Greetings and apologies for being slack of late,

I'm planning and building a new kitchen at the moment. This should be a complete delight but instead is proving a minefield of arcane planning regulation and even more Byzantine aesthetic wranglings with my partner.

As soon as it all feels slightly less emotionally raw, I'll do a column on it.

This week, as the weather has finally cracked into what passes as British summer, every food columnist is trotting out a tired old screed on al fresco eating - why should I be any different?

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

Enjoy...

Barbies for Boys

A Culinary Alphabet:

G - Garnish

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

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.

 

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