I’m moving house.
I've spent the last month dealing with estate agents, lawyers, builders, surveyors and local government functionaries. I haven’t been out for a meal or had time to cook and have probably eaten more packaged crap in a couple of weeks than in any six months of my life.
Under these circumstances, I find it impossible to write lyrically about the loveliness of food so, dear reader, I hope you’ll indulge me as I give vent to a short list of culinary hates.
As always, please feel free to forward this email to friends and encourage them to subscribe at the website .
Enjoy...
Things That Enrage Me
A Culinary Alphabet:
F - Fast Food
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.
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.
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