of acetic acid. That compound – one of the most useful things to have in the kitchen cupboard, or under the kitchen sink – gives the salad dressing its sharpness, the copper coin its sheen. Continue reading...
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Monday 16 August 2010
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The new Twix Fino, a light-textured wafer version of the classic Twix bar.
Forget everything you thought you knew about Twix bars. In simpler times, those four letters stood for a biscuit finger, topped with caramel and covered in chocolate. If the chocolate bar you were eating contained a wafer, it most probably came out of a packet bearing the words Kit Kat. But now, Mars has announced the lighter Twix Fino, due to launch in September, which contains a wafer instead of a biscuit. It's around one-third less calorific – and 100% less biscuity.
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A retro blender.
Len Deighton would not be impressed with me. In his Action Cook Book he devotes a whole chapter to jug blenders, calling them his "Secret Weapon in the Kitchen." He uses his blender for a huge number of things, including making mayonnaise, grinding everything from coffee beans to rice, sieving flour, rescuing lumpy sauces, frothing milk for coffee, as well as liquidising or puréeing solids for soup, mousses and sandwich fillings.
I, on the other hand, am a bit scared of them. Continue reading...
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Friday 13 August 2010
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Rachel Cooke, one of our panelists, with just a few of her cookbooks. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Guardian
This weekend, we'll be publishing a list of our panel's top 50 cookbooks. Have a look at numbers 50 - 11 now and let us know what you hope to see in Sunday's top 10
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The Ace Cafe, home of one of the finest fry-ups in existence. Photograph: Tony Larkin/Rex Features
Like many gentlemen of a certain age, I like to wake up with Fi Glover on a Saturday morning. There's something bracing about the way her cheery tone cuts through the hangover. Maybe it's her skill in introducing a blind mother of seven suffering the final stages of a wasting disease with the same relentlessly breathy, upbeat enthusiasm as a grandma whose parrot can do the shipping forecast. It's a bumpy comedown on the weeks she's replaced by that gloomy bloody padre.
Whatever the cause of her strange appeal, I've always really enjoyed "Inheritance Tracks", a section in which a minor sleb or even a person of some interest is asked to name two pieces of music; one to remind them of their parents and one to pass on to their kids. As I lay, brutalised by alcoholic pollutants last Saturday, I wondered, how would that work with food?
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Word of Mouth writers on Twitter
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jayrayner1: Excuse me while i pimp my wares: great british waste menu, tonight, bbc1 8.30pm #wom
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jayrayner1: Tonight's one show: the history of fish n' chips, the joys of vinegar and blackberries. Oh, and some chap called Chris Evans. #wom
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