Hi again,

The introductory excuse-for-being-late is fast becoming the most creative bit of this newsletter. This time I've been away getting married and having a honeymoon (of which, more later).

Now I'm back in harness I promise to be more punctual.

As always, please feel free to forward this email to friends and encourage them to subscribe at the website .

Enjoy...

Hospitality

A Culinary Alphabet:

H - Health Food

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.

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 which 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.

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.

 

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