Hi again,

The sun is shining and it's a beautiful day. I've been so rude about various bits of kitchen kit during the dark months of winter that I thought I should lighten up a bit and write about something I really like.

Don't worry, I'm not going to make a habit of this.

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

Enjoy...

La mia Pavoni bella

A Culinary Alphabet:

J - Japanese

Right from the start I should say that everything I've tried of Japanese food has been phenomenal. I loved Nobu Matsuhisa's little lunch counter in West Hollywood, I like conveyor-belt sushi, I love the karaoke izakayas in the West end, I like sashimi, I even like seaweed.

My problem is authenticity. People say that Nobu is Japanese/South American fusion for rich Westerners. People say that conveyor belt sushi is so awful that only Westerners would eat it. People say the izakayas are tourist traps.

We don't even have a friendly celebrity to demystify things. Theres no Japanese equivalent to Madhur Jafffrey or Antonio Carluccio encouraging us with jolly stories of their childhood recipes.

Instead we have a bunch of rather snotty Western foodwriters who, on the strength of a single press trip to Japan have become food Ninjas.

"Yes, it's the finest cuisine in the World and no, you can't have any because evrything that calls itself Japanese outside of Tokyo is really rubbish".

Well I'm bored of it.

Call it fusion, call it fake, I like 'Japanese' food and I don't care if the whole thing really is an enormous joke played on the gullible Gaijin.

In fact it must be... what else could explain tofu?

In most civilised cultures sleep deprivation is regarded as torture; for parents of a three year old it just part of life. Normal people have morning routines; tea, toast, the paper, a favourite cereal but for us there's the random factor - the unfathomable agenda of a wilful, three foot psychopath. While you civilians are coming round, considering the breakfast options, yawning and stretching in languorous ease, I'll be diving through a shower and hoping she won't wake up 'til I'm dry, pretending to be a lion, or reading 'The Smartest Giant In Town' on autopilot for the four millionth time.

But I still have one small secret, one ritual moment that puts my morning on track even when I've been up since four and I have Rice Krispies in my hair. It's the sound, the calming Zen click of the Bakelite switch on my Pavoni Europiccola coffee machine.

Hypnotists, life coaches, yoga teachers and black-hat NLP masters tell us that a sound or other sensation can become 'attached' to a series of feelings - programmed if you will. I obviously can't agree with an assertion from any such fraudulent quacks. Yet that simple sound has a huge effect. It's evidence that I've set in train the series of events that will lead to assured gratification. My wheels slot into the grooves and nothing the day can throw will better me.

I love my Pavoni. I love it more than any man sensibly should. If I could afford to, I'd set it up with a flat in Mayfair, lavish it with gifts and visit it once a week. I've leered sneakily at the fecund curves of the Francis Francis and even toyed with the idea of plumbing in a semi-pro, pump-pressurised Gaggia but I always come back to the Pavoni.

The Europiccola is elemental. It's utterly functional and, even to the mechanically naïve, each part has a clear function. The boiler is a tank. A pipe connects it to the head. The receiver can only fit one way with an arousingly positive twist of the wrist. The pressure is applied with a lever and there's a tap for the steam.

It's like the first diagram of the theory of espresso turned in brass and chrome plated.

The design of the Francis Francis might win awards today but the Pavoni looks like it got a medal from Mussolini. The tank has the fascist lines of a 30mm shell. The wheels and valves could fit one of those trains that always ran on time and the lever requires the brawny forearm of a stormtrooper. Marinetti, the futurist poet would have loved the Pavoni: there's a Francis Francis on the kitchen counter in 'Will and Grace'. I rest my case.

As far as I know, the Pavoni is the only machine that uses manual pressure to express the coffee. Hauling down on the arm takes physical effort and reminds you constantly that one day a bolt will shear, a thread will strip, a seam will fail and the whole thing will blow up in your face in a spray of shrapnel and steam. I embrace the fear. When she finally blows I'll affect an eyepatch like the man in the Hathaway shirt and wear my scars with fond pride.

The awful truth, of course, is that for the first couple of years of its life, a Pavoni doesn't even make very good coffee. By the time you've got the blend, roast and grind right, the quantity of coffee and the tamp pressure you realise that the pressure in the cylinder varies by how full it is and that constant force on the arm is impossible to repeat. You have to be prepared to throw out a lot of coffee.

A couple of months ago I found a nearly new Pavoni in a skip. It was almost exactly six months old. That's the point at which any normal mortal finally gives up trying with the damn thing and buys an automatic. Most people hide it in a cupboard and use it as a a sort of Yuppie <em>memento mori</em> - a salutary reminder of the time when romantic notions of misty post-coital breakfast outweighed the practicalities of really needing a decent cup of coffee. Vain people leave them on the counter for the cleaner to polish and nip into Starbuck on the way to the office. This person obviously had either the guts or the sheer rage to throw it out.

It's a pity. That kind of single-mindedness is exactly what you need to master the Pavoni. If only he'd had the stamina for another six months.

An automatic pump machine could make the process so much easier. No shards of red-hot brass or clouds of scalding steam. No worrying about a million arcane variables of grinding, no hauling on a lever to express one thin dribble of undrinkably bitter oil, just  excellent coffee from day one, instant highly-frothed milk, and a quiet life.

But that's not for me. I need more. I need something cantankerous, unpredictable. Something that delights and disappoints with equal heartbreaking facility, something that I can learn to live with that can learn to live with me. Something that gives back as much as I put in - sometimes.

Come to think of it, why else would I have a daughter?

 

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