Fire & Knives

Over the past few years I've come to dread being asked for restaurant recommendations. Sure I've got a few places I'm happy to go back to - at the right time and with the right people - but asking if there's anywhere I'd recommend is so absurdly broad a request I just get confused.

Do you want to spend money? What sort of food do you like? Do you even like food or would you rather sit in a celebrity fishtank and poke a salad about? Do you feel disappointed if the waiter isn't fawning or does intrusive service embarrass you? Do you always pick the second cheapest red on the list or do you have the urge to come back and firebomb a place for not having sideplates?

If I do come up with a suggestion, there's no guarantee you'll enjoy it as much as I did. I don't feel comfortable recommending the newest and most fashionable places because they rarely live up to the hype and, besides, you'd never get in after 6.30 or before 10.00. Little 'out of the way' discoveries have a way of being either disappointingly inconsistent or have been cleaned up and 'relaunched' by the time you arrive.

There's just too much to choose from, too many variables and that, I suppose is the real reason I love London so much. It's nothing to do with the individual restaurants it's the way that big cities, by sheer mass and demographics reach a point where they are really all about food.

There are seven and a half million people here and the requirement for three meals a day is the only thing they have in common. It's London's diversity of culture, class, wealth and ethnicity that creates one of the most exciting food environments in the world.

Rich and poor live side by side. This guarantees world-class restaurants for those who can afford them but also a vibrant market in cheap street food. We've got as many Michelin stars as other capitals but we still maintain a fantastic variety of independently owned caffs and sandwich shops.

Any ingredient money can buy can be found in our expensive delis yet, around the corner, in some strange little corner shop or market stall, you'll find something solely imported for an ethnic enclave. Every cuisine is catered for at every level - anything is available.

London sits in symbiosis with the other great Metropoli. Global food phenomena affect us as deeply as New York or Paris yet, at the same time, our own national food culture is firmly back on the public agenda.

Back at the height of the dotcom boom an American theorist was asked which industries he felt would be safe from the new technology. He identified food provision, waste management and construction as the only sectors that could survive unchanged. (He also noted that these were areas controlled by organised crime in the US but that's rather a side issue). These are the fundamentals, the fixed costs, if you will, of urban existence. You need a roof over your head, and when you live in a concrete jungle rather than an open field, you need someone to cart in the food and someone to pipe away the shit.

The capital city of a small country attracts everyone who can survive it. It's kept stuffed to capacity by a constant flow of incomers that's only stemmed when there is simply no more room. Under this degree of pressure food waste and shelter become even more important. Is it any wonder that Londoners only seem to talk about where and what they're going to eat next, house prices and whether they remembered to put the rubbish out.

Whenever I visit friends in other towns they're always keen to show me the latest new place that's opened. 'We've got a new deli/farmer's market/gastropub you've got to try' with the silent but implied '…every bit as good as the ones in London' and of course, they're right. A Michelin star or an organic salmon smokery in Nottingham or Brighton is every bit as good no matter where it is.

But that's where it stops. Thank you, the fishmonger in Leeds was every bit as good as any single one I could find at home - I could even park - but it was the only one. When I go to my fishmonger, every step I take is surrounded by people eating, selling, making, loving food. From the KP standing by the bins, smoking a sneaky rollup and excavating his nose to the pigeon pecking at a discarded arepa bun it's everywhere. It's like being an ingredient in a particularly thick soup. Trucks drive past delivering bread from Turkish bakeries to Somali corner shops where Lithuanian countermen will wrap it round Italian salami. Even the pavements and bins smell of food - putrescent it's true, but there's no way of escaping food in everything. God knows how anorexics survive without blinkers and a nose clip.

It's not about restaurants, it's about being immersed in, obsessed with and surrounded by food. In an environment this intense, some celebrity chef's latest overhyped excursion into public eating is totally irrelevant. I'm stuck trying to decide between pho or pirogi for lunch, whether I can fit in one more espresso without getting the creeping jitters, if the bread delivery has arrived at the corner shop yet and …what is that fantastic smell coming from the Portuguese deli?

I can't tell what the tipping point is. I can't tell if it's the size, the relative national importance, the human concentration or diversity of a city that causes it to form this foodie gestalt but I know London has it in big lardy helpings and that's why the only recommendation I can give is to live here.

Posted by Tim at 08:10 AM | Permalink

I don’t do restaurant reviews. I have to confess that it’s something I’m unnaturally sniffy about. There are several reasons. The foodwriters I love don’t review – or at least their reviews never make their books; which is equally telling. Once, most quality magazines had some literate connoisseur to waffle on delightfully about food in general. These days they either don’t have the money or feel their readers would rather hear about Britney’s latest diet. There are a few good ones left but once Jeffrey Steingarten, John Thorne and Jim Harrison join Alice Thomas Ellis, Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher on Heaven’s masthead the game will be up.

Partly I suppose it’s because reviewing restaurants, even if it’s an honest attempt to share an informed opinion, places eating in the sphere of commerce rather than the sensual. A ‘Which’ report on vacuum cleaners is a service to the appliance-buying public. A gushing article describing the latest celebrity haunt as a foodie Valhalla just for getting the service prompt and the steak medium-rare is more about conspicuous consumption than hedonism.

Finally, I believe that a column is about entertainment. It’s like a meal – an end in itself and, if you enjoy it, you should feel better at the end of it. A restaurant review isn't entertaining unless you go there and either agree or disagree with my opinion. If we agree that it was great, my review was irrelevant. If I liked it and you didn’t, I’m a poor judge. If you liked it and I didn’t, I missed the point. In either case we’d have to politely agree to disagree which rather undermines the point of reviewing.
Having said all that, I’m going to talk about some specific eating-places in this column to illustrate a point. Please don’t take it as a review.

For a variety of reasons, not unconnected with my honeymoon, I’ve spent the past fortnight in various parts of the English South.

First stop was Ventnor, a faded, dilapidated but stunningly romantic little seaside town on the Isle of Wight. I’d love to say that I’d booked Venice for my honeymoon but ended up in Ventnor due to a keyboard error but, in fact, it was purely intentional.

The trend for ‘Boutique’ hotels has now thoroughly infected every British seaside town – yeah, even unto Ventnor. There can’t be a single backwater left where either the local hairdresser and his partner or a couple of downsizers from Hampstead haven’t bought up the town’s most ghastly Edwardian B&B. They evict the elderly or DSS occupants, smother the entire thing in a thick layer of architect’s white, prop it with carefully chosen objets and throw it open to the ‘lifestyle’ press.

Travellers may thank God that, after years of charging extra for the cruet, the Hotel trade has recognized the existence and importance of customers and has started to cater to them in small ways.

On the other hand, this does leave one at their mercy when it comes to eating that that is not always a good thing. In our particular hotel, the menu reflected the décor – utterly tasteful and entirely devoid of feeling. It works for rooms – it doesn’t for food.

This left us in an interesting position. A choice between two tourist-trap pubs for dinner.

British readers will know that in spite of our culinary renaissance, over the last few years, the UK is still a bit of a curate’s egg when it comes to public catering. Though there are streets in all the major Metropoles where one can buy a fantastic variety of food and drink there are still cafes in the provinces that can actually advertise…

"Chili Con Carni, “Jacket” Potatose, Tea, Nescafe AND Kenco" (All spelling and punctuation restaurateur’s own)

Ventnor’s magnificent Esplanade in not so much a Golden Mile as 217 yards of faded tat. The Gaiety Amusement arcade, a highpoint, would be tragic in Brighton but here has a certain ironic charm. ‘The Spyglass’ lurks, brooding, at one end. It has a terrace that will seat the entire population of the town, eight times over, in February. In July, you queue. The décor looks like someone coated the place in epoxy then sprayed a shipbreaker’s yard at it through a high-pressure hose. Compared to the Spyglass, Disney’s ‘Pirates of the Carribean’ ride has an unpretentious nautical motif. The Spyglass would give a lifeboatman mal de mer.

Two foreign students, attracted by the offer of a room and minimum wage, service around a hundred covers. The menu offers 50 items ranging from the "Cap’n’s sirloin ‘n’chips" to a half lobster. Using rudimentary dead reckoning, I calculated the nearest organic ingredient is 40 miles over the Solent.

I had ‘Whole Tail Scampi and chips garnished with salad’. The scampi was IQF, probably mechanically recovered and deep-fried in industrial batter. The chips were fat and the salad was an undressed combination of cos leaves, tomato wedges and cress. We ate it with Guinness, overlooking grey sea. It was bloody marvellous.

In London, I expend extraordinary effort in finding traceable meat, low-mileage, organic, seasonal veg and would happily chew out a waiter for daring to bring an espresso with an incomplete crema. Out here in the boonies, I’m eating the sort of stuff my Father would have relished in a Berni Inn in 1976 and loving it.

Don’t get the impression I’m automatically against pub food. It didn’t get to be popular because it tastes bad. Whatever you think of chicken-in-a-basket or jacket potato and tuna salad, you’ve got to admit it’s survived the years and, Richard Dawkins would point out, become better at doing its job. But there was something else going on here, some ineluctable quality that transcended even the food.

This is the problem with holidays, they leave you far too much time to think.

A week later I was in North Cornwall and so, naturally, made the pilgrimage to Rick Stein’s. The experience was enormously disappointing.

I’ve always liked Stein’s curmudgeonly take on eating. If you watch his programmes you’ll believe that nothing could taste better than a sea-trout, jerked out of the water and griddled on a shovel over charcoal – that nothing could be more authentic than fresh seafood, simply prepared by local people. Yet, for example, the £65.00 tasting menu features ‘Mackerel Recheado’, a three-inch baby mackerel, split, stuffed with a ginger and chilli masala and tied to a skewer for grilling with neat little pieces of string. I’ve rarely seen anything so fussy and the flavour… well as my more robust Australian guest put it…

“Christ, they could have given the poor little fella a chance.”

In fairness, he makes his money from the wealthy, middle-class second homers of the surrounding county and is consequently booked out every night. Perhaps they really want to dress up and pay a big bill and perhaps you can’t justify that over simple, fresh seafood.

Slowly, the idea was formulating. Sure, the taste of the food and the quality of the ingredients is important - when I cook at home that’s all that matters - but eating food someone else has made adds another level to the experience. Sharing food is the simplest act of generosity we can perform. In most cultures, the act of breaking bread is laden with symbolism and a supporting imperative of hospitality.

I’m beginning to feel that this strange, outdated notion may be a lot more important than we currently think

What disappointed me about Stein’s was the disjunction between his beliefs and his product. Christ knows I’m not naive enough to assume he’s going to cook it all personally, but the place has a man’s name over the door. When the menu ceases to reflect his highly public beliefs, he breaks the personal connection between the cook and the diner - the connection that is hospitality.

Back at the Spyglass, laden as it was with all the faux ‘mine hostery’ of the traditional pub, there was a genuine feeling that there was a cook out the back. He was probably a great tattooed hulk who’d been cashiered from the Catering Corps for poor personal hygiene but it felt like he was putting something together for me. There was a definite feeling of hospitality.

If you go to your granny’s and she makes you an appalling, overcooked Sunday lunch, with a grey ‘joint’, soggy roast potatoes and packet gravy, you tell her it’s wonderful and you’re not lying because it was made with the best intentions and, probably, love.

If a restaurant makes even the weakest attempt to fulfil the fundamental human exchanges of offering hospitality I’ll forgive them anything – no, that’s too patronising – I’ll enjoy food I might reject elsewhere.

If that sense of ‘being cooked for’ is lacking, it doesn’t matter how famous the chef or brilliant the ingredients, I feel like a dumb consumer and that puts me off my food.

In the UK we often refer to the ‘Hospitality Industry’. Isn’t that an oxymoron?

One place finally brought this home to me. Ironically, it was the sort of place Rick Stein would love.

On the south coast of the Isle of Wight, each stretch of beach is managed by a ‘Longshoreman’. The job, handed down through families, comes with fishing rights plus the responsibility to provide management, first aid, rescue and even deckchair services on the beach.

At Steephill Cove, the Cawes family have been longshoremen for generations. The men run lines of pots for crab and lobster and the women make crab pasties fresh every day and sell them from their kitchen door just above the beach.

Steephill Cove is a tiny semi circular bay, surrounded by high cliffs and with no motor vehicle access. Once you’re in, there’s a feeling of staring out to the open sea with an impenetrable rampart at your back. You are enclosed in a micro community, ecology and economy. Catching, cooking, selling, serving and eating take place in sight of each other. Nothing could be in sharper contrast to the disembodied and secret processes of the ‘hospitality industry’.

It’s a fair hike from Ventnor but this is only a good thing. It discourages any but the culinary zealot, makes keen the appetite and ensures that you arrive just after noon when the pasties come out of the oven.

Real purists get up earlier. By arriving at eleven, they can see the contents of their pasty being scooped wriggling out of the pots and dropped into the boiler in the shed.

I find it hard to understand how this only happens at Steephill. Surely the idea of combining the two foods that the South coast is famous for must have crossed some other poor fisherman’s mind at some time. Every seaside town south of the Wash should surely have it’s own special crab pasty recipe. Christ, a pasty even looks like a crab.

http://www.fireandknives.com/images/crabpasty.jpg

I resolve to make it my life’s task to remedy this terrible situation. I have promised myself that I’ll make the crab pasty something of a personal grail – trying over and over until my guests scream for mercy or I create a reasonable inshore facsimile.
This is one of those things that can’t possibly be replicated but here’s where I’m proposing to start. If you try it, let me know how you get on.

1. Obviously the crabmeat has to be utterly fresh so I’m intending to boil them myself. I’m not squeamish, but if you are, the web is awash with theories about humane killing of crustacea. I get my crabs at Borough Market. They are as fresh as can be obtained this far from the sea and cost more per pound than heroin. Fortunately they are so posh they can probably be lulled into a coma with Yogic Chanting.

2. The Steephill Cove originals had a definite leek content, visibly green, so I’ll be softening finely shredded leeks in butter before adding the crabmeat.

3. Either the crabs are exceptionally fit and muscly down there or they’re discarding some of the brown meat. I shall experiment with the latter.

4. The traditional pasty seasoning is simple - just a little more white pepper than you’d think sensible. I propose to grind mine fresh. Salt is usually pointless with seafood so I’ll start without and work my way up.

5. There seems little point in preparing puff pastry from scratch though I know we should. For preliminary experiments any reputable premade puff pastry should do the trick. I understand there are versions made with other than full fat butter. These are of no interest to us though they’d probably make a serviceable sealant should your radiator spring a leak on the way home from the grocers.

6. Roll out the pastry. Trim into a circle using a side plate as a guide. Paint the rim with milk and put a dollop of the seasoned crabmeat and leek mixture into the centre. Fold in half and pinch to seal.

7. Paint with milk then try about 200 degrees for around 30 mins. If you don’t over pack and avoid bursting it comes out looking amusingly like a pastry crab...

8. Hmm, there’s an idea. Next week – tortoise meat pies.

Posted by Tim at 07:59 AM | Permalink

Last weekend, on a pleasantly sunny Sunday, like half the men in Britain, I did my first barbecue of the year. Unlike the rest of them, this was also my first barbecue of the century and, God willing, my last.

I’m not sure what possessed me. Perhaps it was the little portable Weber. It had looked so lovely in the Conran shop but now lurked malevolently under the stairs, reproachful, unloved and still wrapped. It may have been that my partner, (a woman who, though brilliant in every respect has never grasped the concept of ‘clean–as-you-go’) had occupied the kitchen and was now making a carrot cake the way Michael Cimino made ‘Heaven’s Gate’. It could have been that the meat (skewered cubes of aged mutton back-strap marinated in argan oil and ras-al-hanout) might have benefited from an authentic trace of charcoal smoke.

Whatever the cause, I found myself crouched like a Neanderthal over the device cursing, from the profoundest depths of my soul, the utter bloody stupidity of barbecuing.

Barbecuing, it is commonly accepted, is a man’s task. People assume that cooking meat over fire is has some deep elemental evolutionary significance to men. It’s a nice thought, but as I stare out of my window at the ranked gardens of Camden, watching frustrated salarymen in three quarter length trousers struggling with charcoal and lighters, it doesn’t seem to ring true. Barbecuing seldom requires any of the talents or attributes which distinguish us from women - ability to hunt, physical strength, stamina, aggression, ability to know the way without asking directions from passers-by… ever – instead it utilises all our weaknesses - stupidity, stubbornness, total lack of taste, complete greed and an infantile fascination with setting fire to stuff.

Let’s face it, barbecued food tastes crap. Charcoal is wood so thoroughly carbonised that none of its original aroma or character can have survived. It is chemically indistinguishable from coke. It burns hot and clean and is a bastard to get going which explains why, at its simplest barbecued food is carbonised and reeking of whatever accelerant was used to start the pyre.

For those refined enough to dislike the overpowering odour of hydrocarbons special equipment has evolved to ensure that any taint of actual smoke is expunged from the process. Many who fancy themselves as pros use enormous gas-fired appliances

Perhaps this explains why otherwise rational cooks barbecue ingredients far more awful than anything they’d ever cook in their kitchens. Drumsticks from mutant chickens that grow six at a time and shed them monthly, mechanically recovered slurry patties in a pre-stressed fibreglass insulation bap, and above all sausages…

“It wouldn’t be a proper barbie without the sausages”

I’m sure it wouldn’t. I’m positive that without a burnt-up sawdust and pigbits™ filled condom, scorching shreds of reddened flesh off my palate, this would be an infinitely worse experience.

Marinades, the cook will tell you with a nauseatingly conspiratorial wink, are the big secret. As secrets go, enlivening dried out and insipid ingredients by embalming them with corrosive, highly flavoured mixtures is hardly up there with the bloody Enigma machine is it? And by the way, if you can stop yourself gagging long enough, the ‘Chef’s Secret Ingredient’ is always either Tabasco, ketchup, pineapple juice, Marmite or honey and often all of them together.

The real secret to a great barbecue is this – don’t bother. There is nothing you can barbecue that wouldn’t taste infinitely better from the kitchen. Inviting people round to watch you ruin food over a naked flame is like inviting them to watch you defecate in a hole you’ve dug in the rockery when you have a perfectly acceptable flushing lavatory indoors.

No, barbecuing is not clever, or funny and I don’t think it’s even terribly manly. All of which has got me thinking about really manly food. What defines properly butch nosh?

First rule is that it shouldn’t be a meal. That whole sitting down and eating thing implies we have time to spare between slaughtering animals, building skyscrapers, wrestling bears and all the other cool stuff we do every day. Really manly food is some form of grabbed snack.

The most atmospheric piece in Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Kitchen Confidential’ is the heartfelt description of opening up the kitchen in the morning. It’s the time when a cook gets contemplative, casually inspecting his patch and mentally preparing for the day. Bourdain describes whipping up a breakfast omelette with chorizo and scallions. I can picture him eating it standing at the range, with a chunk of bread fresh from the delivery palette and the first espresso of the day.

Admittedly you can’t describe Bourdain as effete to begin with, but that’s just such a manly way to eat. On the job, standing up, throwing together something wonderful out of found ingredients – notice there’s nothing girly like shopping going on here, just grabbing handfuls of stuff from the fridge.

The second rule is that it must contain three of the four major food groups: bread, meat, cheese and onions. Onions are what men have instead of vegetables.

The final rule is that it must be cooked on top of the oven. French food writers would waffle on for hours about the incubating enclosing warmth of the uterine oven but I think it’s simpler than that. It’s all about control. You can’t tell a man to put something in a metal box, turn a few buttons and wait to see what comes out.

Cooking in an oven is about relinquishing control to the mysteries of convection and leavening. Baking is a dark and mysterious art with few certainties. It’s about communing with forces of nature – it’s bloody witchcraft. Cooking on the top is all about taking command - the manly struggle to keep the food on the edge of burning, wreaking change on nature’s ingredients – much more like alchemy.

My own favourite manly recipe follows all these rules. It came from an excellent cook who used to open with me in a San Francisco restaurant. We used to knock these up while gossiping about last nights’ exploits, comparing hangovers and setting up for the day. The 'Philly Cheese Steak', though about as culinarily undistinguished as you can get is as hotly debated a regional speciality as bouillabaisse. I just think it’s a hell of a lot more fun to eat.

1. Take a large roll, split it, leaving a hinge and scoop out a little of the crumb on either side. In the US one would be looking for a Vienna roll though these can be a bit tough to locate in the UK. I’ve had excellent results with ciabatta and a sourdough batard from Chez Paul.

2. Take a large, white onion and slice it into vertical segments. Work the segments through your fingers into a bowl to make loose, long slices. This should be a big, ugly cheap onion, one of those that are so coarse in flavour it makes you weep as you buy them. You’ll need a couple of large handfuls per sandwich

3. Take a medium sized, thick cut steak from the cheaper end of the spectrum and slice, on the bias, into finger thickness strips. Skirt, onglet, anything chewy and flavourful will do. If the butcher recommends beating it for a week with a mallet, you’ve got the right piece of meat

4. Shred a ball of fresh, wet buffalo mozzarella into a bowl. Don’t get too fussy about draining it.

5. Turn a low heat under an enormous cast iron griddle, Ideally, this should be mounted in the back of a truck outside a metal bashing factory in Pittsburgh. Failing this, use your very largest frying pan. Drop in the onions and sweat them gently until they have clarified then whack up the heat to begin to caramelise the edges.

6. Throw in the meat and dredge generously with pepper.

7. Take enough salt to kill every dietician, food allergist and yoga nutter in North London and strew it liberally onto the meat, laughing like a hyena.

8. Keep tossing everything until the meat is nicely browned but still pink inside. To be authentic you should be doing this teppanyaki style with two large offset spatulas. It’s important to continually scrape up any matter sticking to the pan surface and stir it in.

9. Lower the heat a little and throw in the cheese. This is the magical bit. As it hits the heat, the mozzarella yields loads of creamy fluid which combines with the onion juices and deglazes the pan. By the time the last curds of cheese are melting to strings the ‘gravy’ will be perfectly reduced.

10. Using your spatulas, shape the whole gluey mass into a long mound, lift it and dump it without ceremony into the waiting bun. Scrape, chisel or pour any remaining pan residue over the top and serve it forth.

Serving suggestion: Eat standing up with male friends. Position yourselves near a window where you can watch the pitiable Australopithecus barbecuing in the next garden. He’s just lost all the hairs on his forearms trying to drive the botulinus toxin out of frozen hamburgers. He’s already lost the respect of his weeping, hungry children, he’s about to lose his friends to food poisoning and eventually he’ll lose his wife to a man who can actually cook.

Knock back cold beers, chew on your cheesesteaks and laugh ostentatiously.

Posted by Tim at 07:52 AM | Permalink

The Fish Knife.

Why? I can understand needing an offset spatula to fillet or serve fish but can someone explain what I’m supposed to do with the miniature version they insist on sticking next to my plate in some restaurants? Am I allowed to spoon the fish into my mouth on the flat of the blade? Can I have another knife for the rest of the stuff on the plate? Why do I get one with a lobster when what I really want is a pair of pliers and an electric bone saw?

Queen Victoria banned them from the Royal table. If this is what they mean by a ‘return to Victorian values’ then I’m with Baroness Thatcher for the only time in my life.

The letter Y

I don’t get many opportunities to order yak so I believe I’m safe in my desire to expunge the letter Y from all description of food. Any recipe or menu entry that uses the words ‘cheesey’, or, God help us, ‘lemony’ should be ignored on principle; they were invented by advertising men to conceal the fact that the product contained no real cheese or lemon. They debase food. Even if a dish is laden with cheese and lemon, using these words makes it sound like a ready meal or an air freshener.

‘Crispy’, ‘crunchy’ and ‘tasty’ have no place here either. These are not benefits to which our attention needs to be drawn, they are givens in good cooking.

In San Francisco, once, a passing homosexual gentleman in chaps and a moustache called me ‘Chunky’. I took it as a complement, as I assume it was intended, but I can’t welcome it as a description on a menu.

There was a time in when recipe books were written by admen to promote products. One memorable recipe, involving canned tuna, cream of mushroom soup, crushed crackers and aerosol cheese whip was called ‘cheesy, crispy, mushroom ‘n’ tuna bake’ which sounds to me like colon cancer in a handy, family-sized serving. Perhaps the admen thought housewives were so abidingly thick they could only countenance food that was described like other household goods.

This probably explains why Delia Smith still does it.

"Good olive oil"

Even the immortal, Elizabeth David had this strange verbal tic. In one essay she specifies that we should use good things -good olive oil, good butter, good white breadcrumbs - seventeen times.

It wasn’t just the Goddess David either. MFK Fisher has it in spades, the Grigsons never stop and Mistresses Glasse and Beeton are larded with it.

I love these people… why do they do this to me?

Thanks for specifying the ‘good’ oil, Elizabeth. I was just about to reach under the bench and dress my salad with this three-gallon sump of reclaimed 20W40.

‘Lemon cuts through the richness’

Any used car salesman will tell you how to spot a mug. Anyone who knows absolutely nothing about cars will walk around the heap, stroking his chin contemplatively and then kick the tires. The minute you have a tire-kicker on your forecourt you can wheel out your rustiest lemon and rack up the price. His money is yours.

Now cooking programmes are omnipresent on British television, legions of people with no idea whatsoever about food are being asked to taste things, live on air and come up with something to say. They flounder hopelessly. ‘Hmm, that’s tasty’ seems too weak. ‘Mmm. Tastes just like chicken’, is a little obvious - especially if it’s chicken - which leaves only one line, the culinary equivalent of tire kicking…

‘Hmmm. The lemon really cuts through the richness’

The problem is, it’s not just civilians. I’ve heard every chef ever interviewed say it…repeatedly… like it’s on some ghastly tape loop. God knows I understand the difficulty in coming up with fresh language concerning food. There have been a few writers – Coleridge, Huysmans, Genet, Apollinaire – who’ve confined themselves to describing the realm of the purely sensual. Frankly, they all get a bit of a yawn after a while. It’s obviously a stretch. If stone geniuses like that can’t keep it up for more than a slim volume, what hope has Ainsley bloody Harriot who’s expected to fill endless hours of our time using a markedly smaller intellectual armoury?

But please, please, can’t professionals take it for granted that lemon cuts through bloody grease. It’s so obvious it’s humiliating. It’s like saying ‘’Hmmm. Plunging my head into this deep fat fryer has made it really, really hot”.

Come to think of it… “Ainsley? Can you come over here for a minute?”

Pan Frying

OK… I admit it… my dirty little secret. I’ll stand up in front of a huddled circle of twenty guilty looking cooks and make my full confession…

“My name’s Tim. I fry things… in a pan”.

Other, better people don’t have this weakness. American chefs fry in buckets, the French have always favoured porcelain vases and I’m told that Gordon ‘Hard Man’ Ramsay cups the boiling oil in his bare hands and tosses the food like a juggler.

I’ll order ‘pan fried’ sea bass the same day I can get a side of ‘saucepan-boiled’ potatoes.

Until then, it’s off the menu.

The “French Stick”

To wander into an English bakery is to plunge into a glossary of obscure and beautiful nomenclature. Cobs, baps, split-tins, bloomers, Coburgs, flowerpots, quarterns and farls gratify the ear as well as the eye.

Doubly, distressing, therefore, to encounter the ‘French Stick’, the biggest con to be perpetrated by bakers since they stopped adding alum and ground bones to the flour.

Aspiring middle class parents know that feeding their children white bread is but a step short of inoculating them with rickets, lice and poor grammar. They also know that the French have those lovely long loaves that they carry under their arms as they cycle around, selling each other onions and indulging in soft focus bonviveury.

Cunning bakers have responded, not with an authentic baguette but with a preservative-laden, turd-shaped travesty called – with callous humour – a French Stick.

It’s exactly the same rubbish they extrude into white loaves but delivered in a staggeringly inconvenient shape. Trying to eat a sandwich made with one is like trying to fellate a torpedo.

It sums up everything that’s wrong with us as a nation; our willingness to settle for crap food, our obsession with social distinction, our inability to countenance change and our refusal to attempt French pronunciation in public.

Frying “off”

We used to fry. Then professionals came onto our screens and began to fry ‘off’.

‘I’ll just fry off these onions’

Sounds great doesn’t it? Sounds so professional. Which, of course, it is…

‘I’ll just pour two pints of industrial-grade grease into this metre square brat pan, fry off 800 battery chicken breasts, slap them under the heat lamps and hope no-one dies on my shift’.

That’s professional.

‘I’ll fry off this Marks and Spencer salmon fishcake’

… is absurd

Parsley

God, I hate parsley. It’s the invariable adornment of unthinking cooking. A ‘sprig’ of parsley can be used to garnish anything because it means nothing. It actually has a particularly distinctive taste, but that never matters because no-one ever eats it.

I’m sure there’s beautiful parsley somewhere, light, fresh and tender, like a less rank cilantro, plump and juicy with a misting of dew, but I’ve never tasted it. In an entire life of cooking and eating, I’ve never encountered parsley that didn’t taste like a weed that had choked into leathery senescence behind the chemical toilet on a building site.

The French call it persil, which, for obvious reasons, never makes it onto even the most pretentious menus in the UK, but in spite of the fact that they have some wonderful recipes using parsley, for me it’s an unremittingly English herb. The limp, re-used sprig on an overdone steak in a country pub, the light sprinkling on the skin of a flour-thickened nursing home soup, the triumphant flourish on gammon and pineapple in a seaside boarding-house with delusions and boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce.

Parsley will never pass my lips as long as I draw breath but I, herewith, give notice to my family and loved ones that, at my funeral, once the three mysterious, veiled women have cast their roses on my casket and left in a cloud of chypre and once my body is interred, they should serve over-boiled ham entirely surrounded with a rosette of the oldest, most leathery parsley they can find and weep for my passing.

Thank You. I feel much better. Next time, Deo Gratia, I will be in better humour.

Posted by Tim at 07:46 AM | Permalink

At the back of my freezer, behind a frozen pig trotter and a couple of blocks of fish fumet, lie Sigourney and Sissy. They’re certainly not dead but they’re not exactly alive either. They exist in suspended animation and are the daughters of a sourdough ‘Mother Sponge’ which thrives at the San Francisco Bakery College.

I lived in San Francisco for four years and can’t quite shake the memory of proper sourdough so, when my partner went to the college on a course, she brought back the only souvenir that mattered… genuine San Francisco sourdough culture.
To explain why a pot of fermenting mould should mean so much, let’s have a quick recap of the science of bread.

A slice of bread is substantially flour and water. When mixed, these fundamentals create the sticky starch paste which is probably the most elemental and ancient constituent of man-made food. Just slapped on a hot rock, held on a stick over a fire or dropped into boiling water, this will cook to a solid that is more digestible than its constituent grains.

Such primitive unleavened ‘breads’ though, aren’t much fun to eat but there is, mercifully, a second, mysterious quality of the flour/water mix. If it is suitably physically tormented it becomes elastic. During the protracted kneading process a protein called gluten breaks down and reforms into long stringy molecules which change the dough texture from that of thick porridge to that of well-worked bubblegum.

Hold on to that image because I’d like you to imagine blowing into each. Blowing through a straw into porridge would result in hysterically amusing noises as the bubbles burst in flatulent chorus. Blowing into bubblegum would produce… well – bubbles.

This established, we need now only find a way of introducing bubbles of gas into our elastic dough and here we turn to yeasts. Yeast is a living organism that consumes sugars and creates gas. I will allow you to insert your own joke here. By mixing yeast in our elastic dough, providing it with enough sugar and maintaining the temperature it requires to live, we create quantities of CO2, which, trapped by the dough, form a light, spongy foam.

Finally, the dough is placed in a hot oven where the gas pockets expand further, the flour/water matrix cooks and stabilises and the outer surface tans to an appetising crust.

That, plus a little salt, is all there is to bread bakery and, given modern packaged yeasts and strong bread flours, almost any combination of mix-knead-rise-bake will produce an edible, if rather characterless, bread.

Most modern cooks know yeast as brown granules from a hygienic foil sachet. This is a manufactured and highly consistent product created in enormous fermentation vats then freeze-dried and hermetically packed. For occasional home bakers this is a sure-fire, convenient solution but it completely by-passes the excitement and character of wild yeasts.

A few weeks ago, I visited a farm in the Haut Savoie where Reblochon cheese was being made. Cut into a hillside was the characteristic high barn where the cows could winter on the ground floor beneath a seventy-foot high loft of sainfoin, the sweet hay which nourishes them. At one end of the stock floor and milking parlour lay the sterile cheese making rooms and the racks of maturing cheese, open to the air. At the other end of the floor was a twenty-foot high pile of fresh manure.

A good Reblochon is, as a notable gourmand of my acquaintance puts it, ‘redolent of the byre’. Though the cheese itself is suave to the point of creamy blandness, the rind has the not-unpleasant smell of fresh, grassy manure. Standing in the farmyard made it absolutely clear how the local organisms affect the tastes and smells of some of our finest foods.

Yeasts are everywhere, countless millions of them, with distinctive smells and flavours. They flourish on dung, rotting matter and even in the warm damp crevices of our own bodies. When a strong cheese smells of manure, feet, fish or locker rooms these same yeasts and their accompanying bacteria can take credit.

The variety of airborne wildlife present is unique to the location – a sort of micro-ecology. Our Reblochon farmer was managing of his cheese-ripening environment with judicious waste management but the air around regional breweries, wineries, affineurs, miso manufacturies and any other industry dependent on fermentation is equally vital to the flavour of their product.

Which brings us back to sourdough - a way of making bread without the addition of generic tasting, industrially produced baker’s yeast. If yeast free dough is left in a warm place for a while, local wild yeasts will settle on it and it may begin to ferment and bubble. This is certainly how the first leavened or risen bread was discovered, when a batch of fermenting dough was cooked and the results were lighter and more tasty than usual.

If this natural fermentation can be persuaded to begin, a portion of the dough can be kept back from each batch and added to the next, inoculating the fresh flour and water with a rapidly breeding yeast population. The original settlers who moved west to San Francisco kept these sourdough cultures alive as they travelled.

Some have claimed that the cultures kept in the City today are direct descendents of those brought across the continent, perhaps picking up new strains in the mountains and prairies. I prefer to think that settler bakers passed on expertise rather than actual strains and that the taste is that of San Francisco’s own micro-ecology.

When my little pot of culture arrived, it was in bad shape. It had spent a day in a hotel room and twelve hours in the hold of a 777. I immediately fed it with fresh organic bread flour and bottled spring water and split it into two to incubate, both at room temperature and in a very slow oven. After a day, the slow oven sample was beginning to show signs of weak bubbling but its sibling had perished. Split and fed again it began to rally over the next few days. Each morning, I’d rush downstairs, pour off the majority of the strengthening batter and feed the residue. After a week, I was able to use the discarded batter for sourdough pancakes and I was ready for my first loaves.

As you can see, keeping the sourdough alive is a time-consuming job. Each day, eight ounces of the batter is poured off and used to leaven a two-pound loaf. The loaf takes most of the day to rise and bake. Meanwhile, the remaining batter is made up with flour and water to ten ounces and stored carefully in the refrigerator.
You can get away with leaving a strong culture unattended for a day or two but you are entering a commitment to bake, or at least feed the beast, every other day. I know people who leave their culture with trusted friends when they go on holiday. I know happily married couples with less commitment than it takes to keep a sourdough alive.

Fortunately, the cultures can be put into suspended animation in a freezer. Once I’d split off a sample and tested its ability to freeze and come back to life I took half of my strongest batch, named it Sigourney (remember ‘Alien’?) and committed her to cryogenic deep storage. Just to be sure, I kept her sister alive and building strength for an extra two weeks before naming her Sissy (No real reason – I just loved her in ‘Badlands’) and placing her in the family vault.

The girls will be resuscitated in three months, given a couple of weeks of work and then back to sleep.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, for all this love and attention, a sourdough is an unpredictable and ungrateful jade. I’ve seen the same starter create a loaf like a Viagraed Zeppelin on one day then puddle like a superannuated Camembert the next.

You’ll be wondering why anyone would bother with all this and I find myself having to agree. I love the challenge of bringing a strong culture back to life – it’s rare I get to feel like Dr Kovac in ER – and it’s worth it for the occasional Proustian moment of original San Francisco taste but it really reinforces the main problem with home baking – volume. You’ve got to do a lot of it and be utterly consistent, to make the recipes work, to develop your own skills and, ultimately to make the effort worth it.
If you’re a full-time parent of a gigantic, bread-crazed family with self-discipline, a great oven and with forearms like floury hams, this is all fine but otherwise, consider investing in a bread-maker.

I know that sounds heretical to a real cook but they really do have their uses. The ‘sealed box’ cooking process in a bread-maker does two unique things. According to Elizabeth David’s ‘English Bread and Yeast Cookery’, both a radiant closed top and a steamy cooking environment were lost with the demise of the domestic brick bread oven. The bread-maker brings them both back. The machine also restricts you to utter consistency in temperatures and times for cooking and proving – all incredibly difficult to control off-piste – leaving you only able to make small incremental changes in ingredients to improve the results over time.

You will, without doubt, get consistently good bread, infinitely better than anything you could buy in anything other than an artisan baker and with minimal effort. On the other hand you will have lost most of the pleasure of the process.

I trained as a photographer. I still shoot with a completely manual camera, with manual focus lenses and real film. I know I can control every single variable in the process but that anything left unadjusted will remain consistent. I feel comfortable like this, in a way I never can with digital cameras that take the control away.

I want someone to build a bread-maker like a Nikon F2. A great heavy manual beast with a row of big, machined-steel knobs along the front allowing me to control rest, knead, first rise, knock back, prove, bake and cool times, then a second row of knobs controlling the temperature for each phase. I want to sling the thing round my neck and jump out of a Huey in the Delta, distributing baguettes, bloomers, baps and brioche to grateful gourmands in muddy foxholes… hmmm… maybe not, but I could play the thing like a Wurlitzer, making better and better loaves, noting arcane programming combinations and sending recipes like sheet-music to favoured friends.

Here are a few thoughts to start you off…

Breadmaker Subversion Guide:

I have a Panasonic bread-maker that comes with some of the most patronising instructions since ‘Duck and Cover’. Bear in mind that all the recipes given in the manual will be real ‘belt and braces’ jobs to ensure successful and unchallenging loaves for idiots with ten thumbs.

1. There is always too much sugar in the recipe. This is partly to make sure that the yeast has the maximum nourishment so there is no embarrassing failure to rise (“Honestly, Darling. This has never happened to me before”) and partly because regular punters never object to a little extra refined sugar in almost anything. Replace the sugar with honey for white loaves and blackstrap molasses for brown ones. Experiment with reducing quantities while retaining inflation.
2. There’s never enough salt. I’m sure there are millions of people in trailer parks just quietly expanding while waiting for the day they can enter a class-action suit against bread-maker manufacturers for increasing their BP with irresponsibly salty bread recipes. I’m sure this scares Panasonic half to death. I don’t care. Replace the Saxa with Maldon and double the recommended quantities as a starting point. This not only makes the bread taste of something but acts as a flour improver, strengthening the gluten mesh and improving the rise. To give you some idea of how pusillanimous the given recipe is, it recommends 5g of salt to 500g of flour. Elizabeth David recommends 15g.
3. Replace the suggested butter with a decent cooking (ie not necessarily extra-virgin) olive oil.
4. All the recipes include a quantity of milk powder to give the loaf a longer shelf life and to ‘improve the nutritional value’. This is where I start to get really pissed off. I’m home baking for Chrissake. If I wanted a loaf that lasted a week and was packed with government recommended nutritional supplements just to compensate for all the goodness taken away in milling and processing – I’d go to the bloody supermarket and buy one.
5. Now I’m ranting, just don’t bother with any of the white bread recipes. It’s impossible to subvert them into anything other than a competent ‘freshbaked’ supermarket loaf. Stick to the wholemeals, granaries and ryes
6. Finally, if you want to go really guerrilla, try buying fresh, live yeast from a healthfood store. This looks like a block of sticky tofu, smells like a warm brewery and will live for a week if kept in the fridge and treated nicely. As it works unpredictably, the bread-maker recipe book refuses to acknowledge its existence. To use live yeast mix it into the water component of your recipe and add the sugar/molasses /honey and a big spoonful of the flour. Cover and leave in a warm place for half an hour or so until it begins to bubble. At this point I find it useful to run round the kitchen, cackling ‘It lives! My beautiful creature lives!’ before pouring it onto the remaining dry ingredients in the machine and firing it up.

Posted by Tim at 07:41 AM | Permalink

I’m sitting, alone, in the kitchen at 1.13 in the morning. When I say alone, I’m only being partially accurate. There is, of course, the chicken.

I admit this is not normal behaviour. A man doesn’t usually leave his bed, his slumbering wife and child and nip down to the kitchen for silent contemplation of dead poultry. On the other hand, this is no ordinary chicken. It’s a Gauloise, the same breed as the legendary poulet de Bresse but from an English farm. It’s organic and unlike the authentic French version which is ‘hand finished’ on a diet of corn soaked in milk, entirely free-range.

It weighs just over 2.2 Kg and cost me £26.29, an hour-long, round trip to pick up and £3.00 in parking charges. A phone call to my butcher tells me that for the same amount I could have a kilo of organic filet aged for up to four weeks – the most expensive piece of beef in the shop.

The piece of steak would serve four, is cooked in three minutes and eaten in six. I learned from my Mum that a roast chicken is just the start of a process that can contribute to a family’s meals for over a week. I plan to use this chicken as carefully as I can to prove that the expense of the free-range organic bird is at least as justifiable as the steak. Which is why I’m sitting in the kitchen staring at it. This kind of thing takes planning.

The Gauloise is a spectacular bird with unusually long and slender legs. It smells absolutely fresh and shows no sign of bruising or other damage pre or post-mortem. In fact, once you’ve been staring at it for twenty minutes, its skin is really very beautiful. Of consistent, creamy colour, dry, supple and with well distributed subcutaneous fat that’s still firm at room temperature. I don’t think this chicken was plucked so much as charmed into disrobing by an elderly roué.

Buying Chicken
Any tyro can march into an organic butchers and demand their most splendid poultry but they’ll just walk out with the bird. If you’ve spent time and effort developing a relationship with your butcher, he’ll certainly appreciate the effort you’ve making and, most likely, reward you with a few ‘extras’ if asked politely.

Without plunging too deeply into veterinary arcana it is fair to say that every fully functioning bird comes with a complete set of giblets. Fortunately not everyone wants them, this means your butcher may well throw in a few extra sets for a special customer who asks nicely. Many buyers will want their bird professionally reduced to breasts or legs, leaving spare carcasses and wings. Some butchers sell these for stock but the smart ones give them to favoured customers.

My bird came with six extra wings, two full carcasses and a spare set of giblets. Even the ‘special’ ones they breed in gene labs for KFC don’t usually come that over-equipped. It was time for the first phase of the experiment.

Roast Chicken
I’m obviously getting spoiled but, with London butchers and restaurants improving, seemingly daily, it’s no longer such a challenge to find excellent beef. A great roast chicken, though, is an altogether rarer treat. I find myself agreeing with the immortal Lucius Beebe who felt that “…a hot bird and a cold bottle” were essential preconditions for a civilised night on the town.

Any cookery book will give you a foolproof recipe for roasting. Most recommend around 20 mins per 500g plus an extra 20 at around 200C. This works well as a rule of thumb. I check the internal temperature at the thickest part of the thigh with a probe thermometer. 75C is supposed to be properly cooked but I err short of that as the vital 15-20 minute rest allows the meat to continue to cook. The long rest also solves the problem of the thighs being undercooked while the breast is already drying out. To be completely honest, I’m happiest when the meat is still slightly pink at the bone but I realise I’m probably alone in this and, now I’ve made the admission publicly, I’ll never get a job as a cook at an old folks home.

Recipes differ on stuffing. I use a couple of onions but avoid lemons or garlic. These are fine for occasions when a dull bird needs brightening up but are death to a good stock. Finally, detach the breast skin by working your hand up inside it. Get all the obvious jokes and innuendi out of the way then pack in a good 50g of butter.

People love to slather butter and oil over the outside of the bird but whenever I try it, it ends up in the bottom of the pan. I find that by packing the butter under the skin, roasting the bird dry and lightly seasoned and allowing a 20min rest, almost all the juice is retained. That which escapes usually collects in the cavity.

Finally, I put the chicken on a rack in a roasting tin and strew stock vegetables underneath before placing in the pre-heated oven.

For the purposes of this experiment the chicken was tested on my parents: my mother, an All-Star, World-Class chicken-stretcher and my father, a man who feels that money spent on other than red meat is entirely wasted. Some of the juices that poured out of the cavity after resting were whipped into a sauce with reduced vermouth and cream. It was served, with potatoes roasted in duck fat and steamed broccoli.

It was Dad, arch-traditionalist and the kind of chap who still notices such things, who remarked that leg and breast meat were more similar in texture, colour and flavour than he was used to. Indeed, dammit, he was right. The Gauloise displayed none of the usual poultry polarisation wherein the breast tastes like overcooked white fish while the legs taste like a greasy confit de vulture. Though I hate to use the phrase so unimaginatively applied to everything from alligator to human flesh, the whole bird, unmistakeably and triumphantly, ‘tasted just like chicken’.

Chicken Stock
There was plenty of meat left on the carcase. Large and identifiable pieces were reserved for sandwich use. Next, a careful picking-over of the carcase yielded two further qualities of meat; dark, fatty, flavourful morsels to enhance a cream of chicken soup and stringy, tendon laden, cartilaginous material which went straight into a large stockpot. In honour of the battery farming and ready meal industry, I refer to this as ‘Manually Recovered Meat’.

I am a hopeless spendthrift with a complex surgical bypass of his organ of moderation. In no other area could I be described as prudent or measured but I admit, I’m obsessed with stocks.

Stock making has gained a bad rep over the years for which Mrs Beeton must take a lot of the blame. She recommended an eternally boiling stockpot into which everything from fishbones to breadcrusts could be thrown and the resulting ‘sustaining broth’ used to extend other revoltingly self-denying and joyless pap.

Making a good stock is not a begrudging duty of household economy, it’s a rampant act of creation. While Mrs Beeton was wringing the last vestiges of edible material out of the tea towels, Escoffier would spend days reducing enormous quantities of flavourful meat into tarry concentrations. This is not the humiliating extension of leftovers; it is the manly craft of getting an entire ox into a demitasse.

The French have an expression for the last treats of the chicken, the oysters, the winglets and so on… “les, sots l’y laissent” which translates as “the bits the idiots leave”. That sums up beautifully the contempt I have for those who ignore the potential of stock.

The pan in which the chicken was roasted should be deglazed into the stockpot. The plates on which it was carved and the knife can all be rinsed into the pot too. The carcase is torn apart and added along with the roasted stock veg from the pan, freshly chopped onions, leeks, carrots and celery (neither peeled nor trimmed). Any extra wings or carcases should be added here for maximum gelatinousness, along with the giblets. Separate and reserve the liver. Add about four litres of water and bring to a gentle simmer.

I’ve got to confess, I just don’t get the thing about skimming stock. Who needs a perfectly clarified consommé in a modern household kitchen? Were I Jewish or Japanese, crystal clarity would matter. If I were creating limpid aspics in a 1930’s hotel kitchen, scum would be my enemy but most of that stuff floating to the surface looks like a healthy chicken product and, in my kitchen, gets guiltlessly stirred back in.

After about 45 minutes of simmering the stock can be strained off. There should be around two litres but if there’s substantially more it can be reduced. It should by now be straw yellow, slightly cloudy, full of clean chicken and vegetable flavours but without the fowly ghastliness of overcooking. It should also be partially jellied on cooling enabling the fat to be removed as a single piece. The exhausted remains of chicken and veg should be discarded though Mrs Beeton would, of course, reuse them for another gallon of decreasingly entertaining gruel.

Leftovers: The Chicken Sandwich
A chicken sandwich is an essentially leftover dish. It is usually constructed from the leavings of a feast and is often consumed with a stinking hangover. It is, therefore, a serious and medically important comfort food and should not be messed with.

The heaviest, moistest wholemeal bread is vital. One, thin slice should be smeared with mayonnaise the other with unsalted butter then strewn with a thick layer of the best leftover chicken. Finally a dressing of Maldon salt, left in large crystals rather than crushed in the fingers to create an enlivening crunch.

Neat Stock: Cream of Chicken Soup

As a child I was always fed Campbell’s cream of chicken soup whenever I was feeling a little under the weather. A luxury take on a comfort food, it’s worth turning over a whole half litre of our neat stock to its manufacture.

In one pan, heat the 500ml of stock and 250ml of thick cream. A clove of garlic and a bay leaf are optional but splendid additions. Hold at an incredibly gentle simmer for five minutes then remove from the heat. In a second pan melt 40g of butter and stir in a 40g of plain flour to make a roux. Cook through for a few minutes to remove any floury taste then whisk in the warm stock and cream mixture a little at a time. Bring back to just below the boil and simmer for five minutes. Start tasting and seasoning with Maldon salt, fresh-ground white pepper, extra cream or butter and a subliminal hint of grated nutmeg. Chop and shred the second grade of picked chicken meat and stir in to finish.

I’m usually all in favour of medical advances but I nurture a quiet regret that our children’s generation will never know the pleasure of drinking cream of chicken soup while sitting in bed, watching afternoon telly and recovering from mumps.

The Joy of Stocks
I live in mortal terror of the ‘mixed vegetable’ soup. Boiling up the chopped remains of the week’s veg with a stock cube should never take place outside of a student flat. Call me finicky but I have real problems with food where it’s not immediately apparent that it hasn’t been previously eaten. The real beauty of having a reserve of great stock is that any vegetable available can be honoured with proper soup. A proper soup has two main ingredients, one bland, one flavourful, united by a beautifully balanced but diffident stock and ennobled with cream, cheese or some other luxurious drizzling.

Leek and potato, carrot and yellow lentil, potato and onion, chorizo and chickpea, pea and ham: all of these can be yours to command with but four cubes of frozen stock and 20 mins work with pans and blender. I won’t embarrass you with recipes. This sort of soupmaking is a calling rather than a transferable skill. Plan soup for lunch for the next two weeks, start simple and build. Order a home delivery organic veg box and in a fortnight you’ll be able to write your own recipe book.

On days when you tire of soup experimentation or seriously need to impress a date, the carefully husbanded cache of cubes can be turned to impromptu risottos and as a bonus, a single cube can be dropped into any deglazing sauce to its ultimate benefit.

Les, sots l’y laissent
Remember the liver? There’s only one with each set of giblets but they are too distinctive in flavour to use in the stock. Trim away the tough ducts and put it straight into a pot in the freezer. Each new chicken adds another layer of liver and once you have six it’s time for a parfait or to flash fry in butter as a garnish to a summer salad.

Finally, any recovered fat can be rendered and kept in a jar as a refrigerator staple.

Conclusion
I’m not suggesting that anyone really follow this regime step by step. It requires more time and effort than most people are prepared to put in and, frankly, one can only take so much chicken. On the other hand, it does illustrate some important fundamentals.

1. It’s hard to find free range and organic chickens in the UK because people refuse to pay such a high price for them, yet a good bird, though it costs as much per serving as the best filet, will produce more good food and ultimately more pleasure.
2. Chicken is too often used as a conveniently bland canvas for other flavours. A good bird doesn’t need to be tricked out with clever flavourings.
3. Avoiding assertive flavourings means a quality stock.
4. …Which, when used neat and with subtle accompaniment is an unadulterated distillation of chicken flavour.
5. It has a meaty, filling quality but, as it’s cooked quickly and gently, there’s no overwhelming fowliness. This is the traditional classic stock, rich yet neutral. This increases the variety of uses when diluted in soups and sauces.
6. The high quality of the meat means that a greater proportion is pleasant to eat. More meat per bird, more leftovers, better sandwiches.

Posted by Tim at 09:52 PM | Permalink

There is a moment near the beginning of the movie 'Alien' when we catch the first glimpse of the creature they call the ‘Face Hugger’. It is the genius of HR Giger that the creature’s design quotes the legs of spiders, tails of scorpions, skeletal fingers and all manner of invasive phallic imagery. It is intended to provoke, in all who see it, a sense of unease, visceral disgust and revulsion.

It made me think of drawn butter.

Sure, it had acid for blood but, for me, the face hugger had all the flavour of a Japanese spider crab with the addition of that monumental, meter long tail. The mere thought of meter of lobster tail was enough to send me into paroxysms.

Crabs have always been close to my heart. I grew up in a drear seaside Necropolis and probably tasted my first dressed crab in a promenade shelter in horizontal drizzle; a smell of iodine in the air and the scouring lash of windblown sand against naked knees.

In my last years at school I had a job in a beachside shellfish shack dishing out whelks, cockles and appalling jellied eels to drunken holiday makers. I lived for the moment that a slightly classier tripper would ask for a dressed crab. After two long summers, I was adept. I could have the claws and legs off and split, the carapace cracked around the line of weakness, the dead man’s fingers whipped out and the meat shredded into a fluffy mass in less than two minutes – faster if I was drunk. It was the first job I’d had that had ever given me a feeling of achievement through a skill and, I’m sure, was responsible for my later food obsessions.

A while after graduation I moved to North Carolina, a state with an indecent obsession with crustaceans. Where your average English family will dine, al fresco, on paraffin flavoured rusk sausages and rare chicken, a family on the Outer Banks of NC will throw a crab crackin’.

The usual routine is to cover the big table on the porch with newspapers and drink beer while someone else drops at least a hundredweight of tiny sweet, blue crabs into a big drum of boiling seawater on the stove. Once they’re piping hot, they’re drained and poured into a mound in the middle of the table. Drawn (or clarified) butter, Tabasco and a revolting sounding but surprisingly delicious dressing made from equal quantities of horseradish and ketchup are the accompaniments. No one goes home feeling less than uncomfortable around the belt.

The Carolinas are also the spiritual home of the soft shell crab. Lets take a short diversion for a biology lesson. Crustaceans are...

‘...a mainly aquatic class of creatures, sharing with other arthropods, such as insects and arachnids, the characteristics of being invertebrates, with jointed limbs, segmented bodies and an exoskeleton of chitin’.

That hard exterior shell is obviously a bit of a challenge as the crab grows so, at various points during its life, it will shed it and lurk under rocks while its soft skin hardens to create a replacement. Shell shedding always takes place at full moon.

In this soft-shelled phase, the crab is what North Carolinians refer to as ‘good eating’ so, thousands of crabs are harvested and kept alive for weeks in darkened tanks under tarpaulins. Once they’ve waxed fat, a single, 60-watt light bulb is turned on under the tarp whereupon the poor, thick creatures, thinking it’s the full moon, disrobe within minutes.

Soft-shell crabs are delivered to the kitchen alive, in big flat trays, usually containing four or five dozen. They are a pleasant bluish slate colour with a more frilly and decorative edging than the little shore crabs we caught off the pier as kids. The new shell is already present, in all the right places but has the texture of a tough custard skin.

Southern hospitality demands a disorientating generosity of portions so there is little time to waste on fine surgery to remove inedible parts. The crab is pushed flat onto a board, the knife is inserted into the centre point of the back and two fast cuts are made, towards the front of the shell. The discarded wedge contains the eyes, mouthparts, most of the gill structure and a couple of other bits the locals consider unpalatable. The crab is then tossed in egg wash, seasoned flour, another egg wash and breadcrumbs before being deep-fried.

I once catered for some faction of the State Senate at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Their restaurant kitchens were well equipped and we felt we’d staffed up well to handle a mere hundred, elderly Southern politicians, slurping juleps, boasting and munching the occasional canapé.

They had asked for the soft-shell crabs in advance and hadn’t really expressed much interest in anything else on the menu so we set to work, production-line style, chopping, dipping, coating and cycling through four separate fryers. The head waitress picked up the first heaped platter, raised it over her head with a flourish and strode through the swing-door onto the restaurant floor.

The susurration from the main room dipped in anticipation then there was an unearthly roar punctuated with heehawing jeers. Something thumped solidly against the swing door then the waitress stumbled back through it, shielding herself with the empty tray.

“They’re like animals” she choked, her face pale with shock.

We took strategic pause from serving until we had loaded every platter we had, then we formed up at the swing doors. I took point with two more cooks at my shoulders and the rest of the floor staff in a flying V.

I am not a small man. I flatter myself I have a certain commanding bearing. Bruce, on my right was a six-foot, hippie, mountain survivalist with an M16 in the gun rack of his truck, mean eyes and the best-kept knives in the kitchen. Jim, to my left, had played football for the state. I don’t understand the game, but he told me it was his job to stand at the front and get hit.

The senators had us beat from the get-go. We’d placed a buffet table at the opposite side of the room and it was our column’s objective to resupply it, but not one of us got through. One very small waitress managed to crawl between legs, nip out the front entrance and rejoin us in the kitchen later but the rest of us were just overrun by a whooping, slavering mob of crazed seniors, costly dental work flashing and manicured claws tearing.

We regrouped behind the swing door where we found the second wave of dinner had, quite reasonably, made a break for freedom. Four boxes worth were loose and squirreling themselves away in any sheltered corner.

We kept finding them for days afterwards. One or two ventured out from their hiding spots and surrendered, a few perished and had to be tracked by smell. One, however, found itself a home in an inaccessible space behind the walk-in and taunted us for a fortnight, popping up when least expected and waving his claws in a crabby V sign. We grew rather fond of the scrappy little survivor. When our Vietnamese KP finally ran him to ground, he assured us that both his shell and his claws had hardened and showed us cuts on his fingers in evidence.

Wherever later travels have taken me, I’ve always been drawn to local crustacean dishes. Crab cioppino, in San Francisco, though now regarded as a sad tourist bait can be splendid if approached with enough breezy Northern California positivity and cold Anchor Steam Beer. The lobster roll is worshipped by the otherwise phlegmatic Bostonians in a manner I can only find just. Anything the Thais do with their local crabs is worth the flight and Sydney should just blow up that Opera House and build an enormous shrine to the Balmain Bug.

Although everyone raves about their local lobsters, I find it hard to agree for one simple reason. Wherever you find good lobsters, you find better crabs. To me the crabs have always tasted less insipid and more importantly, are much less sought after. This means that the iniquities of pre-boiling, freezing, vacuum bagging or just indecently long, live-storage on ice are all visited on the premium lobster but not wasted on the proletarian crab.

While the boatman is trying to convince you that the timid, beaten, moribund, declawed zombie in the centre of his display was caught this morning, there’s something lashing in a bucket under the slab that’s just exploding with terrifying, scuttering vitality. I know which I’d rather eat.

And here’s my favourite way to eat them.

Proper Crab Cakes.

Crab cakes have long been a menu staple of diners on the Eastern Seaboard of the US and most of them are delicious. They have a lot in common with burgers, meatloaf and other fried arrangements where the main flavouring is mixed with a balance of moistening and bulking ingredients.

A diner crab cake recipe, therefore, will usually be based in roughly a third crabmeat, a third of mashed potato or breadcrumbs and a third of mayonnaise, milk, egg or a plethora of regionally specific ‘secret’ ingredients. What’s important for the cook, here (or, perhaps more accurately, the proprietor), is that the filler extends the expensive crabmeat and the wet ingredients maintain the essential juiciness.

This probably makes a load of sense at ‘Cap’n Sam’s, Down East All-U-Can-Eat Crab ‘n’ Steak Cabin’ but it means that in most restaurants we get something containing everything from chopped onions to ketchup and the crab has become a sorry afterthought. The idea of the proper crab cake is to re-evaluate the three-way balance.

I’m indebted to John Thorne for all of his inspiring writing but in this case, specifically to the chapter ‘Crustaceans and Crumbs’ in ‘Pot on the Fire’ which I recommend as the Ur-text on crab-cakes. I do, however, have to differ in one very important way.

In America, it seems, no use is ever made of the brown meat inside the upper shell. For we English seasiders, the brown meat is a rich dark dressing which, like snipe trail on toast, naturally condenses all the flavour of the animal, its life and it’s habitat. It can’t be crab, for me, without a fair mix of both meats.

1. Pick up a freshly boiled crab from your nearest harbour. I can vouch for Whitstable, Christchurch, Poole, Bridport, Cromer, Ventnor, Lymington, Brancaster, Venice, Sydney, San Francisco, Duck and Elizabeth City personally. Other than this, you may have to find your own.

2. Crack the crab and extract all the white meat from body, legs and claws into one bowl and all of the brown meat from inside of the back shell into another. Discard the ‘Dead Man’s Fingers’ from inside the body – trust me, you’ll know.

3. Flake and fluff the white meat with a fork and remove any shell pieces. Carefully mix small quantities of the brown meat into the white, testing until it tastes satisfactorily of the sea. Once happy, weigh it. (This recipe is based on extracting around 500g – please vary quantities of subsequent ingredients according to your yield)

4. Grissini or Italian breadsticks are a fantastic kid’s snack but are also a perfect source of small quantities of breadcrumbs. For 500g of mixed crabmeat allow 4 Grissini. Place them in a clear plastic bag and slowly but firmly roll their entire length with a heavy rolling pin. This feels naughty and is absurdly amusing - I do them one at a time. The clear bag allows the maximum enjoyment. Add the breadcrumbs to the crabmeat

5. Add 30g of the best mayonnaise you can manage. The fresh organic stuff from my local health food shop is gougingly expensive but if I reserve the free dollop from my lunchtime salad I get the last laugh on the Free Market Hippies. Hellman’s will do.

6. Season carefully, beginning with a smear of Dijon mustard then balancing out salt, and black pepper to taste

7. Most US recipes major on Tabasco here – this is because they haven’t heard of ‘Cap Pharon’ harissa – I intend to right this wrong by dropping planeloads of it all over the US when I eventually become insanely rich. At any rate, add a smidgen and taste again.

8. At the back of your kitchen drawer, next to the dusty drizzling bottles you bought after reading about them in Kitchen Confidential, you’ll find two metal rings that you once used to cook embarrassing, tall, nouvelle cuisine food. Swallow your embarrassment and get them out. Use them to mould the crab mixture into as many loosely packed cakes as you fancy and place on a plate in the fridge to set up

9. Fry the crab cakes in clarified butter (either buy ghee or clarify your own by letting it stand in a metal pot near the back of the stove for half an hour or so). Clarified butter can reach miraculous temperatures without burning, enabling you to crisp the frilly edges of the crab cakes in about 2 minutes per side while still imparting the extra-rich flavour of butter.

Serving Suggestion: Eat from the skillet, late at night, alone, with the St Matthew Passion cranked up full and entirely naked – they really are that good.

Posted by Tim at 09:50 PM | Permalink

I think there’s a lot to be said for mid-life crises. We underrate the evanescent flowering where infantile irresponsibility is momentarily overlapped by wealth and experience. That short and heady time when one is finally rich enough to behave like a child.

When mine hit, I managed to avoid running off with my secretary or joining an ashram, which left me with one remaining option, I decided to buy a vintage Porsche. Due to some characteristically appalling diary management, this hormonal surge coincided with moving in with my future wife. The more astute among you will have spotted the omens of doom in this scenario.

We had bought a house – a superb wreck of a Regency villa in ‘London’s fashionable’ King’s Cross – and were shopping for the equipment for the basement kitchen when I spotted the Lacanche. At the time, the fashion for semi-industrial kit was just breaking but, even amongst the phalanx of stainless steel monsters, it stood out. It was the last model before Lacanche became effete and started making stoves in coloured enamel with bathtaps for knobs. If you’d come across it in a backstreet local restaurant in Rome, Paris, New York or San Francisco any time in the last fifty years, it would have looked perfectly appropriate. It was the Ur-oven.

My partner is a phenomenal cook and shares my respect for no-nonsense kit, but even she was a little nervous.

‘It will stick out beyond the units,’ she opined.
‘We’ll have to block off the second door’, she accurately observed.
‘They’ll never get it down the stairs’, she empirically averred.

Rational argument was pointless against the hormonal imperative of man approaching forty like a runaway truck. She could see there was no way of winning and so, in a moment of treacherous cunning for which I can only blame her innate talent and lifelong training as a negotiator, she said…

‘ Well, I guess it’s the Lacanche or the Porsche’.

I bought a bus pass.

They took six weeks to get it over from France and, as predicted, they had to remove the doors of both the stove and the house to get it in. It stood out, as Raymond Chandler put it, ‘like a tarantula on a slice of angel-food cake’. It was as if someone had parallel parked a troop-carrier next to the sink, dropped the keys down the drain and legged it to Rio. It was a great big bastard but a dream to cook on.

The burners, huge, turned brass things that looked like the afterburner on a Victorian Phantom Jet, could be precisely controlled between a Hollandaise caressing warmth and a searing, blast-furnace maximum which diminished the gas supply of everyone else in the street. There were no markings on the dials – if there had been they would have run from zero to eleven. There were two ovens, one electric for dry heat, one gas for moist, in which, in a hasty codicil, I specified I might be cremated.

The central burner was actually too huge for any pot I owned and, as I couldn’t sublet it as a flare-off nozzle for a North Sea gas field, I added an accessory simmering plate. This may sound like a delicate, filigree trivet but was, in fact, a hundredweight cast-iron slab with a polished top. By moving them around its surface I could seamlessly control the heat on up to five pans.

French cooks refer to the range as the ‘piano’ and now I could see why. Its hulking presence challenged me to perform brilliantly every time I approached it - cracking my knuckles, drawing myself up to my full height and rolling my shoulder muscles. It was an instrument, an altar, an operating table and a piece of precision engineering that made the Porsche feel like the pointless phallic substitute it probably was.
Every single day I entered that kitchen my eyes were drawn to the brooding Lacanche and I loved it more and more. Then we decided to move.

I wouldn’t, in all honesty, have guessed that the two effete young men who viewed the place were into big, oily, heavy machines, but, at some point in the negotiation (handled, of course, by my partner), ‘throwing in the cooker’ became a deal breaker.

I pointed out that the only way you could throw the thing anywhere was off the flight deck of the Ark Royal. When humour failed, I resorted to wheedling and, finally weeping, but it was no use. The house was sold, my beloved piano with it, and for all I know, those fey youths are incubating bloody ready meals in it.

So we moved to a beautiful, rented house in Camden Town. Great location, elegant décor, ample rooms, splendid neighbours and a beautiful kitchen; everything is perfect, save the oven.

At some point, after I bought the Lacanche, the designers of kitchen appliances (may they perish in horrible agonies) began to make Yuppie Bait replicas of real ovens. They are made of stainless steel foil, have countless and pointless burners and emit a disheartening, loose, rattling sound when you walk into the kitchen. Ours is one of these. I toyed with the idea of adding a simmering plate but I know the whole thing would collapse under it. It would be like dropping a paving slab on a takeaway tray.

In a calculated act of vandalism the oven control knobs are mounted loosely on their shanks. If the knob has ten degrees of play either side of centre you can be out in the oven setting by up to fifty degrees but, and here lies the inscrutable brilliance...you don't know if it's under or over.

There is also a timer. A programming device which may once, when toasters had stencils of wheat on them and Hostess trolleys roamed free, have had a purpose. There might, for all I know, still be people who would like to come home to a piping hot casserole after a busy day of executive meetings and three-martini-lunches. I have never met one, though. I would not number a casserole eater among my friends. In this new century, however, a timer retains one useful purpose. It looks, to a two year old, like an eye-level, Fisher-Price, button, beep, flasher thingy and is thus, irresistible.

Even if I can somehow fool the oven into reaching the correct temperature I have no way of knowing when my daughter has programmed it to switch off.

Finally, to complete my anguish, every function on the machine has been made just a little bit less powerful than it needs to be. Not quite seared meat, slightly sunk cakes… It’s impossible to fathom. How could the manufacturers profit from such a mean narrowing of pipe gauges and reduction of flows? I’m paying for the bloody fuel. I can only believe that, after years of being forced to churn out brown enamel and smoked glass monstrosities for our parent’s generation, they just hate food and cooks.

If any landlords are out there reading this, hear my plea. Give us astronomical rents, dodgy boilers, bedbugs, out of order lifts and cockroaches the size of Volkswagens. Give us cold and cold running water, shared lavatories and leaking roofs. Rack us, stack us and charge us tuppence a week for the use of the cruet but please, please, if you have a scintilla of humanity in your icy hearts, don’t lumber us with a crap stoves.

Posted by Tim at 09:48 PM | Permalink

A couple of weeks ago I watched an autopsy. As the result of a series of rigorous experiments with Chateauneuf du Pape, I found myself slumped in font of the telly at three in the morning watching a pathologist at work. As he sawed his Y incision, did my mind drift to the ultimate frailty of our human shell, the evanescence of our lives; the miracles of the human biology or even a healthy repulsion? No, I found myself wondering how he could bear to work with such a shite knife. I mean dammit, the man had some top kit, people to look after it and, working from rectal temperature at time of death, it wasn’t even as if the meat had had time to toughen up. I’d have done a better job with a Stanley knife.

I’ve got nice knives. I’m not ashamed to admit that they’re a bit of a fetish. I’ve still got the first Sabatier I inherited, a Henckels I bought when I got my first job in a pro kitchen, a set of Globals I won on a cookery show and the four Japanese knives I use every day - two debas, a yanagiba and an usuba. Before you ask - no, they are not crafted to fit my hand – I am not yet worthy.

Sobered up, the following morning, I was able to take a more rational view on what I’d seen. We work, every day, with tools of incredible precision and capable of wreaking effortless and appalling damage on flesh. Most civilians, if they own a sharp knife, chuck it in a drawer, wash it in the dishwasher and handle it with no more respect than the rolling pin. A mechanic wouldn’t handle his tools that way and you can’t really hurt yourself with a spanner. This is why I have rules about my knives.

I learned the first rule at my grandfather’s workbench long before I ever stood at a stove. Any tool that’s not in your hand should be in its appointed place. If it’s not, it’s an accident waiting to happen.

In an operating theatre, tools are counted in and out of the surgeon’s hands. Any swab or retractor not accounted for at close is still inside the patient. Pit crews mount their tools on a board painted with brightly coloured outlines. If you realise you’ve mislaid a wrench just as Schumacher hits 200 on the Paddock turn, it’s already too late.

My knives live in a block and on two magnetic strips just to the right of the sink. I still check that they’re all in place before plunging my hands into a sink full of soapy washing up. It’s not difficult to rinse each knife and put it away as you finish with it. It protects the knives and, though this is obviously less important, it prevents over helpful guests opening a vein in the washing up.

The second rule comes from workshops, factories, hangers, and pit lanes the world over but, somehow always seems to get forgotten, even in professional kitchens. There is a proper tool for every job. Never use the wrong one.

In years of working in kitchens I’ve only ever seen one accident that stopped me dead in my tracks (remember, I can watch autopsies without missing a sip). One of the cooks, in the weeds, asked a waitress to help him out by separating some frozen fishcakes. She decided to do it with the first thing to hand - a serrated bread-knife. The results of extreme force exerted on a serrated blade, on a finger joint are best left un-imagined.

Today, I’m officially adding a third rule.

Until last week, I had not cut myself in the kitchen for as long as I could remember. Now I’m no longer paid for it, there’s no need to chop at lightning speeds. Lacking the constant practice of exacting daily prep, my knife skills have atrophied to a comfortable and relaxed competence. Consequently on a relaxed and pleasant afternoon, I was completely sanguine about juilienning a bag of carrots.

I like music in the kitchen. I used to keep a little stack of suitably inspiring CDs in the kitchen; you know the sort of thing, Louis Prima singing ‘Angelina’, Dean Martin in ‘jolly Neopolitan’ mode, a bit of Cosi Fan Tutti and perhaps some Handel for the larger beef joints, but now I have an iPod.

I was, as winter sun arced through the kitchen window and the warm smell of fresh bread rose from the oven, experimenting with the ‘shuffle’ function when Noel Coward broke into ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. It is a song I particularly like and one that, such are the delights of the shuffle, I wasn’t expecting. I launched a particularly spirited rendition and, paying too little attention, picked up the wrong knife.

It was only the tip of the thumb and a half moon section of the nail but Christ, it hurt!

Rule three. Know your music when using knives. Well-known compilations, where you’re singing the opening bars of the next track before the last has finished, are absolutely fine but anything involving the word ‘random’ has no place in the kitchen.

I just read an ad for kitchen units with the offer of a free ‘flip-down flat screen and DVD player’. A whole new world of distraction has, suddenly, to be dealt with. OK, ‘Goodfellas’ might work if you’re knocking out pasta and I’m intrigued by the idea of constructing an enormous, phallic crocquembouche while watching ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ but if I ever have to watch a Adam Sandler movie while having anything to do with sharp knives and boiling fat I won’t be responsible for my actions.

Posted by Tim at 09:46 PM | Permalink

Meals are made memorable when they involve moments of great emotion. A first date, an important decision or a pregnancy announced and the menu pretty much burns into the cortex. For me, the earliest and most profoundly etched is associated with a series of moments of abject terror on consecutive Saturdays in the early seventies.

Most people of a certain age recall hiding behind the sofa or burying their face in cushions when the scariest bits of Dr Who came on. For me this was never an option. No matter what horrific trial Davros was about to visit on the Doctor and his fetching assistant, no piece of upholstery could come between my mouth and my plate.

We used to spend Saturday evenings with my maternal grandparents. Mum and Dad never really got round to introducing their parents so Saturday evenings were spent with Ron and Edna and the genteel pleasures of BBC Light Entertainment while Sundays were spent with Dad's parents, a groaningly vast lunch and 'The Football'.

I find it almost automatic to write 'Edna was a great cook' in fact, by modern criteria, she probably wasn't. What she could do, though, was deliver food with such loving warmth that anything seemed brilliant. There was one particular dish, the distracting fascination of which made me the only child in my class able to face the Weirdigans with such preternatural sang froid. It was everything that my ten-year old heart and palate could desire on a single plate.

Corned beef

'Corn', in its old English usage, means ‘grains’ and, in this case refers to large salt grains used in the pickling process. If you order corned beef in the States, you'll still end up with delicious slices of brined and boiled beef, sometimes served cold with sauerkraut, mustard and pickles. What we refer to as Corned beef - the stuff in the odd tapering tins with the fallible key has a strange and noble history.

It was native Americans who introduced the settlers to ‘Pemmican’: salted and air dried meat, beaten in a mortar, mixed with fat and dried fruit and preserved in skins or bladders; it was the only thing that got them through terrible winters or sea voyages. Pemmican was carried to the Antarctic by Scott and on the early Everest expeditions. Later, the invention of canning made corned or 'Bully' beef the staple of the military diet. I'm not sure if Nan knew any of this but, having brought up a family through rationing, she probably knew it as a good value source of meat that didn't require cooking and was reassuringly upmarket from SPAM.

For the ten-year-old gourmet, corned beef had to be served carefully. Like any beef it needed to be served à point. For this reason it was kept refrigerated until the last moment so there was no danger of the fat content becoming jelly-like or runny (the technical term for this was ‘All yucky’). This was such a culinary transgression that corned beef that had been allowed to chambré would have to be recycled in hash as it could never be satisfactorily re-chilled. It also had to be sliced to around five millimetres so each piece maintained dimensional integrity yet still crumbled when invited by the application of the fork.

God! I was an obnoxious child.

Chips with Worcestershire Sauce

What else can be written about the chip? I could bang on about blanching, fat temperatures and the tragic disappearance of beef tallow from our lives but, for Nan, chip manufacture was in the blood. No, I’m not referring to abnormally high levels of circulating serum cholesterol or blood lipids oxidising to arterial plaques. I mean her Mum ran a chip shop.

From a tiny chip pan on the Baby Belling she produced basket after basket of crisp, blonde, hand-cut chips. How she was able to is still the most enduring mystery of cooking. In a domestic kitchen without a proper fryer, the entire process of deep fat frying seems a suicidal endeavour. What kind of irresponsible maniac would willingly heat a gallon of grease to just below flash-point… in a small pan …over a naked flame… inside their house? I’d sooner let my daughter juggle the knives.

I use the less frightening method (attributed to Heston Blumenthal) of cutting inch thick chips, parboiling them almost to collapse then shallow frying the sides. They taste great and look terrific but my cowardice is total. Nan could not only make better chips with her old pot and a bag of Maris Pipers but, to my mind, she did so with the panache and insane courage of a small, wrinkled Red Adair.

I've no idea where the Worcestershire sauce on chips thing came from. I know my Grandfather used to keep it in the house for his 'Prairie Oyster' - two raw eggs in a glass with a shot of Lea & Perrin’s - which he used to down in a single repellent gulp to my fascinated disgust. To drink something like that without alcohol or large side bet seems even now, weird beyond logic.

At least this meant that Worcestershire sauce was always around and, though I dimly recall some infantile experimentation with ketchup and brown sauce, it's been the foil for my chips ever since.

Worcestershire sauce contains hints of soy, nam pla, tamarind, salt and vinegar and hot chillies; a bastard mix of every cuisine we ever colonised and probably, therefore, politically incorrect in ways we’ve yet to discover. It's also umami in a bottle and elevates the chip from a cheap source of guilt to a near religious experience. I feel no compunction whatever in whispering to you like some comic book crack dealer "just try it… you know you want to".

Mushy Peas

“…Two main varieties are cultivated: a starchy, smooth coated one that gives us dried and split peas, and a wrinkly type with a higher sugar content, which is usually eaten immature as a green vegetable.” (McGee on Food and Cooking).

Let me be honest here and admit that I abhor the frozen pea. Pitifully jejune in its unformed state, the frozen pea is a membranous sac containing pea-flavoured juice and perhaps ambition. I’ve never eaten unborn gazelle poached in its mother’s milk so frozen peas are the one remaining food that leave me authentically queasy. Left in the pod and allowed to develop the pea becomes the seed it was supposed to be; its chlorophyll-laden cotyledons a little trust fund of energy for the plant to come. Above all, the character of the legume has changed from effete vegetable to stout starch. The British have always known this. You can’t make ‘pease puddinge’ out of petit pois.

The key word to look out for here is ‘marrowfat’. Marrowfat peas have been allowed to reach maturity and then dry on the vine. They need only to be soaked and boiled to reform into a nutritious, warming porridge. To expedite this process they used to be packed with an enormous horse-pill of bicarbonate of soda, which, Nan swore, served to retain the healthy green colour during the long boiling. In fact, the bicarb just persuaded the peas to yield form, shape or individuality quicker. Several reputable companies also undertook this process, packing the results into cans for the convenience of Nans everywhere.

As small boys are not hot on veg, the Marrowfat pea is a powerful negotiation tool. The green colour and reassuring name mean that, for the purposes of argument with Mum, they can be regarded as veg whereas – and here, I feel, Nan was a covert ally - they’re really a carbohydrate podge. If people had known what Atkins was, this most happily duplicitous of vegetables would have driven them to howling madness.

Of course, I’m a grown up now and I don’t watch Dr. Who, even in an ironic way. The last time I was in a supermarket, I looked for corned beef. Where there had once been yards of Armour, Victoria Cross, Prince’s and Fray Bentos, upright and resolute like a rank of Tommies on the firestep, there was a huge fixture of modern quasi-meats – Baco-bits, soya mince, vegebanger mix and TVP. Right at the bottom, on a shelf where it would embarrass no one; where only someone desperately seeking bargains or bent double with age would find it, was the corned beef. I think it was imported from China and it looked like dogfood.

Nigella Lawson has a terribly witty recipe for mushy peas that involves pulsing petit pois, poached with garlic into a light but intense green coulis. Nan say’s she retired her chip pot years ago. I’d like to think it was an act of protest by an original domestic goddess.

Posted by Tim at 05:22 PM | Permalink

I don’t have a son. If I did, I only have one piece of useful advice to pass on. One single thought that would make his life simpler and happier. If I had a son, I’d take him, as he approached manhood, to a diner or bar and impart this great pearl.

‘Son’, I’d say, a manly tear, misting the fond paternal eye. ‘Always date waitresses’.

The world is full of beautiful, intelligent single women but finding them is a long and pain filled process. Dating waitresses reduces the odds.

Waitresses have been through a rigorous pre-selection which favours the charming and gregarious. They are usually working their way through college or around the world or filling in time before their first book/screenplay/poem/painting sells. They are not so intimidatingly beautiful that they’re doing modelling assignments or being receptionists at ad agencies, but they’re self-sufficient, bursting with confidence and won’t take crap from anyone. They like late nights and strong drink and are unlikely to be screwed up about food. Most importantly, overcoming the most terrifying barrier for the hesitant youth, for the price of a cup of coffee they automatically engage in conversation.

Of course, dating a waitress also means you never have to pay for china.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to my strangely obsessive relationship with my coffee mug. Most people have a favourite mug. Few have four identical ones in case of breakages.

Mine is a US diner coffee mug, off-white with a single green band around the lip. You have seen it countless times, in the strong hand of Joan Crawford in ‘Mildred Pierce’; Lana Turner or Jessica Lange in ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’; Madchen Amick in ‘Twin Peaks’ or Susan Sarandon in ‘White Castle’, ‘Atlantic City’ or ‘Thelma and Louise’. (Sarandon is a bewildering goddess to waitress fanciers ). Her other hand holds a bottomless pot of execrable drip-filter coffee that could probably strip the chrome off a ball hitch in the ageless pose of a hospitality industry Statue of Liberty.

My mug was made by the, now defunct, Buffalo China Inc. of New York, manufacturers of institutional china since 1901. By the time it came into my hands it may have spent years in the San Francisco diner where I worked as a grill cook. Tucked beneath the handlebar moustaches of numberless brunchers, pressed to the lips of thousands truck drivers and endlessly refilled. A million trips through the Hobart, through the giant hands of Reggie the dishwasher yet still as unmarked as the day it was first slammed onto the stainless steel bartop.

What strikes you first is the weight. The sides are incredibly thick and, even in such a hefty, man-sized mug, the actual space for fluids is quite small. It’s designed to work in beautiful symbiosis with the pot. With each topping up the ceramic mass rises in temperature, keeping the coffee warmer longer and encouraging you to linger, thawing your hands around it as the snow piles up outside. You gaze dreamily at the waitress and plan your next volume of Beat poetry.

A Buffalo mug can’t be used for tea it holds too little to be satisfying. In a diner, of course this wouldn’t matter. Tea either comes iced or in kit form - a mug of tepid water, a bag of Lipton’s export-grade tea dust and a sneer. I don’t have a big Cona drip rig on my kitchen counter but I’ve found that my mug is the perfect size for a cappuccino. I know this is a sort of heresy but I find it a perfect match. By preheating the mug with the steam wand I can keep the coffee à point while I make breakfast for my daughter. And as I lace my fingers around its reassuring bulk I can quietly drift into a simpler world wheel where orders spun on the wheel, where the griddle was the fiery heart of a dizzying ballet and where nothing mattered but the food.

My mug and its three replacements were stolen for me by the waitress I later married. In the intervening fifteen years, one of the mugs, after being dropped dozens of times, fell to the pavement from the top of a ladder. The slab was cracked across but the mug just lost a handle and now sits on my desk holding the 12 sharp pencils that Hemingway recommended. That marriage too, after ten years of poor treatment, finally took a terminal knock. I hope I’ve learned to be more careful.

I now have a daughter. I’ve been told that women often seek men who remind them of their Father so perhaps I’ll still be able to use my one great piece of advice. One day I’ll take her to a diner and, with tears in my eyes I’ll say, ‘Travel the world, write a great book, be a waitress and always date the customers’.

Posted by Tim at 05:20 PM | Permalink

There is a disheartening moment at too many dinner parties when some pompous bore solemnly intones ‘I think it was Oscar Wilde who said…’. Nine times out of ten, it wasn’t. Neither, indeed, was it Winston Churchill, the other catchall for any half remembered quote. The sensible diner is well advised to mentally switch off as this useful warning phrase is spoken.

For those who pontificate about food, at either amateur or professional level, there is a similar, usefully vague source – Apicius. He is imagined to be a sage and portly Roman voluptuary, possibly chef to one of the more colourful Caesars, and gets the blame for any culinary myth involving tongues, udders, unlikely birdlife, unspeakable bits of otter or dormice in honey.

It’s time for a little precision.

Apicius was a legendary Roman gourmet of around 100 BC and later became a nickname for anyone who was a bit handy with the pans. The eponymous cookbook is a collection of around five hundred recipes of which 200 are for sauces. It is written in the Latin vernacular to be read by cooks rather than noblemen and, to the chagrin of Apicius quoters, it appears to have had more authors than the bible.

At least three Apicii are mentioned by name in the text. The first (C2nd- C1st BC) is chiefly remembered as an appalling glutton and the third (C2nd AD) for a way of keeping oysters fresh over long journeys (there is no record of how he died but acute ptomaine poisoning looks like a fairly safe bet), but it is the second, Marcus Gavius Apicius (b. 25 AD), who particularly stands out.

According to Athenaeus, he moved to Miturnae because of its unusually large prawns. When he heard that bigger prawns could be found in Libya, he set off by ship to find them but, on meeting Libyan fishermen off the coast he discovered that he’d been misled vis a vis crustacean enormity. He turned round and headed home without bothering to land, reasoning that, unless the food was spectacular, he might as well give the country a miss. Many of us feel the same way about France.

Between gargantuan dinners, he invented a process for fattening sow’s livers with figs to produce a kind of foie gras de porc, which is more than due for revival.

Were this not enough to make Marcus Gavius Apicius an all-time culinary pin-up, we are told that he blew his entire fortune on banquets and, when his accountant told him he was living beyond his means and might have to slow down a little, he killed himself.

Tragically, though each Apicius was fascinating, there is no historical evidence to prove that any of them actually wrote the book that bears their name.

Posted by Tim at 09:53 PM | Permalink

“Turtle soup with ambergris, sole à la normande, reindeer fillet in cream sauce, salmis of veal, roasted young pigeon, watercress salad, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, bone marrow pudding, port; Bordeaux, coffee and coca.” This menu, from a C19th collection, was the highest tech amorous enhancement available to a blissfully previagran world. It’s hard to imagine following a blowout like that with a night of anything other than crippling indigestion and drunken flatulence, but perhaps our ancestors were tougher than we credit them.

According to the French, who spend far too much time theorising about this sort of thing, aphrodisiac qualities are attributed to food for many reasons: physical resemblance to the genitals, a perceived fecundity or sexual prowess in the donor animal, a general heating effect on the blood or intoxication. Were this true, one could infallibly score with a dinner of large, comedy turnips, rabbit curry and a surfeit of alcohol.

I find any and all food to be potentially aphrodisiac in the right circumstances. While still at college my flatmate and I discovered that, with minimal effort we could save ourselves from a diet of takeaway and pot noodle simply by learning to cook. By learning to cook better we guaranteed ourselves a string of grateful dates. It doesn’t take much. Successful results from student Bolognese rather knock holes in the argument for oysters and champagne.

The secret seems to be in the way that food becomes a measure of effort and, by extrapolation, caring. Blokes aren’t usually good at expressing affection or cooking. By getting the sauce right and the pasta al dente, a fellow can usually generate enough happy confusion to ensure the desired result

Posted by Tim at 08:43 PM | Permalink

Maybe it’s an English thing, maybe it’s a guy thing but the meal that really seems to stir the emotions more than any other is breakfast. Sure, an intimate diner a deux, a three star gourmet blowout, fast food or even, God help us, barbecue have their place but there’s nothing like breakfast.

There can only be one explanation. Breakfast involves the application of fantastic comfort foods at the times when we are emotionally least able to resist.

We wake up as children, rub sleep from our eyes and are carried down to the kitchen still glowing and smelling like fresh baked Victoria sponge in our warm jammies. With nothing on our little minds except last night’s dreams, we’re fed boiled eggywegs and soldiers by strong and loving parents. Who could resist?

We grow up and, if all goes well, each morning we will awake, weakened by post coital glow or a roaring hangover – often both. In this condition, a lover or a kind friend slips us anything from eggs Benedict to warm croissants and again the bond is strengthened.

In maturity our relationships are burdened with complication and there’s rarely time to appreciate each other yet, fresh from sleep and with yesterday’s petty frictions forgotten a well timed full English can feel like the glue that repairs us.

Now, and best of all, there are mornings when my daughter and I get up together. With Mum asleep upstairs, she’s permitted the illicit luxury of sitting on top of the big prep table while I make her boiled eggs and serve her the froth from my cappuccino in an espresso cup.

“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons”. But I can’t forget the egg cups, toast racks, marmalade drips, butter stains, Rice Krispies and bacon rolls.

Posted by Tim at 07:44 PM | Permalink

When did it become the defining characteristic of a culinary genius that he must be a foul-mouthed yahoo with psychopathic tendencies and a hair-trigger?

PRs and newspapers dwell with lascivious indecency on stories of Marco Pierre White slicing off a cook’s whites with a knife and whipping him with wet tea towels. Jamie Oliver only shed the taint of a pier-end comedian when he was heard cursing illiterate trainees and Gordon Ramsay has built a lucrative TV career on scripted insults, brooding malevolence that would look poorly acted on Eastenders and an almost certainly fictional working-class Scottish upbringing.

The first Chef I worked for was an entirely amiable Swiss called Jacques who lived with his family over the restaurant. He used to invite me into his office to share desserts he’d invented and share his worries about his daughter becoming ‘Born Again’. After service and half-way down the second bottle he’d suggest that I went upstairs and ravished her as a general prophylactic against a deeper relationship with her Lord and Saviour. Aside from this one Lutheran aberration he was a quiet, kindly and deeply creative man who rarely raised his voice above a whisper.

Next, I worked for a little fat Frenchman called Giles who regularly wept when he had to drown the rats he caught in gluetraps. Later it was a barrel-shaped Jewish New Yorker called Howard who used to send his Mother her dinner from the kitchen every night then take a ten minute call at the height of service wherein she’d enumerate his failings.

All the cooks I’ve worked for, in fact, have been charming, polite, good people who loved food and wanted to teach. If you want a real bastard of a boss, I’ve discovered, look to public relations people, advertising men and TV presenters.

I thought, maybe, I just hadn’t worked for the real top dogs. Then I read this…

“Remembering the indignities and brutalities suffered in his youth, he forbade drinking on the job, swearing, shouting, and any vulgarity. If a cook erupted into a fit of temper, he was quietly admonished…”Here you are expected to be polite. Any other behaviour is contrary to our practice.” In the face of unpardonable breach of such decorum, he habitually pinched his left ear and announced in a soft voice, “I am going out. I can feel myself getting angry.”

Maybe simple courtesy doesn’t make good TV. From the quote, it seems Escoffier didn’t have to worry about such things.

Posted by Tim at 06:47 PM | Permalink

We love to get all misty eyed and lyrical about the food we adored as children but few of us care to remember the things we really hated.

Any adult who’s ever tried to feed something to an unwilling child will know that the disgust reaction is profoundly physical and all but impossible to overcome. If a kid doesn’t like spinach, no amount of intimidation, cajoling or bribery will make him eat it.

When was the last time, though, an adult refused something you’d cooked them? Clearly, we lose some of that visceral disgust as we mature. Except for dieters, vegetarians and those with psychosomatic food ‘allergies’ who, I hope, you have no need to dine with, grown-ups are properly omnivorous or at least polite.

But surely those infantile revulsions were every bit as formative of our adult tastes as the things we loved.

A brief and unscientific survey of childhood food phobias reveals some interesting facts. There was a surprising gender split amongst respondents with women remembering things in vivid descriptions of revolting tastes and smells and men seeming much more moved by texture. It also appeared that the things we really hated were most often the sort of nonsense that no adult would ever serve to another.

This correlates with my own particular loathings. Packet vegetable soup that seemed indistinguishable from vomit, containing imperfectly reconstituted cubes of dried and nameless vegetation, now sticks in my memory as intractably as it once stuck in my gullet. Worse, if possible, was a concoction by our school dinner ladies - a ‘Russian Salad’ comprising inadequately drained tinned diced veg with the terrifying addition of a lumpy, floury white sauce. This was called ‘Macedoine’.

It was Kilgour, a classicist and limp-locked Ganymede of the upper sixth who remarked that, if the Macedonians really ate like this, it was little wonder that Alexander the Great laid waste to Asia Minor.

Aaah, the heady days of youth. I believe he’s a mobile phone salesman now.

Posted by Tim at 05:52 PM | Permalink

An egg is culinary perfection. The protein content of a small chicken in a natural packaging. A perfect emulsifying agent in mayonnaises, a thickener in custards and sauces. Redolent, when flanked by soldiers, of the nursery yet capable of the sophistication of soufflé or omelette Arnold Bennet.

Perhaps it is because the egg is so perfect, particularly at breakfast, that cocking it up makes me so angry. People who claim they ‘can’t boil an egg’ frustrate me, people who overcook scrambled eggs make me very ill-tempered but anyone who screws up eggs Benedict can set me into a fulminating, incoherent rage.

Why is it that every restaurant, diner, gastropub or hotel feels the need to mess about with eggs B? It is very simple.

An egg is lightly poached. Its yolk must remain runny. No, it’s not going to give me salmonella. It’s not the rawness of the yolk that’s the problem anyway, it’s the fact that you’re buying cheap eggs from mutant chickens and your kitchen is grubbier than Scutari hospital during an orderlies’ strike. Just poach the bloody egg and I promise not to sue your crummy restaurant.

Take some bacon and fry it. Not ham, be it Parma, Westphalian, country or merely a wet slab of reconstituted pig parts. Just bacon. Neither, indeed, smoked salmon, spinach, haddock or Christ help me, cheese. (Repeat after me…Arse – Elbow… Shit – Shinola… Benedict – McMuffin).

Place on a toasted English muffin. Not a ‘round of brioche’, not a scone, not a ‘Country Biscuit, not a disc of granary toast because it’s first thing in the morning and the commis is still in bed and you haven’t broken open the bakery order yet. You said you could do it - it’s on the bloody menu. Just do it and stop mucking about.

Finally top with Hollandaise. The easiest sauce in the book. Your most knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, haliotosis-ridden, lips-move-when-he-reads KP could knock it out in the gaps between emptying the swill bins and you can keep it on the steam table for a week. I don’t care. Just don’t ‘scent it with orange’, strew it with chervil or let it get a skin before it hits the table.

See. That wasn’t difficult at all. Was it?

Posted by Tim at 03:56 PM | Permalink

I think fast food has had bad press.

I’m not talking about the stuff in McDonalds and Burger King – anyone who’s ever waited to be served in any of those places will know it’s anything but fast – no, I mean the stuff that‘s cooked by a human; a ‘short-order’ cook.

Done right, diner food is cooked, from decent ingredients, right in front of your eyes. You don’t find that in many places that don’t feature Japanese guys with huge knives and tanks of raw fish.

Short-order cooking involves recipes evolved by the preferences of millions of real people. In no other kind of cooking is the customer allowed to make dozens of decisions about their meal and then have it cooked and served in minutes while they watch.

And nowhere else is the audience so tough. A particularly raw form of consumer feedback affects your work when you stare across a hot grill into the eyes of a 250lb truck driver who’s appraising the omelette you just flipped.

The problem with chain burger bars is not the fat and hormone laden meat-pulp they serve to morons – people get what they deserve – it’s that, by making the cooking process idiot proof, they rob us of a generation of skilled short-order cooks.

The tired, overweight, fifty year old professional with fat burns up his forearms, who can keep 20 orders in his head and still manage a smile for the customers on a comedy wage and unlimited crap coffee has been supplanted by a pustular adolescent with an electronic timer and we are the poorer for it.

Posted by Tim at 02:57 PM | Permalink

Apparently, archaeologists can measure time with ‘The Vole Clock’. No matter what stage of evolutionary history there is always a vole, they often survive as fossils and, because their teeth evolve quickly to accommodate changes in diet, they are a unique belweather of the age.

The garnish is a culinary equivalent. My first kitchen job was ‘doing the garni’s’. Laying out lines of limp lettuce leaves on big trays and topping each one with a slice of cucumber and a wedge of tomato.

As this was a Bournemouth hotel in the seventies, there was also a smaller number where the tomato was replaced with lemon for fish and a half dozen topped with a pineapple ring for the gammon.

I never knew what the garnishes were actually for. Nobody ate them, I’m sure that was considered dreadfully non-U. The staff often whispered that, in cheaper hotels, the dishwasher rescued them and dusted them off for re-use.

The floor staff were supposed to have some obscure code that reminded them how the steak was done by the placement of the garnish but, as they all went out well-done anyway, it can’t have made any difference. Since then I’ve watched the garnishes with the avidity of a twitcher.

Somehow we evolved. Sprigs of fresh herbs came next; dill for the fish, parsley for the meat then came the eighties. Physallis, or slices of starfruit lay limp in the drizzled coulis while a bloke in braces made improper advances to a girl in pearls and a Lady Di hairdo.

There was a brief flash of fried sage leaf and then we were galloping into a new decade of knotted chives and whittled ginger roots.

For months now I’ve been watching and waiting. What would be the cliché de garniture de nos jour? What would emerge as the trite and meretricious gilding of nouveau gastropub, post sleb chef, reinvigorated and confident ‘Modern British’?

And now we have an answer - roasted cherry tomatoes on the vine. Marvellous stuff. Roughly torn from the plant, tossed carelessly in the oven, organic yet ‘pukka’. Easy to cook, requiring no thought and utterly, utterly pointless

Posted by Tim at 01:58 PM | Permalink

I suppose I only have myself to blame. I chose to live in Camden so my local grocery is a healthfood shop. It opens later than everyone else so I occasionally find myself in there looking for a pint of milk (Organic, additive free, four times as expensive as regular).

Last week I found a packet of ‘Ancient Grains’ breakfast cereal made with ‘Quinoa, spelt and Kamut®’. Which Neolithic tribe registered Kamut as a trademark, one has to ask?

The week before it was ‘Nomato Soup’, entirely organic and guaranteed free from any member of the nightshade family. I watch that shelf carefully now, waiting for appless pie or dehydrated water.

This morningI saw a worried North London Mother rifling distractedly through the gluten-free children’s snacks while her three year old was diligently licking each bread roll in the nearby basket. Poor little bastard, he looked hollow-eyed and desperate like a hothoused Oliver Twist – Please, Sir. Could I have a big doughy jam sandwich?

Parents like that should swap kids for a week with someone on a sink estate in Newcastle. Little Wayne would get his first bit of roughage and Tarquin could be rescued from the brink of starvation with a bag of chips and Vimto through a teat.

It’s become so entertaining that I’ve actually stopped going to the cinema and instead return home from each visit for an hour of incredulous gaping wonder.

They also have the nicest staff anywhere. Happy, blissed out yoga-people with piercings, tattoos and seraphic smiles…

Which usually makes me want to rush out and eat meat.

Posted by Tim at 12:01 PM | Permalink

It’s an oft-repeated culinary truism that the food you eat in Indian restaurants bears no resemblance to the food of the subcontinent. I’m sure this is entirely true. I’m sure that the fish cuisine of Kerala has to tasted (preferably in situ) to be believed and that the spice mixes of the North have an intoxicating and evanescent finesse that disperses like incense smoke when exported.

The problem is that ‘Indian’ has changed so far and so fast that it’s achieved critical mass. It’s a thing alone, like tinned peaches and baked beans - delicious in its own right. Whether you trace it to the Raj, Lascar seamen in London Docks or the first waves of mass immigration, a fork was formed in the evolutionary tree of Indian cooking and the product of our curry houses is a result.

Uniquely tailored to British taste, brilliantly developed by a fertile and entrepreneurial industry, the Ruby Murray is now demonstrably more British than boiled beef and carrots and we’re all the better for it.

Bores who’ve had fish grilled by the locals on a gap year in Goa or who nibbled lightly at spiced petit fours in the Lake Palaces should be conspicuously ignored as the showoffs they are. It matters not if the chicken is battery. No one cares if the menu has 85 options but we only ever order three of them. No-one gives a toss if the sauces are all created in giant vats on an industrial park just outside Birmingham. A properly policed curry blowout with a bunch of mates in a Brick Lane curry house, ticks all the boxes of sensual pleasure, sharing, bonding and congenial hospitality.

When was the last time you got all that at a dinner party?

Posted by Tim at 11:02 AM | Permalink