one crumb at a time

Month in Review - January 2012

2012-01-31T16:31:00.001+11:00

It hardly seems possible that the first month of the year is over - and with precious little to show for it. When not hacking away at the garden with a machete (so much rain, so much greenery, so little of anything else - tomatoes taking weeks to even turn pink and then being picked off by the possums, eggplants staunchly refusing to do anything much more than look attractive, and who knew that possums also have a liking for broccoli?) I have had my head buried in old recipe books by the likes of Harriet Wicken and Amy Schauer. Never much of a cake maker I am more than happy not to have had to follow recipes which call for the amount of baking powder you can fit on to a sixpence and give no information at all about tin sizes but do suggest you beat the mixture for 20 minutes! Even my poor old Sunbeam Mixmaster would draw the line at beating for 20 minutes. Authors like Wicken were big on advice and short on the sort of precision to which we have become accustomed. I hope I never need to remember this but you might like to know that you can check the oven temperature by placing a piece of paper in the hot oven for three minutes and then investigating what colour it has turned - if dark yellow the oven is hot enough for large cakes, light yellow and you are ready for small cakes.

Australia Day always generates some press about our lack of a national cuisine. Coles supermarkets took on the challenge this year and rose to the opportunity to, and I quote from The Sydney Morning Herald, 'turn our jingoism into the jingling of coins in the till'. Among other things they managed to persuade Masterfoods to package tomato sauce in blue plastic bottles (instead of the usual red) and talk Arnott's into producing Australia-shaped biscuits (but not, of course, Tasmania shaped biscuits).
For a glimpse of what a visiting American foodie had to say about Australia Day see here. And for a laugh from Sam Kekovich if you haven't already you should have a look at his "Barbie Girl" video with lines like 'be my mate while the chops marinate' and 'marination leads to salivation' and his rant as Lambassador where he complains that a 'lack of lamb has led to a littany of lamentable behaviour'. Both videos are here at his official web site and the 'Barbie Girl' is also here.

Ever since seeing 'Jesus Almagro and the Golden Bocuse' (which you can read about here) I have had a fascination with the Bocuse d'Or competition (I wrote about it again here too) so I was pleased to see that the Americans are back in the race for the event next year. You can read about the USA finals here. The Australian bid, if there is one, doesn't seem to get anything like the same amount of attention, which is perhaps not altogether a bad thing.

Month in Review - December 2011

2011-12-31T16:42:00.002+11:00

First up this month a Christmas Quiz (in time for next year perhaps) from the Guardian here and the answers here.

In the latest issue of Gastronomica (Volume 11, number 4) there is an article about Dione Lucas by Jean Schinto ('Remembering Dione Lucas', pp. 34-45). Dione Lucas may be a forgotten name these days but in the 1950's she was appearing on American television - well before the likes of Julia Child. She had trained under Henri-Paul Pellaprat at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in Paris and she set up the Ecole du Petit Cordon Bleu school and restaurant in London with Rosemary Hume in the early 1930s. In 1940 she sailed to America and from then on made her career there. She opened her own Cordon Bleu Restaurant and Cooking School in New York in 1942 and first appeared on television in 1947, demonstrating French cuisine to American audiences when Julia Child was still learning to chop onions (Schinto, p. 34). By all accounts a complicated and rather difficult personalty Mrs Lucas regarded cooking as a serious business and as Schinto puts it 'her personality was at odds with the whole idea of mass appeal'.
What Schinto doesn't mention in her article is that Mrs Lucas made at least three trips to Australia, in 1956, 1958 and 1960 which included demonstrations in department stores and television appearances. The tours were sponsored by the Australian Women's Weekly and promoted through the publication of special supplements of her recipes. In addition the magazine ran a series of her recipes in 1957 and again in 1966.
In her photograph on the cover of Book for Cooks, the recipe supplement which complemented her visit in 1956, Dione Lucas appears stern and competent, with her apron tied firmly around her waist in her 1950's kitchen with peg board behind the stove on which to hang the copper saucepans. She is referred to as 'America's blue-ribbon chef' (Australians were not yet ready for cordon bleu?) who has come to 'demonstrate to women how to make artistic creations from ordinary kitchen ingredients'.

When Dione Lucas tells her Australian audience how to cook she will be doing what she does five days a week in front of the TV cameras for her audiences in America. There she creates in half an hour complicated, mouth-watering delicacies that would take an ordinary cook at least twice as long to prepare.

Mrs Lucas's philosophy makes for interesting reading. Although a capable and independent woman herself (she was a divorced mother of two boys) she was no feminist but as her son says of her 'an artist in cookery' (Schinto, p.39)

I believe housewives these days spend far too little time in the kitchen planning and preparing meals. They depend too much on quickly prepared meals, so losing two of cookery's most worthwhile ingredients - glamor and artistry in food.

Cooking, to my mind, is as much art as painting, dancing, or composing poetry, and cooking a masterpiece for the table can be a creative outlet for the modern housewife. (Book for Cooks)

She saw no need to 'spend vast sums of money to produce the most artistic and tasty meals', advocating the use of the cheapest cuts of meat along with heart, brains, liver, kidneys and 'the most maligned of all meats' tripe. For Mrs Lucas economy was achieved 'by substituting skill and careful preparation for expensive ingredients'. She emphasised planning so that meals could be 'integrated', simple menus ('concentrate on making masterpieces of each of a few dishes'), doing your own shopping 'rather than ordering by telephone' and using 'spices, herbs, butter and wine' to bring out the best in your ingredients.
Most importantly she believed 'there are no short cuts to real cookery success.

As with every other art, it takes time and practice to acquire and learn the many techniques needed by a creative cook.
I have three rules for mastering the art of cooking. First, learn to cook by making mistakes; second, learn to save the food you spoil; and third, remember not to repeat your mistakes. (Book for Cooks)

On her 1956 tour she demonstrated numerous different menus which included exotica like Coronets de Jambon Lucullus. This recipe required the hapless housewife to prepare a foie gras mousse which she then piped into ham cornucopias (made by lining cream horn tins with slices of ham). Each cornucopia was topped with a thin slice of truffle and sealed with aspic jelly (which said housewife had prepared earlier) and served on a bed of rice salad. She also demonstrated delicacies such as cabbage strudel (including making the strudel pastry), Vacherin aux Peches, piroshkis, Mousse de Saumon Judic (salmon mousse made with tinned salmon and served with sauce Bercy and braised lettuce), Lobster Thermidor, Charlotte Malakoff, Beef Tenderloin en chemise Strasbourgeoise and prunes stuffed with sauteed chicken liver and wrapped in bacon which were baked in the oven until the bacon was crisp then speared with a toothpick and attractively presented atop a head of cabbage. All rather a far cry from making the best of inexpensive ingredients.
But then as now there was more to cooking than just technique and practice. According to the recipe supplement to emulate Dione Lucas the modern cook also needed a Sunbeam frypan and mixmaster, a Kelvinator refrigerator, a Metters oven and a Namco pressure cooker as well as Nestle milk products, Champion's malt vinegar, Mayfair ham, Aunt Mary's baking powder, Davis gelatine, Meadow- Lea table margarine and Wade's cornflour.

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is by Anissa Helou (you can read about her background here). She has written a number of books including Lebanese Food and The Fifth Quarter (about offal, which I think has recently been re-published) and my current favourite Mediterranean Street Food. Two of her recent posts about yufka pastry (here and here) were particularly interesting. All her work is well researched and she takes great photographs.

Two other books this month. First Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Sicily (my review is at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf here.) I had thought that Mary Taylor Simeti had the last word on Sicilian food but I enjoyed Locatelli's book where the recipes are a bit more accessible for those who want to avoid some of the historical background.
The other read (which I haven't started on yet) is by Richard Wilk, Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, entitled Home Cooking in the Global Village. Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Despite a cover which doesn't seem to do the content justice - a pirate with an eye-patch and a parrot on his shoulder holding a platter of food from 'Blackbeard's Burgers' - this is a book about globalization. More specifically it is about Belize and how globalization has been influencing patterns of food consumption there for over three hundred years. None other than Sidney Mintz (he of Sweetness and Power) says

'Wilk's narrative food history of a timberland backwater reborn as a tourist mecca redefines the term 'colonial'. It makes a solid theoretical contribution to clarifying the real meanings of terms like 'fusion' and 'blending', when applied to food in the modern world. A thoughtful and stimulating essay on the present, pitched entertainingly against a tatterdemalion and ragged colonial past.'

Sounds irresistible doesn't it? I am pleased to say Wilk himself doesn't go in for words of any more than about four syllables.

And another historical/anthropological read which might be of interest - Rachel Lauden on servants and how the survival of 'traditional' laborious cuisines depends on having someone prepared to do the work - here - with links to some other interesting articles.

Looking for Lamingtons and Chasing Čupavci

2011-12-12T17:10:00.000+11:00

In an earlier post (here) I raised the issue of the provenance of the Australian lamington having discovered, in Croatia, the exact same cakes calling themselves čupavci. (When I made my notes on a scrap of paper in a cake shop in Split I wrote down čupavac which Google has persuaded me is the wrong spelling. Čupavci is obviously the plural -we would translate this as lamingtons - but I don't know whether the singular lamington is the čupavc or the čupavca, such is my knowledge of Croatian.)
From the little research I have been able to do, thanks to the internet, the general consensus seems to be that čupavci are a traditional cake/dessert in Croatia with no hint of how far back that tradition might go. Since coconut seems to be the defining feature of both lamingtons and čupavci the answer would seem to hinge on the availability of dessicated coconut. The process for drying coconut was developed by a gentleman by the name of Henry Vavasseur whose company began producing commercial quantities of dessicated coconut in Ceylon (as it was then) and shipping it to Europe in the 1890s. This would suggest that both lamingtons and čupavci could have been 'invented' at around the same time and certainly no earlier than 1890. Advertisements for desiccated coconut imported from London began appearing in Australian newspapers in 1895.*
Lord Lamington was governor of Queensland from 1896 until 1901. According to Dr. Katie McConnel, curator of Old Government House in Brisbane, Lady Lamington mentions the cake named after him (or her) in her memoirs and credits their French chef, Armand Galland, with its creation. ** Galland stayed in Brisbane after the departure of the Lamingtons, where he established a wine business. I couldn't find an obituary for Armand (who died in 1923) but that of his wife, Cladie, who died in1934, confirmed that she was born in France, not Tahiti as I quoted previously, and that the couple came to Australia in 1897 ( The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 23 June 1934). Armand was not employed at Government House until some time after that, perhaps as late as 1900. In none of the early newspaper references I could find is the creation of the lamington attributed to Armand Galland, or indeed to anyone else.
In The Brisbane Courier 19 July 1901, Galland is advertising himself as 'open for engagement to do Luncheon, Afternoon Tea or Dinner Parties in private houses' but he does not promote his association with sponge cake dipped in chocolate. Nor would it appear that the lamington was instantaneously well known.
In the 'Mutual Help' column of The Queenslander (Brisbane), 14 December 1901, the editor responds to a reader's query with 'Have not heard of a 'lamington cake'. Can you give some clue to the appearance and ingredients of the cake?' So it seems that by the end of 1901 the lamington was known outside the confines of Government House but only to a select few. Perhaps the few who had sampled afternoon tea as prepared by M. Galland.
Subsequently (4 January 1902) The Queenslander publishes a lamington cake recipe, the first to appear in a newspaper, submitted by 'a subscriber'. Although called lamington cake rather than lamingtons this first recipe was for small cubes of cake exactly as we know lamingtons today. Now would have been the perfect moment for Galland to claim ownership of the recipe but he did not do so.
On 26 November 1904 The Queenslander again publishes a lamington recipe this time provided by Miss Schauer of the Brisbane Technical College. Amy Schauer trained at the Sydney Technical College and was appointed to the Brisbane Technical College in 1895 where she taught until 1937. Miss Schauer and M. Galland were at least acquainted - Galland was an examiner of chefs at the Technical College in 1902 - but she does not attempt to credit Galland or acknowledge his claim to the recipe for lamington cake. It has been suggested that the lamington may have been invented by Miss Schauer but she makes no such claim at the time her recipe is first published or throughout her long life (she died in 1956). Perhaps neither M. Galland or Miss Schauer thought that the invention of the lamington was anything special or indeed anything to be proud of. Nonetheless lamington cakes quickly became established in cookery competitions at local fairs and horticultural shows and recipes appeared regularly in newspapers and began to be published in cookery books in all states.
Very recently David Lebovitz wrote about lamingtons on his blog and garnered a tremendous response from his audience. There was no mention of čupavci but two responses linked lamingtons to Hungary and other responses confirmed a link with Eastern Europe through the popularity of 'coconut bars' in of all places, Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland boasts a sizable population with Eastern European ancestry. In particular large numbers of Hungarian immigrants came to Cleveland between 1870 and the beginning of World War One and it is claimed that at one time Cleveland had the highest Hungarian population of any city outside Budapest (see here).
'Coconut bars', called kókusz kocka (coconut cubes) in Hungarian, described as 'smallish, stout oblong cakes entirely covered by a thin icing of chocolate and shredded coconut' are a speciality of Jewish bakeries in Cleveland and almost unknown elsewhere in the US (see here and here). It would appear undeniable that 'coconut bars' were brought to Cleveland by immigrants from Europe. If my original assumption is correct, that is that lamingtons, čupavci, and coconut bars all date from around 1900, when desiccated coconut became readily available, the question then becomes why Australia, or more specifically Brisbane, and Hungary? Which came first, the lamington or the kókusz kocka, or is it possible that identical cakes were produced at roughly the same time in both Hungary and Queensland?

* All the information I have managed to glean from newspapers is thanks to the wonderful National Library of Australia Trove database.
** The Age, Melbourne, 6 June 2009

Month in Review - November 2011

2011-12-01T18:38:00.001+11:00

On two separate occasions this month I had much the same discussion with friends about how we were all scrambling to keep up to date with the latest information on the things that interested us - food, books, films, food events - and how, even with the best intentions, we struggled to share what information we did have. So from now on the Month in Review won't be a digest of the fascinating things I have done during the month, riveting reading though that may be. Instead I thought I could use the blog as a means of spreading the word. This first effort only includes journals, articles and books which I have come across lately which I think might be of interest. In future I hope to get contributions from friends so that I can include up-coming events and reading which covers a broader spectrum.
However, given that we have to start somewhere, here is the Month in Review for November 2011.

The Australian Humanities Review is an on-line journal published quarterly by ANU which 'provides a forum for open intellectual debate across humanities disciplines, about all aspects of social, cultural and political life, primarily ... with reference to Australia'. The November 2011 issue is entitled 'On the Table: Food in Our Culture' and can be accessed here. I haven't worked my way through all of it but there are articles by Colin Bannerman, Barbara Santich and Adrian Pearce which are worth a look.

Locale The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies (here) was launched this month. The first issue covers a broad range and includes among others an article by Jacqui Newling on tea in the early days of the Sydney penal settlement, one from Helen Leach (the New Zealand pavlova queen) on regional dishes and one entitled 'Unearthing Paradox: Organic Food and its Tensions'.

For the anthropologists, I have only just discovered a new book by Carole M. Counihan, A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2009) which the reviewer in Gastronomica described as a 'beautiful feminist ethnography'.

My friends know of my on-going interest in the effect of technology on our food lives, which is why I recommend reading this article from the New York Times entitled 'Are Cookbooks Obsolete?'

And finally I had a bit of a chuckle over this piece from The Guardian, a review of Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking first published in 1951. Needless to say Ms David remains well know whereas the author of the review, Lucie Marion, - well have you ever heard of her? Ms. Marion had herself published a book on French cooking, Be Your Own Chef: Simple French Cooking in 1948 and no doubt saw ED for the rival that she was. Whilst her criticism of ED may well be justified it didn't do her any good.

For anyone who has the time or the inclination to venture to Melbourne the programme for the Wine and Food Festival in March 2012 is now available. One of my criticisms about the similar event in Sydney is that it centres on restaurants and chefs rather than programming a wider range of cultural offerings. Well not so in Melbourne where they include a week of Foodie Films!

A lamington by any other name.

2011-11-23T18:32:00.000+11:00

The humble lamington. Photo by John Woudstra, The Age, 29 October 2011.

A recent article in the weekend paper ('Time to advance, Australian fare' by Sue Bennett here) raised that perennial recurring theme in Australian food writing – the lack of/need for an Australian culinary identity. The article opened with the question

'If we defined Australia by its food, what would it be?'

What is meant here? – Defining Australia by the food which is eaten here is not the same as trying to come up with some sort of national dish. And the issue of an Australian national dish always seems to involve the use of indigenous ingredients despite the fact that the examples of other nations (in this instance Italy characterised by tomatoes, basil and olive oil; Japan characterised by soy sauce, seaweed and fish and Thailand by coconut milk, curry and kaffir limes) makes it clear that it is neither indigenous nor unique ingredients or flavours which become associated with particular cuisines. It is what cooks do with those ingredients which lead to something special and different.
Its all very well for chefs to play around with lilly-pilly ice-cream and finger lime mousse, and these may very well be the flavours that the world may come to associate with Australia, but, for the moment, this is no more what Australians eat in their own homes than Rene Redzepi's food is what the Danish sit down to for dinner every night of the week. Few if any of us use these ingredients or would recognise them if we tasted them.

Looking to more exotic indigenous ingredients to provide unique flavours suggests that we might have given up the idea of promoting the kangaroo as the meat Australians love to eat. The kangaroo issue is just too fraught. There is the debate about eating wild animals to say nothing of the practicalities of trying to farm kangaroos and the emotional arguments surrounding consuming the national emblem. It seems we can't promote Skippy as a unique symbol of Australia in the flesh and serve him up stewed as well. On the other hand kangaroo meat is at least available in the supermarket which is more than can be said for finger limes

Why try to define a culture by just one national dish? What we should be concerned about is the breadth of our shared culinary culture in a large country with a broad range of climatic and geographical areas , with a population made up of people from such a wide range of backgrounds and with so much choice available to us. We should be celebrating what we have and interpreting our cuisine as it is not trying to develop a cuisine which says what we think we want to say about ourselves.

Whilst the barbecue may not be an entirely original idea there is an argument for a peculiarly Australian approach to the barbecue. What we cook, how we cook it and the social rituals which surround our style of barbecue certainly distinguish a barbie here from what one might encounter in say North Carolina. And as I have argued here before the barbecue also serves as a unifying theme in the diversity of food cultures imported into Australia.

But the problem with the barbecue is perhaps that it is not glamorous enough, it isn't haute cuisine, it wouldn't put Australia up there with the great cuisines. It is so much easier to add a new flavour to something from the French canon, a mousse for example, than really develop something new or wait around a hundred years or so for traditions to develop and mature.

The meat pie is a great Australian tradition which could answer both questions. What does our food say about Australia? Just like a Massaman curry pie or a tandoori chicken pie or a Moroccan lamb pie, exotic flavours encased in a traditional English pastry, Australia is a mixture of a variety of other cultures wrapped around with an Anglo-centric veneer. And if we want a food that represents Australia why not a pie with a filling of kangaroo in red wine. But even with sophisticated flavours the poor old pie isn't sophisticated enough to rate as 'cuisine'.

Other than indigenous ingredients with unique flavours which still have a long way to go before they are part of our day to day food culture and kangaroo meat which is never likely to be more than a novelty, is there anything which Australia can claim to have invented?

As Ms Bennett notes in her article, aside from the pavlova, which the New Zealanders claim as their own, Australia has always had the lamington. The accepted wisdom is that this sponge cake dipped in chocolate and coated with coconut was first created by a French chef, Armand Galland some time around 1900.* At that time Galland was working for Lord and Lady Lamington at Government House in Brisbane and his creation was a happy accident, something he put together quickly as a matter of necessity, and named after his employers The lamington has gone from strength to strength, although perhaps no longer a tea time staple, it is a school lunch box regular, a feature of the cake stall at the local fete and a sure fire fund raiser. Many Australians think that the lamington is a unique part of their food culture. But is it?

Before I went on holidays recently I was part of a discussion at Syrup andTang on the history and origins of the vanilla slice. It seems that Australians have their own definition of a vanilla slice although its origins are doubtful. My money is still on the galaktobureko as a precursor rather than anything French, but it was intriguing to discover that there was something very similar from Croatia. The krempita (pita pastry, krem cream/custard) is made in the same way as the vanilla slice – puff pastry and custard thickened with cornflour, each prepared separately and then assembled. So which came first or do both the vanilla slice and the krempita owe their origins to the galaktobureko? Or is the similarity mere co-incidence? After all there are only so many ways you can put custard filling and pastry together.

An investigation of Croatian cake shops proved that the krempita is popular there and tastes just like our vanilla slice although with a slightly citrus-y note. There is also a version which includes a layer of cream as well as custard, and Gina, who contributed to the Syrup and Tang discussion and grew up in Croatia, suggested there were slight variations which characterised the krempita from Bosnia and Serbia.

Whilst I was tracking down the vanilla slice in Croatia I was totally unprepared for the discovery of the čupavac. Čupavaci are none other than lamingtons by another name! So was chef Galland's bright idea so original after all? Have the Croatians been eating lamingtons for centuries? Who knows? I certainly haven't been able to dig up much information on the origins of the čupavac. It is suggested that dipping cake in chocolate is a French technique and that Galland may have been influenced by his French Tahitian wife to use coconut, so were French chefs with Tahitian wives also busy whipping up afternoon tea in Zagreb and Split?

Čupavaci not withstanding there is no reason why we should not claim the lamington as an important part of our culinary culture. Despite the fact that it was introduced by a Frenchman, contains no indigenous ingredients and is neither original or unique it is part of our food history and our collective food memories. For those of us who have ever eaten a lamington they are, like it or not, part of how we define ourselves, even if they are a 'none-too flash bit of sponge cake'.

*All information about the history of the lamington came from an article ('Let them eat cake: French take a bite of our lamingtons') by Cosima Marriner, The Age, 6 June 2009.

Ban the Banquette

2011-11-09T14:55:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I had lunch with two friends at a plush restaurant in the city (which rates one star in the current local restaurant guide, although we shouldn't hold that against it). The meal was pleasant enough but overall it wasn't a pleasurable experience.

This morning I read this article by David Rockwell, CEO of a New York architecture and design practise who knows a bit about designing restaurant spaces, extolling the virtues of banquette seating. Well I'm sorry Mr. Rockwell but I beg to differ.

I don't think you need to be an architect to understand that the seating plays a huge role in the atmosphere of any restaurant. The positioning of the tables and the seating at those tables influence how diners behave towards the members of their own group, seated at the same table, and towards the other diners in the room. Maintaining privacy and some sense of personal space in the public space; being able to make eye contact with the people you are dining with and being able to attract the attention of the waiter without having to stare at the people at the table next to you and simply sitting in a chair which is comfortable rather than merely stylish all impact on the dining experience. And that means on the enjoyment of the food – it doesn't matter how clever the food is if you don't feel comfortable.

So why my dissatisfaction with yesterday's lunch? Because the three of us were sitting at a horseshoe shaped banquette. My heart sank the moment the waiter pulled the table forward . We dutifully took our seats and then he pushed the table back and trapped us in place.

David Rockwell, 'Creating Public Intimacy: Designing Restaurant Booths and Banquettes', The Atlantic, 8 November 2011.

You don't need a degree in physics (or architecture for that matter) to recognise that the person or persons in the middle of the U are entirely hemmed in. It is difficult enough to discreetly leave the dining table but in the horseshoe scenario not only does the entire table have to be moved but half the people seated at it have to get up to make way for the poor embarrassed soul who needs to go to the loo before dessert. Slithering out of your seat and crawling under the table is not an option but it would cause less commotion.

Another consequence of the fixed seating is that individual diners have no control over how close they sit to the table. Unless the table is exactly centred some people have to sit on the edge of the seat while others are hard up against the edge of the table. Of course there's no discreetly moving your chair back so that you can rummage on the floor for the lost napkin or to allow for the crossing of legs or just a bit of expansion room between courses.

And in my experience there seems to be a general problem with the depth of the banquette. There is always too much space between your back and the seat back. You have to sit right on the edge of the seat to get to the food and then wriggle back to lean up against the back rest or else collapse backwards into the void and eventually connect with the back rest at a rakish angle. There's also something I don't like about being marooned on a seat which is too big for me. On the one hand I want my own chair not my share of a communal space but there's also a strange feeling of isolation when you can see the expanse of unoccupied leather between you and your nearest neighbour. Your own chair gives you a bit of definition, a sense of security and place.

Yesterday the sense of alienation was increased because the three of us sat at a table big enough to accommodate four on the banquette which meant that the person opposite me was just that bit too far away for quiet conversation. Surely the staff in a restaurant worthy of one star should be able to work out that three people are only one more than two people not one less than four, that is they can squish up a bit into a smaller space rather than be left to wallow in too much.

Mr Rockwell argues that the horseshoe banquette 'creates an intimate, inward facing world, but also looks out onto the theatre of the dining room' which is all very well in theory but the theory also needs to address how people get into and out of that world and whether or not its a world they feel they want to be in. It seems to me that there isn't anything intrinsically intimate about the banquette. I would suggest that any well placed table and chairs can become its own little world within the greater whole provided those seated at it feel relaxed and comfortable.

A final word on Eliza Acton

2011-10-30T18:11:00.002+11:00

Fact is stranger than fiction. A good biography beats a good story any day, but to write a good biography an author needs not only an interesting subject and a degree of empathy but also a good supply of both primary and secondary sources to draw from. In The Real Mrs Beeton, The Story of Eliza Acton Sheila Hardy has made a brave attempt to breath life into the woman credited with being the best cookery writer in the English language but sadly the real Ms Acton eludes her. To be fair this is not entirely Sheila Hardy's fault. Eliza Acton left no diaries or letters, not even a will, to posterity, no written record of her life at all other than the poems she published and her books Modern Cookery and The English Bread Book. Of her family and friends no one has left more than a fleeting glimpse of their association with her.

A sympathetic reader of Modern Cookery would picture Eliza as thorough and precise; an intelligent, well educated and well read woman of her time, not lacking in a sense of humour, with a lively interest in the world around her and a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Self evidently she was also interested in food and eating and the principles of household economy. Unfortunately, despite a valiant, but not altogether satisfactory, effort to place Eliza in context and to put flesh on the bones of her family and friends (running to more than 200 pages!), Sheila Hardy can add little to that picture. There just isn't enough hard evidence to do more than hedge around what little information is verifiable with 'perhaps' this, 'it is likely' that or 'one could assume'/'we can imagine' the other.

This is a shame because Eliza did mix with some interesting people, just how, why, when and where remains a mystery. Who was the love of her life (an unknown Frenchman?), why did she go to France (for the sake of her health?), did she have an illegitimate daughter (probably not - well not one that survived) will have to remain questions open to speculation.

For me the biggest puzzle is why Eliza thought to write a recipe book in the first place. What motivated her to devote ten years of her life to a cookery book? What experience did she have of the kitchen? Hardy suggests that the recipes were most likely tested by her servant Ann Kirby but Eliza must at least have spent many hours observing and taking notes and the details in some cases are so exact that surely Eliza had hands-on experience of her own. Was it her publisher who suggested the idea of a cookery book and if so why did he think Eliza was the person to write it? Sheila Hardy asks this question herself but fails to provide a satisfactory answer. Perhaps Eliza was urged by her friends to make a record of her recipes. Hardy presents some evidence that Acton openly solicited her friends for recipes to include but it seems to me unlikely that she only started to collect them once she had made up her mind to write a cookery book.

In the end I suppose the whys and wherefores don't really matter, we should just be thankful that Eliza staked her future on recipes and not rhymes.

Sheila Hardy, The Real Mrs Beeton. The Story of Eliza Acton, The History Press, Stroud, 2011.

Alice B. Toklas and her cook book - Part Two

2011-09-06T16:49:00.014+10:00

Alice at rue de Fleurus with some of the 'sparkling' silver.
Man Ray, 1922.

After I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book I went looking for as much as I could find about Alice and Gertrude and food (without having to resort to reading any of Gertrude's works which I think might be a bit beyond me). I wanted to fill in some of the gaps in Alice's story and try to understand more about the role food and cooking played in her life and in her relationship with Gertrude. I don't know that I am necessarily any the wiser but herewith, in no apparent order, are some of the bits and pieces which I found interesting.

Before Alice came to Paris she had led what Gertrude called in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (hereafter AABT) 'the gently bred existence of [her]class and kind'. She had grown up in a household where there were cooks and nurses. With her mother's death she had taken on the management of that household – such as the menu planning and budgeting – rather than the labour of actually preparing meals. In the The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (hereafter ABTC) she tells us that before she came to Paris she 'was interested in food but not in doing any cooking', she read cook books, she collected recipes, but most importantly she enjoyed eating. In the preface to Aromas and Flavours she talks of the 'rapture and surprise' she experienced on her first tasting 'a steak smothered in garlic' although her adventurous palate was not considered entirely appropriate, 'garlic was not admitted in my mother's kitchen, nor did she consider my enjoyment of the strong flavour of salmon, sweetbreads, brussels sprouts, all cheese, caviare, the onion family including garlic, and wine, natural or commendable in her young daughter'.

Alice and Gertrude at 27 rue de Fleurus, Man Ray, 1922.

When she first moved to 27 rue de Fleurus to live with Gertrude Stein the cook was Hélène, an 'invariably perfect cook' who 'knew all the niceties of making menus' (ABTC p. 171). Alice claims that she learned nothing about cooking from Hélène because Hélène did not think it appropriate for a lady to cook. Both Alice and Gertrude tell stories about Hélène and her understanding of the role food played in the social niceties. As Gertrude tells it

Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these things but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand. (AABT, p.16)

But in Alice's version the lesson she learnt from Hélène was more complicated and subtle

If you wished to honour a guest you offered him an omelette soufllé with an elaborate sauce, if you were indifferent to this an omelette with mushrooms or fines herbes, but if you wished to be insulting you made fried eggs. With the meat course, a fillet of beef with Madeira sauce came first, then a leg or saddle of mutton, and last a chicken. (ABTC p. 171).

I think that if she did not already know, Alice would have quickly appreciated that food could play a significant part in her relationship with Gertrude, not just providing sustenance and a sign of affection but also as an important contribution to the gatherings of Gertrude's salon. The guests, the artists and writers, who came to rue de Fleurus in the 1920s and 30s came to see Gertrude but it was Alice who opened the door to them. The conversation may have belonged to Gertrude but the food belonged to Alice. Alice choreographed the proceedings and regulated the atmosphere of those gatherings, at least in part through what she served and how she served it. Even if their guests did not appreciate it, Alice would know that what they were eating reflected how much they were valued.

Hemingway describes Alice working on her needlepoint while he talked to Gertrude and Alice talked to his wife. Alice saw to the food and drink and at the same time 'she made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making' (A Moveable Feast). Bravig Imbs, who first met Gertrude in 1926, 'realised instinctively that Alice was important and required attention',

Gertrude received so many people that she could not be bothered worrying whether they would get on together, but let all classes and kinds mix pell-mell and the devil take the hindmost. All she cared about was to shake loose the people who bored or annoyed her and though she was too kindly to drop them in the middle of a sentence, she always managed to introduce them to Alice before the sentence was ended. Alice acted as both sieve and buckler; she defended Gertrude from the bores and most of the new people were strained through her before Gertrude had any prolonged contact with them. That was why after the preliminary handshaking, I found myself taking very delicious tea and munching heavenly cakes with the gypsy-like person ...She talked a blue streak.

What a shame he doesn't tell us what she talked about. Sir Francis Rose, who was first introduced to the pair in the summer of 1937, describes Alice sitting behind a tray 'sparkling' with silver urns and teapots, surrounded by small tables 'covered with beautiful china, heaped with all kinds of home-made cakes, marrons glaces, crystallized cherries and violets'. Most commentators accept that Alice's role was to entertain the women guests, the wives, while Gertrude talked with the men, and to serve the tea and cookies. Rose observes that she was 'always watching the guests like a cat to see that everything was going well and that good manners, according to the Victorian standards of the house, were being observed'.

Whilst some visitors appreciated Alice's attentions others found her intimidating and difficult. Françoise Gilot describes being taken by Picasso to meet Alice and Gertrude, a scene which would be funny except for Gilot's obvious discomfort and for the fact that it paints both Alice and Gertrude as rather ungenerous to their young guest. She was ushered into the salon and 'Alice Toklas sat down on the divan beside me but as far away as possible. In the centre of our little circle were several low tables covered with plates of petits fours, cakes, cookies, and all kinds of luxuries one didn't see at that period, right after the war.' Whilst Gertrude was cross-examining Gilot

Alice Toklas was not sitting down, but bobbing up and down, moving back and forth, going out into the dining room to get more cakes, bringing them in, and passing them around ….when ever I said anything displeasing to Alice Toklas, she would dart another plate of cakes at me and I would be forced to take one and bite into it. They were all very rich and gooey and with nothing to drink, talking was not easy. I suppose I should have said something about her cooking, but I just ate her cakes and went back to talking with Gertrude Stein, so I guess I made an enemy of Alice Toklas that day.

Did Alice and Gertrude disapprove of Gilot or were they trying to give Picasso some sort of message? In the end Gilot promised herself that she would never visit the apartment again and concluded that it was easier to do without Gertrude altogether 'than to take her in tandem with Alice B. Toklas'.

Cakes and sweet things seem to have played a large part in their lives. Apart from what was served to visitors, according to Natalie Clifford Barney, another expatriate American who had a salon in Paris, Gertrude and Alice were always on the look out for new cakes. She rather neatly concludes that Gertrude 'must be sustained on sweetmeats and timely success, this being the surest way of taking the cake and of eating it and having it too.' Alice would have learnt early on that Gertrude had a sweet tooth, and, according to Harold Acton, 'cosseted' her with creamy cakes. Alice may not have known too much about cake making when she first came to Paris, ordering them instead from the baker since Hélène's talents didn't stretch to fancy pastries either, but eventually she earned a reputation for them. Writing to Annette Rosenshine in 1951 she says

When I used to bake a cake for Gertrude I never asked is it good I always said does it look like one that came from the bakers ... well it was often that Gertrude thought that it did.(Burns ed, p. 237)

Natalie Barney recalled a summer afternoon at Bilignin when Alice served a 'fluffy confection of hers, probably a coconut layer cake which only Americans know how to make – and eat' which came with white icing edged with pink. Clare More de Morinni, chairman of the American Women's Club in Paris, was delighted to be invited to 'sample one of Miss Toklas's wonderful cakes'. But for all that they may have been important cakes are not disproportionally represented in The Cook Book and you will search in vain to find Gertrude's favourite or the recipe for coconut layer cake. Many of the recipes are not what Alice herself cooked, they are recipes she collected, recipes for dishes she enjoyed, so whilst she doesn't necessarily tell us what she liked to prepare we do know what she liked to eat.

Alice and Gertrude at 5 rue Christine, 1938
Cecil Beaton

Alice did pretty much everything for the two of them while Gertrude sat around being a genius. Gertrude has Alice say 'I am a pretty good housekeeper, and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once '(AABT p. 256). What she doesn't say is that Alice was a good cook.
She first cooks for Gertrude only on Sunday evenings, when Hélène was at home with her husband, which was when 'Gertrude Stein liked from time to time to have me make american dishes' (AABT p. 122). For all that they spent most of their lives in France, returning to America only once, and both women came from families imbued with European sensibilities and culture, they both seem to have always remained Americans abroad and proud of it. So Alice prepared Gertrude 'the simple dishes I had eaten in the homes of the San Joaquin Valley in California' (ABTC p. 37) and presumably coconut layer cake, and W. G. Rogers sent them seeds of American corn each year for the Bilignin garden. In 1949, writing to Annette Rosenshine Alice comments that a Chinese restaurant she has been to in Paris was 'nice but not like in S.F. oh dear no' and in 1951 she writes to Claude Fredericks of 'a California recipe for pecan pie with rum and the pecans glazed on top that I've read for years that we might enjoy' (Burns, ed. pp. 157 and 231). Both were enormously proud of the American forces and their role in the liberation of France. Harold Acton commented, on meeting Gertrude and Alice just after their return to Paris at the end of the war, that 'Gertrude had become more aggressively American in idiom and the use of slang'. In Paris their friends were in the main expatriates of one sort or another and the common language of their conversation over Alice's cakes must have been English. It seems to me that living in Paris allowed them a freedom to be themselves which they could not have enjoyed in America, living apart from the French society which surrounded them in a way that they could not have achieved had they been merely trying to separate themselves from their social milieu. According to Gillian Tindall there were probably as many as forty thousand Americans living temporarily in Paris during the 1920s. She goes on

It is from this era that one can date the curious phenomenon, still observable on the Left Bank today, of an almost hermetically sealed anglophone world with its own cultural preoccupations, its own bookshop (Shakespeare & Co.), its own parties and dramas. It also has its own folk memory of former figures, from Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, to the more recent Allen Ginsberg and William Styron, which hardly interacts with the French inhabitants' perceptions of the Left Bank in anything but the most superficial way. The Paris 'to which all good Americans go when they die' has always been ...a different place from the one the local inhabitants know.

Is it too much of an exaggeration to suggest that, at least until they were exiled to Bilignin during the Second World War, Gertrude and Alice interacted with French culture largely through their liking for and indulgence in French cuisine?

Rue de Fleurus, 1922, Man Ray.
This photograph shows Alice entering the studio adjacent to their apartment, where Gertrude wrote, .

If the idea of living the bohemian life in Paris appears romantic and exotic the reality was anything but luxurious, although Alice and Gertrude no doubt lived a more comfortable existence than many of their working class French neighbours. Until 1938 they lived at 27 rue de Fleurus, a stone building dating from the 1890s. Their two storey apartment was off a paved courtyard with a small hallway separating the kitchen from the dining room, and two bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs. Gertrude wrote in a separate studio adjacent to the apartment. In 1914 with Alice permanently established there and Gertrude's brother, Leo, gone they had a covered hallway built between the studio and the living area, they had the studio painted and the house papered and finally had the gas lamps removed and electricity installed. Electric heating wasn't introduced until 1929. There is no mention of the cooking facilities but it seems likely that Alice first cooked for Gertrude on a fuel stove. Their move to 5 rue Christine was a wrench but made easier to bear because of the inadequate conditions at rue de Fleurus, the apartment was dark and airless and 'no servant would stand the kitchen' which suggests that the kitchen facilities were primitive and antiquated. The move also resulted in the acquisition of a refrigerator and gifts of an egg whisk, a garlic crusher,a meat thermometer and a lid opener from friends (Souhami, p. 226). When Alice and Gertrude first started spending at least six months in the summer at Bilignin, where Alice cultivated her much loved vegetable garden, they had no inside plumbing. It wasn't until The Autobiography was published and successful (1933) that they could afford to have a bathroom and lavatory installed, which presumably meant that the kitchen now had a water supply, and to replace the coal fired stove with an electric cooker (Souhami p. 195).

In The Autobiography Gertrude claims on Alice's behalf that 'I like cooking, I am an extremely good five-minute cook'(p. 122) but Alice tells us that 'cooking is not an entirely agreeable pastime' because 'there is too much that must happen in advance of the actual cooking'. She goes on

In the earlier days...if indulgent friends on this or that Sunday evening or party occasion said that the cooking I produced wasn't bad, it neither beguiled nor flattered me into liking or wanting to do it. (ABTC p. 37)

She then says that she did not begin to cook seriously until 'it suddenly and unexpectedly became a disagreeable necessity' while they were in exile in Bilignin during the war and their life with servants had at least temporarily come to an end. (A chapter in The Cook Book deals with some of the cooks Alice employed who worked for them in Paris and travelled with them to Bilignin for the summer.)

What should we make of this? It seems clear that Alice could cook when she wanted to or needed to but she preferred not to or at least preferred to make quick and easy five minute dishes. She came from a home in San Francisco which had boasted an "automatic" freezer for ice cream (ABTC p. 97) so she would have found the conditions in the kitchens in Paris and Bilignin very primitive and cooking would have been hard work. Alice's passion was food, she loved eating, she loved growing her own ingredients ('there is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfying or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown' ABTC p. 266) but cooking was just a practical necessity which took her away from the 'many more important and more amusing things' that she enjoyed (ABTC p. 37).

This and the following two photographs were taken by Carl Mydans for Life Magazine. They show Gertrude and Alice and their dog Basket 'on the doorstep of their home during the US 7th Army's liberation of southern France'. These are my favourites of Alice because they show her in a less severe and mannered pose and because she and Gertrude are shown as equals, rather than Alice being relegated to the background.

When Alice says that many first-rate women cooks have 'tired eyes and a wan smile' (ABTC p. 82) I wonder if she had herself in mind.

Alice was extremely resourceful and capable – she could knit, she produced needlepoint based on designs drawn by Picasso, she spent her summers digging and planting a glorious vegetable garden aside from all her duties as hostess, housekeeper and secretary – and she loved luxury and extravagance. We know from The Cook Book that the food she enjoyed most involved cream and eggs, cognac and champagne, foie gras and truffles, served with lashings of crystal and silver and lace. Not that she was incapable of appreciating simplicity, she just loved a bit of indulgence. When she was driving around France in 1917 she armed herself with the newly published 'booklets on the gastronomic points of interest' (ABTC p. 102) and it was the Guide des Gourmets which led them to Bilignin (AABT p. 228). Even in old age, alone and destitute she craved the finer things. Doda Conrad writes that it was difficult to satisfy her 'I remember tricking her by having fruit brought to her in used bags from Fauchon or Hédiard. This gave her the illusion of eating the best food Paris had to offer' (Malcolm p. 218).

For all that we know about Alice and Gertrude, from what they wrote about themselves and from what others wrote about them, Alice in particular remains elusive. As Janet Malcolm puts it 'biography and autobiography are the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn, and, in the latter, he chooses to tell'. In this case The Autobiography tells us as much about Gertrude Stein as it does about Alice. Whilst The Cook Book is Alice's memoir it is somehow oddly impersonal. She tells us only just as much as she wants us to know about the personal details of her life with Gertrude and reveals almost nothing of her own thoughts or feelings. Her other memoir What is Remembered adds little or nothing to the two earlier works. Trying to find the Alice who existed before the publication of The Autobiography is almost impossible. Sadly all her early letters to her father (written regularly from 1907 to 1922), those she wrote to childhood friend Clare Moore de Gruchy, all her early letters to Annette Rosenshine and most of her pre-1946 letters to Louise Taylor have either never been found, were wilfully destroyed or simply lost.

What she looked like is easy enough to gauge from the photographs. Obviously no conventional beauty at best she is described by those kindly disposed to her as 'slim,dark and whimsical' (Sylvia Beach), 'enigmatic and dark' (Clare More de Morinni) and 'tiny and hunched .. with her hooked nose and light moustache' (Harold Acton) and at the other end of the spectrum as 'incredibly ugly, uglier than almost anyone I had ever met' (Otto Friedrich in Simon p. 211). Those who did not warm to Alice saw her as 'hideous...she looked like a witch' (Joan Chapman in Malcolm p. 188) 'with large, heavy-lidded eyes, a long hooked nose, and a dark, furry moustache' (Françoise Gilot).
Hemingway thought she had 'a very pleasant voice', but found her 'frightening'. In A Moveable Feast he can't bring himself to use her name, referring to her only as Miss Stein's friend or companion. Many people who met her found her intimidating, several were a little scared of her. Mabel Dodge thought she was insidious and 'somehow dishonest' (Simon, p.81). Some responded to Alice's wit and vitality (W. G. Rogers), found her dignified, appreciated her shrewdness 'the cultivated and slightly grainy quality of her voice' and her warm, malicious laughter (Otto Friedrich) and took the time to discover her 'intelligence and culture' (Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler). Whilst there seems to be little doubt that she was jealous of her role in Gertrude's life and that she could be wilful and manipulative she still had life long friends like Annette Rosenshine who had been a neighbour in San Francisco and Louise Taylor who had been a friend since they studied music together and the letters written later in her life radiate graciousness, from them 'she emerges ...as a great lady, witty, self-deprecating, attentive, cultivated' (Malcolm, p. 210).

I still can't help but think that it's too bad neither Gertrude nor Alice nor any of the people they entertained bothered to leave us a description of Alice cooking in the kitchen at rue de Fleurus.

References
All quotations are from Linda Simon, Gertrude Stein Remembered (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995) unless otherwise acknowledged.

Burns, Edward (ed.). Staying on Alone. Letters of Alice B. Toklas, Liveright, New York, 1973.
Malcolm, Janet. Two Lives. Gertrude and Alice, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007.
Souhami, Diana. Gertrude and Alice, Phoenix Press, London, 2000.
Simon, Linda. The Biography of Alice B. Toklas. Doubleday, New York, 1977.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Zephyr Books, Stockholm, 1947.
Tindall, Gillian. Footprints in Paris, Pimlico, London, 2009.
Toklas, Alice. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Harper Perennial, New York, 2010 (1984 edition).
What is Remembered, Michael Joseph, London, 1963.
Aromas and Flavours of Past and Present, Michael Joseph, London, 1959.

Alice B. Toklas and her cook book - Part One.

2011-08-29T18:13:00.009+10:00

Alice B. Toklas, Chartres, October 1949
Carl Van Vechten

Who was Alice B. Toklas?

Alice Babette was the only daughter of Ferdinand and Emma (Levinsky) Toklas, born in San Francisco on 30 April 1877. As a child she lived a comfortable and cultured middle-class existence surrounded by the female members of her mother's family, women interested in flowers, gardens, food, music and fashion. At eight she travelled to Europe with her parents; a few months after her tenth birthday her brother Clarence was born and at sixteen she entered the University of Washington to study music. (Her father's business interests were in Seattle and Olympia and the family was living in Seattle at the time.) She was all set, as her biographer suggests, to 'glide quietly into the coming century, comfortable in the Jewish middle class, a well-trained flower of pale Victorian womanhood'. The wheels started to fall off when her mother became ill and the family returned to San Francisco. Alice, aged eighteen, was required to take on the role of housekeeper. Emma Toklas died in March 1897, just before Alice's twentieth birthday, and Alice, Clarence and Ferdinand moved in with her widowed grandfather, Emma's father, Louis Levinsky.

Although she mixed with musicians (she had the idea of perhaps becoming a concert pianist), artists and writers, went to the theatre and to restaurants, she lived in a male dominated, highly conservative household where she was valued largely for her efficient housekeeping. Like most young women of her class she had been brought up to be a lady and a 'perfect hostess' who would eventually make someone the perfect wife. By 1904 her grandfather was dead, her brother was eighteen and no longer requiring her ministrations and she had given up the idea of a musical career. Alice began to think of escape.

Alice's friend, Harriet Levy, was a friend of Sarah Stein, wife of Michael Stein, the older brother of Leo and Gertrude. In 1903 the Michael Steins had gone to join Leo and Gertrude and settle in Paris, taking with them another of Alice's friends, Annette Rosenshine. At the end of August 1907 Alice and Harriet also left San Francisco to join the Stein circle.

Almost from the moment she meets Gertrude in Paris, Alice and Gertrude become GertrudeandAlice with Alice fulfilling her role as the perfect wife. Gertrude writes and Alice works assiduously nurturing Gertrude's genius. Both of them become popularly well known after the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas written by Gertrude and published in 1933. Before this date Alice is just plain Alice Toklas. It is Gertrude who chooses the name for the book despite Alice's protestations and she is Alice B. Toklas from then on. Gertrude dies in 1946, when Alice is 69, and she spends the next twenty years maintaining the Gertrude Stein legend and crafting anecdotes about their lives in her own books The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and What is Remembered.

Why did Alice write a cook book?

By her own admission it was at least in part because she needed some money. Although Gertrude Stein had intended to leave Alice well provided for, after Gertrude died Alice lived in ever more straightened financial circumstances. The idea of writing a cook book however was something she and Gertrude had discussed. According to Linda Simon (Alice's biographer) a plan for a cook book of seven chapters interspersed with recollections had been written on the inside cover of Gertrude's copy of James Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot although there is no indication of when this was done. Simon also references from amongst Stein's papers a note by Gertrude that 'Alice is at work planning a cook book and reading recipes', that 'she is deep in descriptions of cake she will never make', which dates from 1946.
Their friend Carl Van Vechten claimed to have witnessed two occasions when Gertrude had ridiculed Alice about the idea of writing a cook book despite Alice having long wanted to do so (Souhami, p. 260). In a letter to Carl Van Vechten in November 1946, Alice admits to having told Thornton Wilder that she might write a cook book and he had responded 'but Alice have you ever tried to write'. Perhaps those scenes with Gertrude were also in her mind when she wrote her famous final sentence 'As if a cook-book had anything to do with writing'.

Alice had collected recipes from childhood and had a reputation as a good cook but her publishers were probably less interested in her recipes than in her memoirs (Simon p. 217). More particularly they must have been interested in what Alice could tell of the years not covered by Gertrude in The Autobiography. Carl Van Vechten thought that her clashes with Gertrude had made her wary of writing anything and certainly anything about their life together. For her part perhaps Alice was flattered by the attention she was receiving (she was also approached to write articles for Vogue and House Beautiful), perhaps she realised that using food as the basis for her reminiscences meant that she could easily control just how revelatory they were, and, after all, she could do with the money. In the publisher's note to the 1984 edition of The Cook Book it is Alice who suggests to the publisher that she write a cook book full of memories rather than a book about her life with Gertrude Stein.

Where did her recipes come from?

Alice had collected recipes for most of her life. From about the time her mother became ill and she took charge of the household she began copying recipes into 'a grey cloth-covered notebook'. Did she expect when she left San Francisco in 1904 she would never return? Whether she did or not, among the possessions she took with her to Paris were this notebook and her mother's handwritten cook-book, both of which she referred to when it came to writing her own books fifty years later. The recipes she collected were her 'treasures', a way of capturing her memories and recording her experiences. In The Cook Book she says

When treasures are recipes they are less clearly, less distinctly remembered than when they are tangible objects. They evoke however quite a vivid feeling – that is, to some of us who, considering cooking an art, feel that a way of cooking can produce something that approaches an aesthetic emotion. What more can one say? If one had the choice of again hearing Pachmann play the two Chopin sonatas or dining once more at the Café Anglais which would one choose?

Cook books and reading about food and cooking had always 'intrigued and seduced' her. She discussed food with cooks and chefs she met on her travels, experimented to reproduce food she had eaten in restaurants and exchanged ideas with her friends. Amongst her collection she had 'priceless recipes from three chateaux manuscript cook books' from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as books which she had received as gifts. Gertrude gave her ' very important' cook books for Christmas (such as Montagne and Salles The Great Book of the Kitchen) and friends regularly sent her the latest publications (such as Wanda Frolov's Katish: Our Russian Cook published in 1947 from W. G. Rogers).
But a recipe collection does not make a cook book, as Alice discovered. She found the process of writing the book a 'grind' and the effort was difficult and tormenting, at least in part because she was now 75 and recovering from jaundice, but she plodded on 'despairfully'. The chapter entitled 'Recipes from Friends' (which included the notorious Hashish Fudge recipe) was a device to make up the short fall of words in what she thought of as a 'deadly dull offering'. Alice had neither the time nor the means to test any of the recipes she included, instead she spent the winter of 1952 bent over an 'imaginary stove'. She was both shocked and furious when told about the hashish fudge, it would appear that she had not even bothered to read the recipe before including it with the rest of the manuscript. In her foreword to the 1984 edition of The Cook Book M.K.F. Fisher notes that the first edition listed ten errata of which only three were significant. Linda Simon discusses one of these, the amount of milk required for the croissant recipe (p.219) which, when discovered, left Alice 'ashamed and confused'.

After The Cook Book was published (in 1954) she was approached to do more food writing but found she had no more words left, lamenting 'there is nothing but a large cardboard box of recipes. If this is a disappointment to others how much more so is it to me!' However The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book was not the only book of recipes published with Alice as author. Her contract with Harper gave them the option on her next book and to fulfil her obligation she supplied recipes for Aromas and Flavours of Past and Present which was published in 1958. According to Linda Simon the manuscript Alice had submitted for The Cook Book was misspelled and badly typed and had set a record for sloppiness.* For this next effort she was teamed with a professional writer, Poppy Cannon, who would take Alice's recipes and put them into some sort of shape. Who could have thought that the author of The Can-Opener Cookbook would be a good match for Alice? In Mouth Wide Open John Thorne quotes from The Can-Opener Cookbook,

At one time a badge of shame, hallmark of the lazy lady and the careless wife, today the can opener is fast becoming a magic wand ...We want you to believe just as we do that in this miraculous age it is quite possible - and it's fun - to be a "chef" even before you can really cook.

The result of their collaboration is a sad little book. There are glimpses of Alice such as her comment that 'Chicken Stuffed with Seafood' is a 'mirific way to prepare a chicken' and her note that 'it has been my habit for several years to keep a carafe of good cognac on a kitchen shelf' because 'like salt, it brings out and amalgamates the various flavours of any dish', but the comments throughout by Cannon are at best incongruous and at worst plain silly. Of Braised Capon she says that 'tinned or frozen asparagus tips may be used' and for Onion Soup she suggests the reader 'can use Miss Toklas' ideas even though you resort to tinned or packaged dehydrated onion soup'. Alice scorned processed and prepared food in any form, little wonder then that she disassociated herself from Ms. Cannon's introduction and comments and lashed out at all her editorial corrections. In response to the query 'How many does this recipe serve?' Alice allegedly replied 'How should I know how many it serves? It depends on – their appetites – what else they had for diner - whether they like it or not.'

Alice believed that 'between speed and ease and excellence there could be ... no possible connection'. For her 'a dish … can only have the flavour of what has gone into the making of it', not just the quality of the ingredients, but the care and attention in its preparation, the understanding of its origins and a respect for tradition and seasonality. Perhaps she was being purposely provocative by providing recipes like that for Boeuf A La Mode, which requires the larding of a top round of beef with strips of salt pork, previously soaked in cognac for 4 or 5 hours, and then simmering with a calf's foot to give the sauce the required texture (it must surely be Ms. Cannon's annotation to suggest that 'if you haven't a calf's foot handy, use 2 envelopes of gelatine') and that for Duck in Delicate Aspic which begins 'this was a favourite dish in 1797' (although she admits 'it seems almost irreverent' Ms Cannon cannot resist the suggestion that 'the beef bouillon necessary for the aspic can be made with a bouillon cube'.)

What happened to Alice's library of books and her recipe collection?

In his introduction to Staying on Alone. The Letters of Alice B. Toklas Gilbert Harrison writes 'She was addicted to cook books and could never settle on where her treasures should go. She kept revising her will, leaving them to one beneficiary, then another.' (p.xiv) In the end apart for a few tokens and the royalties from her books, her estate went to her old friend, Louise Taylor (whom she had met when they were music students together) so perhaps she was the final custodian of Emma Levinsky's hand written recipes and Alice's large cardboard box. Louise Taylor died in 1977.

* There is a video of an interview with Leon Katz on YouTube (Katz spent several months interviewing Alice at the time she was writing The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook) in which he claims to have typed the manuscript for the cook book.

References

Burns, Edward (ed.). Staying on Alone. Letters of Alice B. Toklas, Liveright, New York, 1973.

Malcolm, Janet. Two Lives. Gertrude and Alice, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007.

Simon, Linda. The Biography of Alice B. Toklas. Doubleday, New York, 1977.

Souhami, Diana. Gertrude and Alice, Phoenix Press, London, 2000.

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Zephyr Books, Stockholm, 1947.

Thorne, John. Mouth Wide Open. A Cook and His Appetite, North Point Press, New York, 2007.

Toklas, Alice. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Harper perennial, New York, 2010 (1984 edition).
What is Remembered, Michael Joseph, London, 1963.
Aromas and Flavours of Past and Present, Michael Joseph, London, 1959.

All hail the Victoria Sandwich

2011-08-18T18:51:00.004+10:00

Roger Fry
Still life with chocolate cake

The first cake I learnt to cook was a Victoria Sandwich. For many years it was the only cake I made and it remains the one I make regularly because the recipe is simple (I can remember it without reference to any book), its quick to prepare and pretty much foolproof. The result is a moist, light textured cake which is perfect for afternoon tea and belies its ease of preparation. A friend asked me for the recipe recently and when I explained what was involved she replied -'Oh you mean pound cake'. I was a little taken aback because 'Pound Cake' seems rather a coarse and common name for something dainty to serve for afternoon tea and for some reason I had always thought of 'Pound Cake' as an Americanism. 'Victoria Sandwich' on the other hand comes with connotations of very ladylike behaviour and is indeed, according to The Oxford Companion to Food, named after Queen Victoria but there is no mention of by whom and why. So I was inspired to go off in search of the Victoria Sandwich.

Mrs. Beeton seemed like a good source for a recipe with Victoria in the title but all I could find there (in my 1861 version of The Book of Household Management) was 'Pound Cake' (so named because it calls for a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs) made with currants, candied peel, citron and almonds, a recipe lifted from dear old Eliza Acton. Acton suggests adding a glass of brandy, Mrs. B a glass of wine. A variation to the basic method involves beating the yolks and whites separately and adding separately so that the cake is lighter. Both women call for a round baking tin. This was not quite what I was looking for since this cake was neither a sandwich nor plain but my prejudice against 'Pound Cake' as un-British seemed unjustified.

James Beard's American Cookery claims that 'every homemaker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century kept a loaf or two of [Pound] cake in the pantry to serve to unexpected guests'. Beard claims that it is customary to use several flavourings for example orange juice and vanilla or rum or brandy with vanilla and that some cooks 'insist that pound cake should also have 1 teaspoon of nutmeg or mace added, which was invariably true of New England pound cakes'. Beard goes on with elaborate instructions to aerate the flour and then beat the egg whites, stabilising them with lemon juice or cream of tartar and adding some of the sugar to them before folding them into the batter. The mixture is then baked in two 23cm loaf tins. Beard also gives a recipe for 'Fruit Cake with Pound Cake Base', very similar to the Acton/Beeton recipe, and this too is baked in a loaf pan.

In English Food Jane Grigson traces 'Pound Cake' back to Hannah Glasse. Her four egg version is also baked in a 23cm loaf tin. She also suggests a number of variations – adding caraway seeds (a Hannah Glasse innovation which Beard also mentions) or chopped nuts, adding walnuts and flavouring with coffee or rum, flavouring with orange rind and juice or a butterscotch version using brown sugar and rum.

The basic premise for the regal sandwich cake is the same as that of the metrically challenged version i.e. equal amounts of all the vital ingredients – eggs, sugar, butter and self-raising flour . In the case of the 'Pound Cake' a pound of each, hence the name. The difference between the substantial Pound Cake and the more sophisticated sandwich appears to lie both in the quantities of ingredients used and in the execution. In all post-Beeton recipes I could find in my collection the 'Pound Cake' is traditionally made in a loaf tin while the sandwich, perhaps not surprisingly, is made in a round tin and usually cut in half. The two halves are then sandwiched together with jam and/or cream. Why it is called 'Victoria' still remains a mystery.*

I only have two books with recipes specifically for 'Victoria Sandwich' both of them owned my mother and dating from 1948 when she was recently married, living in England and coping with rationing and food shortages. In Cooking with Elizabeth Craig the recipe is for a traditional four egg sponge – that is there is no fat in the mix at all. Ms Craig is indifferent as to the the shape or size of the baking tin. My mother's recipe came from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book where there are two versions. The 'Economical Recipe' calls for only one egg – either fresh or reconstituted egg powder. We always used the 'Standard Recipe' which was more extravagant and required two eggs.

My mother always made two small cakes which were usually sandwiched together with either raspberry or strawberry jam and sometimes with home-made lemon curd. The top was always dusted with icing sugar. This is the recipe which I have always used – cake making doesn't get any easier than this.

Prepare two pans by lining with baking paper. (I use the pans I inherited which are 7" or around 16-17cm.)
Weigh 2 eggs (in the shell) and then weigh out an equal amount of butter, sugar and self raising flour. I don't remember that we ever added baking powder but the official recipe calls for ¼ teaspoon.
Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time (if the mixture starts to curdle add a spoonful of flour). Fold in the flour with the baking powder and add a little milk if the batter seems to be very thick (once you have made this a few times you will know when it is right – if unsure then don’t bother with the milk).
Bake at 190ºC for 25 – 30 minutes (longer if only baking in one tin).

Over time I have discovered that you probably don't need any other cake recipe. You can add all the flavourings already mentioned, flavour with spices (1teaspoon mixed spice), replace a tablespoon of the flour with coconut or cocoa, use the mixture as the cake part of an upside down cake (make a four egg version and bake in a 22 or 25cm tin) and even bake the mixture in patty cases (the two egg mixture makes around 16 small cupcakes). But what happens the day the battery in your electronic scales gives out and you are alone in the kitchen with four eggs of indeterminate weight?

I could have done the conversions myself but it is much easier to refer to Jane Grigson's 'Orange Syrup Cake' ('one of the best variations on the pound cake theme'!) in her Fruit Book. Not only has she done all the conversions (for four eggs use ¾ cup sugar, 1 cup butter, although because butter is sold by weight it shouldn't be too hard to at least estimate 250grams, and 2 cups of self raising flour with 1 teaspoon of baking powder) she also introduced me to another excellent idea. The cake is flavoured with orange rind and orange juice or liqueur and then the hot cake is drenched in a syrup made from orange juice and sugar. Using the same technique you can also produce a lemon syrup cake (which is fabulous iced with passion fruit frosting) and a lime version. What's more, emboldened by Ms Grigson, I found that, as she suggests, it isn't really necessary to do all the creaming of butter and sugar followed by carefully adding eggs one at a time. Although the resulting texture isn't quite as good you do get a perfectly acceptable result just bunging all the ingredients into the food processor and whizzing until you have a smooth batter. And I have subsequently discovered for myself that you can produce a reasonable result using plain flour with 1 teaspoon baking powder rather than self-raising flour but that was by accident rather than by necessity.

The most important lesson I've leaned is not to be intimidated by cake recipes. If you read them carefully many of them are just a variation on the 'Pound Cake' theme. So rather than keeping a file of different recipes all you really need is a bit of confidence, the 'Pound Cake' formula and a pinch of common sense.

* Whilst the 1861 Beeton does not include a recipe for 'Victoria Sandwich' the 1874 version does. This time frame neatly fits the period during which Queen Victoria reputedly becomes acquainted with the new vogue for afternoon tea and the custom becomes firmly entrenched amongst the middle classes. It is not difficult to imagine someone making a dainty version of the 'Pound Cake', prettied up with jam and cream, and serving it to Queen Victoria or at least using her name to suggest that it had the royal imprimatur. Nor is it difficult to imagine that this version of a basic cake, probably already known to many cooks, and now with royal connotations would become popular in the kitchens and salons of the nouveau riche.

'El Bulli,Cooking in Progress' and 'Jiro Dreams of Sushi'

2011-07-20T15:24:00.000+10:00

This year's Sydney Film Festival screened two food films El Bulli, Cooking in Progress, about,unsurprisingly, Feran Adrià and his team at el Bulli and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about Jiro Ono and his Tokyo restaurant Sukiyabashi Ono.

Both films concentrated on the chefs and the work which goes on in the restaurant kitchen and showed lots of close-ups of food. Both were interesting but not especially informative – it was interesting being a fly on the wall but there wasn't much depth to either film.

Cooking in Progress assumed the audience was already familiar with the reputation of el Bulli and some idea of the sort of food likely to be served there. Feran Adrià spent a lot of time looking enigmatic but there was no insight into what drives him to keep experimenting with food. Oriol Castro has been with Adrià since 1998 and seems to do most of the hard work but there was no hint of what he gets out of his job, why he spends his time analysing, documenting and perfecting. Nor was there any sense that any of the chefs had a life outside the kitchen but surely they must. Although the film starts in the laboratory with the ideas that might become the season's menu and finishes in the restaurant with the food being prepared and sent out to the diners there was no sense of tension or drama and no clear progression from initial idea to finished dish.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi gave some of Jiro Ono's background and attempted to be more personal but also assumed that the audience was well informed about sushi and understood something of the history and culture of the sushi kitchen and the sushi master. I would have liked to be told more about sushi in general and what makes Jiro's sushi unique rather than having to make my own inferences.

But personal gripes aside both films were fascinating because of what they have to say about restaurants and dining out in general .On the one hand we have a restaurant which seats 52, situated in a quiet oasis at the seaside, where the meal takes four hours or more and consists of thirty odd 'courses'; on the other a little hole in the wall in the basement of a city office block which seats 10 people, where the meal consists of nineteen or twenty mouthfuls of food and takes about 30 minutes to consume. Both restaurants have three Michelin stars and neither offers the diner a menu. One is all about experimentation, innovation, constant change and challenge to traditional expectations, the other is all about precision, practise, perfection and the maintenance of tradition. One embraces technology the other shuns fancy equipment.

Seeing the workings of both kitchens and the contrasts between them begs the question of what a restaurant should be and, by extension, what diners expect from restaurants. Fundamentally there is the question of what role food plays in the dining experience – is what Adrià serves food at all or just a series of taste and texture sensations, is a series of twenty mouthfuls of raw fish and rice a meal, is the drama of the meal and the atmosphere of the venue more important than what is eaten?

What neither film explored was the role of the diner and the relationship of the diner and the chef in these two very different situations. In both cases the diner is at the mercy of the chef, to an extent that is not always usual in a restaurant, since without a menu he cannot choose or even anticipate what he will eat. How much he enjoys his meal will depend to some degree on the extent to which he understands what he is eating.

In Cooking in Progress we don't see anything of what happens once the food leaves the kitchen but reviews of el Bulli suggest that many diners struggle with the unfamiliar and the unexpected. They rationalise their reactions to the food on the basis that the meal is essentially an event, an entertainment, that they are there for the experience. Dining at el Bulli is at once all about the food and nothing to do with the food. At Sukiyabashi Ono the food and its freshness and simplicity is everything. For the diner to fully appreciate the chef's creation he must also appreciate the aesthetic. The only surprise from Jiro Ono is the perfection of his offerring.

At el Bulli the kitchen is full of people each preparing separate components or specific dishes, many hands make a contribution before the waiter takes the dish to the table. The diner sees little or nothing of the preparation of the food he eats and in many cases the waiter has to explain not just what he is presenting but how it should be eaten. The chef and the diner occupy different worlds where the intentions of one and the experience of the other may not always coincide. At Sukiyabashi Ono the diner and the chef inhabit the same space. Jiro Ono prepares each portion literally with his own hands, the food passes directly from the chef to the diner, and the chef then watches the diner eat. In this situation there is little scope for ambiguity but who wouldn't be intimidated eating under the watchful gaze of the sushi master.

Come to think of it my family eat their dinner every night under the scrutiny of the kitchen master, which is just one of the many reasons why eating at home is not the same as eating in a restaurant.

The latest rant from David Mitchell - Chef's Special

2011-07-18T17:54:00.000+10:00

Pellegrino Artusi and some thoughts on a national cuisine.

2011-06-24T15:32:00.000+10:00

I knew nothing of Pellegrino Artusi until I read Exciting Food for Southern Types* recently published by Penguin as part of their Great Food series. Exciting Food for Southern Types consists of extracts from Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene (translated as Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well). Apparently what was remarkable about that book when it was first published in 1891, and why it remains an Italian favourite, is that it was the first attempt at a truly Italian cookbook.

Today we have a fairly clear idea of what we understand by Italian cuisine but Italy as a unified country only came in to being in 1861 and in Artusi's day, although unified politically Italy was still coming to terms with cultural unity, an overall national identity and a national language. What he attempted to do in his cookbook was present a practical manual, meant to appeal to the newly affluent middle-calls housewife, bringing together recipes from all over the country and written in a language which every one could understand. As such La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare bene is seen as a revolutionary contribution to Italian culture and is credited with creating a language which allowed people in Italy to talk about food.

According to John Dickie** what culinary language there was in Italy in 1891 was split between French, the language of high-class cookbooks, of banquets and menus, and regional dialects, the languages actually spoken around the dinner table. In his discussion of 'Cacciucco' (fish stew) Artusi explains that this word 'is understood perhaps only in Tuscany and on the shores of the Mediterranean' elsewhere it is known as 'brodetto' whereas in Florence 'brodetto' means 'a soup with bread and broth, bound with beaten eggs and lemon juice. In Italy the confusion between these and other names from province to province is such that it is almost a second Tower of Babel.' He goes on to lament

After the unification of Italy, it seemed logical to me that we should think about unifying the spoken language, and yet few can be bothered with such an undertaking and many are outright hostile to it, perhaps because of false pride and the ingrained habit that Italians have of speaking their own regional dialect.

Artusi chose to use the formal, written language of public affairs, the Tuscan dialect and to make this accessible to his readers he included a glossary.

For his recipes Artusi drew on his own knowledge of food, derived from his travels and restaurant experiences and (in subsequent editions) on those provided by his readers, to record and codify what had until then been an almost entirely oral tradition of domestic cookery. The Italy of 1891 was only tenuously united, the various regions divided by history, climate and economics, the biggest divide being simply between north and south. The poor, hungry south with their olive oil, dry pasta and tomatoes, and the affluent, cultured north with their butter, polenta, rice and boiled meats. Born in Forlimpopoli, in Romagna, and living much of his life in Florence, Tuscany, it is hardly surprising that Artusi has something of a bias towards the food he knew best and subsequently the cooking of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany came to represent the ideal of Italian cuisine.

In an oft quoted article Arjun Appadurai ('How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India', Comparative Studies of Society and History, 30 (1), pp. 3-24 (1988)) makes the case for cookbooks allowing women from different groups to represent themselves to one another and communicate by exploring different tastes. Artusi's middle class audience were no doubt keen to learn more about their new country and what better way for the different regions to represent themselves to one another than through food. Over time recipe books play their part in breaking down geographic, cultural and class barriers to create some sort of homogeneous 'national' cuisine. It follows that in a culture where the traditional cuisine is handed down orally and by demonstration, and particularly in circumstances where there are tremendous regional differences there can be no national cuisine until someone writes it down. Now different parts of the one country can represent themselves to each other but further to that a codified, national cuisine allows the nation to present itself to the wider world. It seems to me that what has emerged in Italy is similar to the Indian situation Appadurai describes 'a national cuisine in which regional cuisines play an important role, and the national cuisine does not seek to hide its regional or ethnic roots.' The problem then becomes that the established notion of a national cuisine often involves regional stereotyping on the one hand and the inflation of a specific tradition to exemplify the whole on the other. The national cuisine becomes a simplification and it becomes what the outside world sees as the authentic/traditional cuisine. So Italian food outside Italy becomes nothing like Italian food served in Italy. The national cuisine which is exported to other countries atrophies because it is standardised. Even at their best cookbooks can only describe what ought to be done or what used to be done but can't quite get at the essence of what cooks are actually doing in the kitchen. Pizza and pasta for example are now ubiquitous but the pizza we get from the take away at the end of the street is nothing like an Italian pizza. The idea of pizza has been subsumed and perverted to suit Australian culinary concerns. When Pellegrino Artusi asked for 'Pasta margherita' he expected to get a sponge cake.
Even in his day Artusi observed that the 'other', the foreigner may then have expectations of 'traditional' food which adversely influences the cuisine so that what is served in Italy as traditional fare becomes a caricature.

Italian cuisine can rival the French, and in some respects actually surpasses it. However, due to the hordes of invading foreigners … our cuisine is slowly beginning to lose its special character in the swirl of wandering nations. These unfortunate changes in our diet have already begun to appear, particularly in the larger cities and in those areas heavily frequented by foreigners. I recently became convinced of this on a trip to Pompeii, where my travelling companion and I were preceded into a restaurant by a group of German tourists, ...and were served in the same fashion as they were. When the proprietor later came up and courteously asked how we liked our dinners, I took the liberty of commenting on the nauseating slop of seasonings we had just been served. He replied, 'Our cooking has to please these foreigners, since this is how we make our living'. Perhaps this is the same reason Bolognese cuisine has begun to change,...and no longer deserves the reputation it once had.

But I digress. Artusi was not a chef. In 1891 he was seventy one, a retired silk merchant with literary pretensions and a passion for food. When he had no success finding someone to publish his recipes he printed the first 1000 copies of Science in the Kitchen at his own expense, with a dedication to his two white cats. According to Dickie he initially managed the whole operation himself, selling the book from his home and personally signing every copy. His original volume contained 475 recipes which had grown to 790 by the fourteenth edition published in 1911, the year of his death. Since then it has never been out of print.

Much of the original appeal of Science in the Kitchen, and what makes it appealing to the reader today, is it's style and tone. Artusi was well educated, well read, well fed and well travelled. He was a noted raconteur and a celebrated host and his text flows much like a lively conversation at a dinner party. He addresses the reader as a friend and confidante in a witty and chatty tone interspersing recipes with anecdotes, historical asides and advice such as 'the best sauce you can offer your guests is a happy expression on your face and heartfelt hospitality'. The title Exciting Food for Southern Types comes from his observations on the English taste for unseasoned vegetables, 'we southern types need our food to be a little more exciting.'

I don't know how representative Exciting Food for Southern Types is of the whole of Artusi's work but he certainly sounds as though he would have been a charming dinner guest. Who could resist his introduction to 'Salsa di magro per condire le paste asciutte' (Meatless sauce for pasta), 'this sauce is like a young woman whose face is not particularly striking or attractive at first glance, but whose delicate and discreet features you might indeed find attractive upon closer observation' or his address to 'Dear Mr. Meat Loaf',

I know that you are modest and humble, because, given your background, you feel inferior to many others. But take heart and do not doubt that with a few words in your favor you shall find someone who wants to taste you and who might even reward you with a smile

Artusi never married. In his will Dickie says 'he left the bulk of his estate to a home for Forlimpopoli's least fortunate inhabitants' and the future royalties from his book to his servants Marietta Sabatini and Francesco Ruffili who had tested all his recipes and without whom there may not have been a book at all.

*All Artusi quotes are from Exciting Food for Southern Types, Penguin Books, London, 2011. These extracts are taken from the translation published in the USA in 1997 which I think must be a translation of the final 1911 edition. Clues in the text suggest that it is certainly later than 1900. I reviewed Exciting Food for Southern Types for The Gastronomer's Bookshelf here.

**John Dickie, Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and their Food, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2007

Eliza Acton and Modern Cookery

2011-06-21T17:08:00.000+10:00

Everyone (well everyone that is who writes an introduction to one of the editions of Modern Cookery*) agrees on the bare bones of Eliza Acton's life. She was born in 1799 and her father was a brewer. At 17 or so she opened a school for girls which ran for a few years and then she went to France. By 1826 she was back in England and a book of her poems was published. Other poems and articles subsequently appeared in newspapers but when she approached her publishers, Longmans, to print another volume of poetry (some time in the late 1830s) they sent her away suggesting that she might prefer to write a cookery book.

Was the publisher serious or was this his idea of a cruel joke? “My dear Miss Acton, you have as much chance of getting these poems published as you do of writing a cookery book!” Or was he in the same entrepreneurial mould as Sam Beeton? “My dear Miss Acton, don't waste your talents on minor poetry. The future lies in the kitchen. If you want to make us both rich go forth and produce receipts.' Did he just want to be rid of her or did she already have a reputation as a bit of a foodie? Had he been to dinner at the Acton's and realised there was potential here? Did they discuss her future over lunch and did Eliza give him her views on the present state of English food? Why suggest to Eliza Acton, a spinster in her late 30s with literary pretensions, that she go away and write a recipe book? Sad to say we may never know, but in 1845 she was back on the door step with the manuscript of Modern Cookery for Private Families and the rest is history. The book was still in print in 1914, having run to forty editions (the last was 1908) and sold 60,000 copies.

So what was so modern about Modern Cookery?
Acton is concerned with with addressing a modern audience, hers is perhaps the first cookery book written specifically for an urban middle class. The full title Modern Cookery for Private Families makes it clear that her work is concerned with domestic cookery in the private home, not with professional cooks or haute cuisine. She dedicates Modern Cookery to 'the young housekeepers of England'. Were they servants employed as housekeepers or middle class women much like herself who were running their own household with limited means and few staff; women who may have been able to employ maids but probably didn't run to a full-time cook; who aspired to gentility but were also having to devote time to the management of their own homes in the absence of a professional housekeeper.

In her preface she makes her intentions very clear

It is a popular error to imagine that what is called good cookery is adapted only to the establishments of the wealthy, and that it is beyond the reach of those who are not affluent. On the contrary, it matters comparatively little whether some dishes, amidst an abundant variety, be prepared in their perfection or not; but it is of the utmost consequence that the food which is served at the more simply supplied tables of the middle classes should all be well and skilfully prepared ** (1855)

She aims to present 'thoroughly explicit and minute instructions ' which may be 'readily comprehended and carried out by any class of learners'. She did not expect her readers to have had much if any previous cooking experience.

To achieve her goals she employed two very modern approaches. She 'trusted nothing to others' and tested every receipt herself and she introduced the novel feature of a 'summary appended to the receipts, of the different ingredients which they contain, with the exact proportion of each, and the precise time required to dress the whole'. Hers is the first recipe book to suggest that cooking might be reduced to a rational and almost scientific discipline. It is these innovations, her personal comments and observations and her precise and practical approach, which really single Acton out as the first truly modern cookery writer.

For the twenty first century reader it is the mix of the modern, ideas and recipes which still sound modern to our ears, with the quaint and old fashioned which makes Acton particularly interesting. Although her audience was becoming increasingly urbanised and able to purchase a wide range of ingredients she still writes for cooks who will have access to their own supplies of seasonal fruit and vegetables – she goes into great detail about the making of jams for instance and the likely variations in crops from year to year and her recipe for 'Birthday Syllabub' calls for a large bowl containing sugar, lemon juice, port wine, sherry and brandy to be placed directly under the cow 'and milk it full'. At the same time she is familiar with the work of 'Baron Leibeg' and the latest thinking on the nutritional value of foodstuffs. She is more cosmopolitan than her predecessors including recipes for curries and even recommending the use of ready made 'currie- paste' (preferably Captain White's), alongside exotic dishes such as 'The King of Oude's omlet' and 'Risotto à la Milanaise,' In the preface to the original 1845 edition of Modern Cookery she notes that although 'until within very recent years [English] cookery has remained far inferior to that of countries much less advanced in civilisation … we have ceased to be too bigoted, or too proud to profit by the superior information and experience of others upon any subject of utility.'. All the same there is a preponderance of traditional, often stodgy, recipes, for example nine different ways of preparing a calf's head. However modern some of the tastes roasting is still done on a spit, the oven is addressed as something of a novelty and although 'a goose, a leg of pork and a suckling pig, if properly attended to while in the oven, are said to be nearly, or quite as good as if roasted' baking is only really considered an option if you have no other choice. Along with a Bottle Jack for roasting meat Acton's well equipped kitchen requires 'two or three mortars in varying sizes', hair sieves and well tinned copped pans. Cooking was labour intensive and time consuming.

The preface to the 1855 edition of Modern Cookery begins with a familiar, modern lament

It cannot be denied that an improved system of practical domestic cookery, and a better knowledge of its first principles, are still much needed in this country; where, from ignorance, or from mismanagement in their preparation, the daily waste of excellent provisions almost exceeds belief'

and her disdain for style over substance also has a modern ring to it,

Merely to please the eye by such fanciful and elaborate decorations as distinguish many modern dinners, or to flatter the palate by the production of new and enticing dainties, ought not to be the principal aim...of any work on cookery.

Her detailed instructions on how to 'broil' beef steaks (only season with pepper but never salt, heat the grid iron, turn the steaks 'but once') and how to make marmalade, and her recipes for very many dishes such as Christmas Pudding and 'English Sauce for Salad' can be followed just as easily, and with excellent results, today as they could be in 1845. That said however the need to translate the original recipes into modern measurements and cooking times and temperatures perhaps makes Modern Cookery less appealing today than it was originally (although the Quadrille edition does come with a conversion chart). A close reading of Acton only confirms that whilst the present day modern cook has access to a bewildering range of ingredients and kitchen equipment may have changed significantly basic techniques of course have not. It is equally clear that her attention to detail has ensured that her recipes have provided the foundation for subsequent generations of cookery writers.

Acton writes with authority and conviction, in the same vein as say Elizabeth David or Stephanie Alexander, and, like them, with the knowledge that can only come from personal experience and observation in the kitchen. She assures her reader that all her recipes, 'with a few trifling exceptions which are scrupulously specified', can be 'perfectly depended on, from having been proved beneath our own roof and under our own personal inspection' and the detail provided in her observations would suggest that she may have actually put on her apron and rolled up her sleeves to do the cooking herself. It is her confidant voice, her enthusiasm and her somewhat convoluted prose which makes this book such a pleasure to read. Every page yields some little gem of wisdom or insight into the Victorian kitchen such as

potato flour 'can at present be procured at most foreign warehouses and general grocers'; but we would recommend its being home-made'
'Genuine amateurs seldom take prepared sauce or gravy with their steaks, as they consider the natural juices of the meat sufficient'
'the quantity of onion, eschalot, or garlic used for a currrie should be regulated by the taste of the persons for whom it is prepared; the very large proportions of them which are acceptable to some eaters, preventing others altogether from partaking of the dish'
'Fruit steamed in bottles is now vended and consumed in very large quantities in this country, but it is not wholesome, as it produces often...violent derangement of the system.'
'No attempt should be made to braise a joint in any vessel which is not very nearly of its own size'
and her advice on beating egg whites 'it is a mistake to suppose that they cannot be too long beaten, as after they are brought to a state of perfect firmness they are injured by a continuation of the whisking'

Where did her recipes come from? She tells us that the 'toil' of writing Modern Cookery was 'so completely at variance with all the previous habits of my life' which suggests she may not have had much first hand experience of cooking. Her mother had taken in boarders from the Tonbridge School so perhaps some like that for 'Bordyke Veal Cake' (named after their residence in Tonbridge) and 'Acton Gingerbread' originated in the family kitchen. She makes clear that some s are the 'Author's original recipe'. Eliza had travelled to France so perhaps some of her knowledge of French and even of German and Italian cooking was acquired then. Perhaps she had a reputation for keeping a good table and a good cook in her kitchen who did much of the experimenting (Although given her attitude too plagiarism, the 'unscrupulous' appropriation of 'large portions' of her work 'without the slightest acknowledgement', she would undoubtedly have given credit where it was due if this was the case.). She was the eldest of five children so perhaps she swapped recipe ideas with her siblings and other members of her extended family ('Aunt Charlotte's Biscuits' for example). She credits some of her sources such as 'a highly intelligent medical man who has been for twenty years a resident in the Mauritius', 'a friend who had long experience ...in India, 'an American gentleman'. The range of her recipes and the depth of her knowledge, both of techniques and of foreign foods, suggests a lively interest in all aspects of food and its preparation and a broad circle of friends and acquaintances with whom she discussed her work.

Recipe books don't tell us what people actually ate. They give us an idea of what the household might have aspired to eat, what foodstuffs were perhaps generally available but not which dishes actually appeared regularly on the dinner table. Regardless of social status the Victorian dinner was very much hostage to the cook and her skills, enthusiasm and experience. Acton's book is a mixture of nostalgia for the past, traditional plain English fare, up to the minute ideas and exotic specialities. In England, French food or French influenced cooking had been the preserve of the wealthy who could employ foreign chefs. Acton brings 'foreign' food within the realm of the those 'private families' with social pretensions and a regard for fashion. Did the households who still had access to their own cow for fresh milk also experiment with 'A Simple Syrian Pilaw'? Did families sitting down to a boiled calf's head accompany it with 'Curried Macaroni' or with a 'Puree of Tomatas'? The food on the Victorian dinner table had the potential to be appetising and varied although it might only have been the tables of the wealthier more urban families which ran to such variety. The best pasta for example was to be had from Mr Cobbett's of Pall Mall which 'is not a professedly cheap house, but all that he supplies is of excellent quality'. What Modern Cookery does do is give a glimpse into a world on the verge of great changes, a taste of cookery on the brink of what we now call modern.

Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management may be better known today but given that a fair percentage of Beeton's recipes are lifted straight from Modern Cookery ***, Acton should at least be credited with her contribution to Beeton's success. Elizabeth David asserts that 'it is difficult to find any standard cookery compendium of the latter part of the Victorian era ...which do not include a quantity of Miss Acton's recipes'. Moreover Mrs David considers Miss Acton's volume to be 'the greatest cookery book in our language'.

*Modern Cookery for Private Families,Quadrille, London, 2011 (with an introduction by Jill Norman)
The Best of Eliza Acton, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, 1974 (Edited by Elizabeth Ray with an introduction by Elizabeth David)
Penguin have also recently published a selection from Modern Cookery entitled The Elegant Economist (Penguin Books, London, 2011)
A biography of Eliza Acton The Real Mrs Beeton. The Story of Eliza Acton by Sheila Hardy is due to be published by History Press in October 2011.
** She goes on to say 'particularly as it is from these classes that the men principally emanate to whose indefatigable industry, high intelligence, and active genius, we are mainly indebted for our advancement in science, in art, in literature, and in general civilisation' which just goes to show that she wasn't all that modern in her thinking!
*** In The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (Harper Perennial, London, 2006) Kathryn Hughes attributes a third of Beeton's soup recipes, a quarter of her fish dishes and 'many other preparations besides' to Eliza Acton.

Adrian and Tony come to town

2011-05-26T16:43:00.002+10:00

Both Adrian Anthony Gill and Anthony Bourdain were in Sydney this month for the Sydney Writer's Festival. Any of the writers who were in town must have thought they had died and gone to heaven - the weather was perfect, gentle autumn sunshine everyday, the venue (down by the harbour, in the shadow of the Harbour Bridge) is gorgeous and there were huge crowds of people milling around ready to hang on their every word and buy their books. For me the Festival is an opportunity to put a person to the face you've only seen on television or to the voice you've heard on the radio or perhaps just in your head. And there seem to be precious few opportunities to hear interesting people talk about food so I was a presence at several of the Gill and/or Bourdain sessions.
Adrian was just as eloquent and angry in the flesh as he is in print, although perhaps even more arrogant and uncompromising and dare I say it somewhat rude and ungenerous, both to his interviewers and his audience. I know his raison d'être is to be provocative but constantly playing for the laughs and the boos wears a bit thin after a while. They both appeared relaxed and confident but Adrian seemed more like a clever school boy compared to Bourdain who was suave, urbane, patient and polite. Both of them were however very honest and Gill spoke quite freely about his alcoholism and his dyslexia while Anthony certainly has made no secret of his past.
As is nearly always the case with interviews the interviewer rarely asks the questions you might want to hear answered and you can't help but feel sorry for 'celebrities' who have to come up with some sort of answer never mind how inane the question, however there were one or two exchanges which were at least worth thinking about.

1. One of Gill's criticisms of Britain is that it is a nostalgic country, that there is a general feeling that the best is in the past and therefore that the past has to be preserved. So the modern is just a reworking of what has worked before which is debilitating in contrast to countries like Australia where there is a general sense of optimism and looking outward rather than inward and backward. It struck me that this is exactly the contrast between what say Blumenthal is doing at the Fat Duck, and more particularly his London restaurant Dinner, and Redzepi is doing at Noma. The food that Blumenthal presents is often grounded in some historical precedent, as though it needs some sort of justification, although it uses modern techniques, whereas Redzepi and Adrià don't appear concern themselves with the past at all.
Both Gill and Bourdain think Adrià is a genius but at the same time they were scathing about interminable degustation menus, restaurants serving food which has to be explained and the notion of a landscape on the plate. Would that someone had asked how they reconcile what appear to be opposing views - the menu at elBulli is interminable, many of the dishes need to be explained and the appearance of the food on the plate is highly contrived. The answer I expect lies in the notion that Adrià knows/understands what he is doing whereas lesser mortals don't and are just being pretentious, but I'm not so convinced myself. However I can't claim to have actually eaten at elBulli so herewith an excerpt from Gill's review which appeared in The Sunday Times on September 28, 2008 (which you can access here)

This is just very, very good cooking: intense, and obtusely original, in the sense that it’s not rooted in history or region or culinary orthodoxy or fashion. It certainly isn’t Spanish. It manipulates a worldwide variety of ingredients. We were given 38 courses that came without fuss or fanfare, at intervals dictated by how fast we ate, not how slowly the kitchen could cook. Most of it was eaten with fingers in a mouthful or two. The combinations of flavours and textures and methods are challenging, but never overpowering, and often astonishing. I’m loath to describe the ingredients: they sound comical or disgusting. Food on paper is only ever an approximation of food in the mouth, and it relies on a shared experience, and if you haven’t eaten here, you haven’t had the experience.

2. Both men were asked on more than one occasion to comment on organic food. There was a consensus that the 'movement' was more of a marketing campaign than anything else since 'organic' does not necessarily have much at all to do with quality but has everything to to with creating feelings of guilt and promoting a two tier food system. Whilst a general concern about food politics and food policies, about the provenance of our food, should lead to improvements (more options, more variety) for all (food consumers and food producers) anything which promotes elitism and snobbery ('farm to table' for example is a bit of a nonsense since all food comes from some sort of farm) is antithetical to good eating. Bourdain in particular argued that the chef is not in the business of politics but the business of pleasure, his concern is deliciousness so, for example, he wouldn't use animals which had been mistreated because said animals wouldn't taste good.

3. On the ethics of eating or at least on the ethics of eating meat it appears that the current criterion is whether or not you would be prepared to eat human flesh. Well it goes without saying that Adrian would and Tony seemed to think that it made sense in the right circumstances, given that both of them had to admit that there wasn't much that was edible that they hadn't already tried at some time. But Gill went on further to suggest that food is all about eating other people, that is their fresh air, their labour, their water, their land and their culture. Is this a profound statement or just more Gill-speak? He also said that he didn't much care if animals did suffer, reasoning that we should be giving our time and attention to human rights -his example being that most Ghanaian dishwashers are treated far worse than the geese force fed to make foie gras. We should be more concerned about the welfare of people who work in kitchens (and by extension the people who produce our food at all levels) before we started worrying about animals.

4. Both also agreed that eating is less about what we eat and more about who we eat with. Gill makes the point that humans are the only animals who can make eye contact while they eat signifying that we can eat together without being competitive. Which might be true (more Gill-speak?) but humans do use food to demonstrate status - both intellectual, cultural and social - so eating is to some extent competitive albeit on a more sophisticated level that actually snatching the food off someone else's plate.

5. Adrian Gill also had some thought provoking things to say about electronic media. Not surprisingly he remains a staunch advocate of the free press, by which he means printed newspapers.(He does work for Rupert Murdoch.) He spoke particularly about the discipline involved with print, the editing and peer review, the attention to quality which was, in his opinion, not evident in most of the material churned out on the internet (in particular by bloggers whose opinions are worthless - he called the internet a virtuous circle of self-satisfaction!). More particularly, and this from someone who is regularly in trouble for his caustic comments, he doesn't like the tone of the internet, the indiscriminate anger evident in the anonymous comments people make, going so far as to say that anonymity is offensive to humanity.

So I wouldn't invite A. A. Gill home for dinner (well he wouldn't come anyway because he doesn't go to dinner parties - not since he sent the food back at the last one he was invited to) but he certainly isn't afraid of being controversial and contrary. He might be a bit smug and self-satisfied but you could never call him boring or predictable. The world would certainly be a poorer place if we didn't have people like him to make us think and question, to justify our own stance on food issues and face up to our prejudices, preconceptions and pretensions. Anthony Bourdain on the other hand could come round for dinner anytime, he would be much too polite to refuse the food on offer, but I doubt the conversation would be as lively.

The Food Fighters panel, Gill and Bourdain 'moderated' by a hapless Tony Bilson (recorded live at the Sydney Town Hall on 19 May) can be accessed here

Apple Season

2011-05-25T18:30:00.000+10:00

For those of us who live in the suburbs of Sydney, this is what apple season really looks like. (Not a Pink Lady in sight.)

Eating Out - the Wedding Feast at Cana

2011-04-11T17:14:00.000+10:00

Many a visitor to the Louvre comes away a little disappointed by the Mona Lisa. To my mind she looks a little drab and small for all the attention she is given and these days it is impossible to get anywhere near her because of all the security precautions to say nothing of all the tour groups. If you stand facing her you also miss out on one of the greatest joys of a visit to this museum, a painting that La Gioconda has eternity to contemplate, Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana.

It is impossible to get a real sense of this painting from reproductions because it is enormous – 6.77 metres high by 9.94 metres wide. Painted in 1562-3, it was originally commissioned by the Benedictine monks of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice to fill one whole wall at the end of their refectory. Since then the canvas has had a chequered history. It has survived being cut in half and spirited to France by Napoleon, been preserved through numerous European wars and most recently been restored after being damaged whilst hanging in the Louvre. Although the original still resides at the Louvre, thanks to modern technology a facsimile now hangs in the proper location at San Giorgio Maggiore.

Veronese's subject is Christ's first miracle, the turning of water into wine, which was performed at a wedding banquet in the village of Cana. Christ was a guest at the banquet along with his mother and his disciples. When it is apparent that there is no more wine for the guests Jesus instructs the servants to fill containers with water which when tasted has turned into excellent wine. Veronese's version of these events does not depict a simple, rustic feast in a dusty village but a sumptuous Venetian banquet. No doubt the monks contemplating this scene as they ate would have been aware of all sorts of religious symbolism. I am more interested in what this painting can tell us about dining in Renaissance Italy.

First of al I love the colours – the glorious blue of the sky and rich colours used to convey the luxurious fabrics worn by the wedding guests and the officials involved with the feast. The fabulous outfits worn by the bride and groom on the left of the picture, the velvety green of the man on the left (supposedly the governor of Cana, the master of ceremonies) presenting the wine to the groom and the rich brocade of the wine steward on the right examining the wine in his glass.

The sense of luxury attests to the wealth of Venice and the power of its citizens as does the rather eclectic attire of the guests. Powerful family dynasties used marriages to forge strategic political alliances with other courts in Italy and Europe, and welcomed aristocratic visitors and guests from far away and exotic places. Men of status used banquets as a means both to show off and to maintain that status. The celebration of an event such as a wedding was an opportunity to demonstrate hospitality and to communicate wealth and power.
What you served your guest and how you served it also communicated who you were. In this case the table is covered with a crisp, white cloth and laid with expensive looking plate. Everyone appears to have their own place setting including a knife, fork and napkin suggesting not just wealth but also up to the minute fashion, testimony to the host's good taste and sophistication.

Intricately folded table napkins were becoming popular table decorations. Eating with forks was still something of a novelty as was the idea of eating from individual plates rather than sharing from a common dish. The wine is served in delicate glass goblets – with large shallow bowls which maximised the amount of wine exposed to the air – which is also an allusion to the skill of Venetian glass makers. At the top of the staircase on the left of the painting jugs and plates are being taken down from the credenza where they were displayed for all to see. Cold food was prepared on the serving tables adjacent to the credenza.

Although no one seems to be eating much and there doesn't seem to be much food on the tables there is a flurry of activity in the background indicative of the number of people and the amount of effort involved in producing food for a lavish banquet. Food was usually presented as a sequence of hot and cold dishes and a meal might consist of nine or ten courses, each course consisting of several different dishes. Perhaps by not showing food on the table Veronese was avoiding any suggestion of gluttony while creating a table and a setting which would reflect an occasion befitting the attendance of Christ as a guest and also the Benedictine dictum of hospitality.

All the guests seem to be enjoying themselves, chatting to one another (although none of them do appear to be actually talking), taking in what is going on around them and enjoying the musical entrainment. There is a real sense of conviviality.
There are two things which puzzle me about this picture. The first is the woman on the left who is looking down the table at the bride with what looks like a toothpick in her hand.

Bejewelled toothpicks were probably still fashionable at this time, they appear in household inventories which survive in the Archivio do Stato in Venice, although the the practice of wearing them on a chain around the neck may have been considered a little uncouth. However from the examples that survive and the paintings which show them being worn, these toothpicks were curved, talon like whereas whatever Veronese's young woman is using appears to be straight. One suggestion is that she is sucking pensively on a fork.* She is obviously doing something, and something distinctive which sets her apart from the others at the table. Whatever it is Veronese included it deliberately but why? Veronese included lots of little details that his viewers must surely have found acceptable and recognisable - like the number of dogs and cats there are in the scene.

There are only two characters in the painting who look out at the viewer. Amidst all the back and forth in the background and the chatter and activity in the foreground Christ sits in the centre, calm and tranquil, gazing down on the monks as they eat their meal. Clearly not against everyone having a good time Jesus remains aloof from the action around him.

The only other person not entirely involved with the action in the painting is the bride herself. She seems oblivious to what is going on around her – to the earnest man on her left who seems to be talking to her, to her husband on her right, to the pageboy handing up the glass of wine, to all the noise and commotion. What is she thinking? What did Veronese intend we should think of her?

*This is the suggestion of Roy Strong in his Feast. A History of Grand Eating (Jonathan Cape, London, 2002)

The information on toothpicks comes from Nicholas Penny, 'Introduction: toothpicks and green hangings', Renaissance Studies, Vol. 19, no 5, pp. 581-590.

See also Katherine A. McIver 'Banqueting at the Lord's Table in Sixteenth-Century Venice', Gastronomica,Vol. 8, no. 3, pp.8 -11, Valerie Taylor “Banquet plate and Renaissance culture: a day in the life', Renaissance Studies, Vol. 19, No. 5, pp.621 – 633, and Nichola Fletcher, Charlemagne's Tabelcloth, A Piquant History of Feasting (Orion Books, London, 2005).

To see how the painting in its original context and to learn more about the facsimile go to Factum Arte.

Ode to the Aubergine.

2011-03-24T16:23:00.000+11:00

Still life with tomatoes, a bowl of aubergines and onions
Luis Meléndez
oil on canvas, 36.8x49cm
Derek Johns, London

Luis Meléndez is one of my favourite still life artists and so I wanted one of his works to illustrate my Ode to the Aubergine. Unfortunately in this instance he seems to be more interested in the tomato. What does please me about this painting is its simplicity - the plain wooden table, the rustic pottery bowl, the feeling that these vegetables have been plonked down on the kitchen table ready to be sliced up for the next meal - and the way the subject fills the field of vision and focuses your attention.
Meléndez painted the ordinary things of everyday life, the fruit and vegetables and kitchen objects he would have found in his kitchen at home. Neither the tomato nor the aubergine is native to Europe. Tomatoes were brought back from the New World by Spanish and Portuguese explorers. Unusual both in appearance and taste, and a member of the suspicious nightshade family, the tomato didn't become generally acceptable in gastronomy until the 18th century. Aubergines, also nightshades, originated in India and travelled along earlier trade routes, certainly coming to southern Spain with the Muslim occupation if not before.
Meléndez painting suggests that the artist probably liked his food and knew that aubergines and tomatoes and onions were made for each other, with the implication also that by this time (the 1770s) these ingredients were no longer unusual. Thanks to the way he brings his subject to life, when you look at this painting today you don't just see what Meléndez saw but you can almost taste what he tasted. The stars of the show, the tomatoes, with their wonderful rich colour and their glorious sheen promise intense flavour while the hoary, prickly calyxes of the aubergines hide their contents suggesting that there might be hidden pleasures inside.The onions are subordinate but have a significant role both in the structure of the painting and the flavour of the dish to be prepared.
What interests me too is that some 240 years after Meléndez arranged this composition all the ingredients are still immediately recognisable for what they are, albeit that the deeply ridged tomatoes are now what we would call 'heirloom' and the aubergines look small and undernourished compared to the commercial varieties which we are picking from the garden at the moment.
Hence my Ode to the Aubergine.
The plants themselves are lush and robust with big, lobed, slightly downy soft green leaves and small unassuming purple flowers. They have been so easy to grow - seemingly oblivious to any sort of pest or disease (although one or two have succumbed to sunburn) and existing on minimal amounts of rain. Everyday I pick more of the fruit, heavy and tight in their skins, so shiny they look as though they have been polished and a deep purple-black like no other colour.
And we have eaten them in every form you can think of, dishes with exotic names to do justice to the exotic appearance of the fruit - smokey baba ghanoush style dips, parmigiana di melanzane, tian d'aubergines, ratatouille, caponata, imam bayildi, moussaka, melitzanes papoutsakia, baigan pachchadi and the cupboard is stacked with jars of kasaundi. I've fried them, grilled them, baked them, barbecued them; sliced them into rounds, sliced them length ways, cut them into cubes, scooped out the flesh and stuffed them, and still they keep coming. It's tempting to think of the poor aubergine as a cross between Jack's bean stalk and something out of The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
On the other hand when struggling with what to feed the family there is great pleasure in knowing that there is always something in the garden to provide inspiration.
From me the aubergine gets five stars - good to grow, good to look at, good to cook with, good to eat and good to share. My Turkish friend Haluk turns 50 today and his gift will be a bag full of freshly picked aubergines which I know he will appreciate and put to good use.

What price milk?

2011-03-16T07:45:00.000+11:00

Still life with milk can and apples
Paul Cézanne, oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The big supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, are selling their generic brand fresh full cream milk for $1 per litre. Two questions - how and why?
How can they afford to do this? Well Woolworths admit that they are only reducing their prices to be competitive and that they don't see how they can maintain this level of cost cutting. To date it is the retailers who are bearing the reduction in profit but dairy farmers are justifiably anxious about the long term implications for them if supermarket prices remain this low.
Dairy farming is no picnic since cows produce milk all day everyday and someone has to be around to see that they are milked. The raw milk is then sent off for processing. The processors sell their own brand of milk and also negotiate a price with their customers and competitors - the supermarkets. The dairy farmer is paid by the processor at a rate which clearly depends on the price the processor receives for the pasteurised milk. The processor gets a higher return on his own branded milk than on generic, supermarket brand milk so whilst lowering the price of milk in the supermarket may mean that more milk is sold overall the return to the farmer must eventually be reduced. Coles may well argue that they are not out to hurt the farmers and really only want greater transparency of farm gate pricing but at $1 per litre surely no one makes and money - transportation, refrigeration and packaging alone must eat up most of the price.

Why are Coles cutting the price of milk? Well the answer seems to be 'because they can'. In marketing terms they presumably hope that by cutting the prices on essential items customers will flock to their stores in the belief that Coles only wants what is best for their patrons. Along the way of course the shoppers will buy other items and eventually be so convinced that a Coles supermarket is a consumer paradise they will never want to shop anywhere else.

What alarms me is the power that retailers have to control what we eat - not just what we can afford to buy but what is actually available to us. Whether Coles persist with maintaining this price war or not it is worth pondering what might result if they do. One consequence might be that branded milk disappears from the supermarket altogether. In other words you buy Coles/Woolworths milk or you have to seek out milk from small independent dairies which will inevitably be more expensive. (At the moment it is possible to buy milk from independent processors but at around two and a half times the current price of Coles milk).
The two largest milk processors in Australia - National Foods and Parmalat - are not Australian companies. It probably doesn't matter all that much to them whether Australians have fresh milk in their supermarkets or not. According to Coles 50 percent of our milk production is exported and only 25 percent of total production is fresh milk, so one consequence might well be that fresh milk disappears from the supermarket altogether and we end up only producing, if not importing, UHT milk. Anyone who has travelled in Europe will know that in many places UHT milk is much more common than fresh, refrigerated milk.

Clearly we can't rely on the moral conscience of the people who run the supermarket chains to make long term decisions about our food supply.Who has the authority to stop Coles and/or Woolworths doing whatever they want? As consumers one approach would be to boycott Coles and Woolworths and only buy branded milk. At least this strategy would mean that the dairy farmers would continue to get a reasonable return for their product. This is easy for me to say because I can afford to pay for my principles. I don't buy fresh fruit or vegetables or meat from the supermarket and never buy anything that is a house brand but there are plenty of others who do and who welcome a reduction in a family staple with open arms.
Only buying milk from independent, locally owned processors sounds like a good idea but again only for those who can afford it and with the proviso that probably this approach won't be much help the dairy farmers who rely on contracts with the two big processors.
Given the amount of milk my children consume I have often toyed with the idea of taking control of our milk supply and buying a cow of my own but I think there are probably local council regulations which have something to say about grazing cattle in the local park.

What I don't understand is why they, that is the Federal Government, doesn't/can't do something. Isn't that what governments are for? If part of the role of government is to see that everyone has access to an education and to health care don't they also have a responsibility to ensure that everyone has access to a healthy and stable food supply?
CHOICE advocate a National Food Policy (how is it possible that we don't already have one?) in the belief that 'a more centralised approach is needed to ensure the many and varied players along the food supply chain operate in a co-ordinated and strategic manner'. Hear, hear!!!

For CHOICE see here
For Coles and their current marketing strategies see here

How Cornish is the Cornish pasty?

2011-02-25T18:29:00.001+11:00

The Cornish pasty has been granted 'Protected Geographical Indication' (PGI) status by the European Commission. What does this mean?
Henceforward a Cornish pasty is a savoury, D-shaped pasty which is filled with beef, vegetables and seasonings. Any sort of pastry can be used provided it is savoury and 'robust enough to retain shape throughout the cooking, cooling and handling process and serves to avoid splitting or cracking.' The pastry is crimped by hand or mechanically 'to one side, and never on top'.
A Cornish pasty must contain not less then 25% vegetables which must be sliced or diced potato, swede/turnip and onion only, not less than 12.5% meat which must be minced or diced beef and seasonings. No other types of meat or vegetables or any artificial additives can be used and all filling ingredients must be uncooked at the time of sealing the product.
And to be called a Cornish pasty the product must be assembled in the designated area of Cornwall.

Now the European Commission don't go around the countryside looking for things to classify, chances are they would never have heard of the Cornish pasty if it hadn't been for the Cornish Pasty Association. And who are they? Well you might not be entirely surprised to learn that they are a group of Cornish pasty makers who just happen to all be in Cornwall and are concerned 'to protect the quality and the reputation of the Cornish pasty and to stop consumers being misled by pasty makers who trade off the value of the name without producing a genuine product.' They believe 'protection of the Cornish pasty is necessary in order to safeguard the heritage of the Cornish pasty, the future of the industry and the reputation of the product.'

Safeguarding traditional foodstuffs and the heritage of their production is all part of the modern nostalgia for the past, a back lash against the commercialisation of food production and the fear that local traditions and even national identities will disappear into the blandness of globalisation. In Cornwall the pasty is historically associated with the mining industry. It was a neat, convenient and economical meal for the labouring man. The crimped edge was held by the miner as he ate and then discarded because contaminated with the grime from his hands. So the pasty is an unashamedly proletarian foodstuff, a reminder of hard times and hard work. Now that the mining industry in Cornwall is no more (although the mining landscape has been granted World Heritage Status) the poor pasty becomes a potent symbol of the 'good old days' albeit one which is commercialised and now standardised.

Will being granted PGI achieve the stated aims of the Cornish Pasty Association? Simply standardising the ingredients is surely no guarantee of the quality of the finished product. To qualify to carry a Cornish pasty logo, proof of authenticity, there is no requirement that the raw ingredients be sourced from within Cornwall, so there is no suggestion, for example, that turnips grown in Cornish soil are essential to the final flavour. Many consumers are unlikely to find a pasty made with puff pastry equal in quality to one made with shortcrust pastry (made with lard of course), and many consumers already consider that a pasty made with mince in highly inferior to one made with diced beef whether made in Cornwall or not. In fact to qualify as Cornish it is only 'the assembly of the pasties in preparation for baking' which must take place in the designated area, the actual baking does not have to be done in Cornwall. So what's Cornish about the Cornish pasty?
Is it cynical to suggest that the Cornish Pasty Association is less interested in protecting the good name of the pasty and more interested in the future of the industry in Cornwall and ensuring that 'consumers willing to pay a premium price for a genuine article' will make an appropriate contribution to the Cornish economy?

Safeguarding tradition is something that Cornish families have been doing for centuries and Cornish pasties are consumed in countries around the world. Does it matter that some of them may contain carrots and have the crimping on the top rather than at the side? Perhaps it is no bad thing that there is some standardised recipe for a Cornish pasty just so that no one ever gets the idea that pastry stuffed with Tandoori chicken might have originated in Cornwall but to suggest that only pasties which are made to that recipe AND 'assembled' in Cornwall can rightfully be called Cornish pasties seems – well at least odd, if not down right silly.

For more on the Cornish pasty and what some people think of the granting of PGI status see here and here
The Cornish Pasty Association are here and you can read their application for PGI status here and click on the link.
The images above are from the Cornish Pasty Association website.

On discovering Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher

2011-02-21T18:29:00.001+11:00

This photograph of M. F. K. Fisher in her study, April 28 1971 by Robert Drew,
appeared in the Guardian, 11 August 2010.

'Mrs. Fisher is as talented a writer as she is a cook. Indeed, I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose. If a reader wishes to test this assertion, let him turn to the first three pages of the section in An Alphabet for Gourmets entitled I is for Innocence.'

So says W. H. Auden, writing in 1963, in his introduction to The Art of Eating, a compilation of five of M.F.K. Fisher's books – Serve it Forth (1937), Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943) and An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949). As a newcomer to Mrs.Fisher's prose, I decided I should begin by testing it as suggested.

In ' I is for Innocence' she writes of the ghastliest meal of her life which was prepared for her by a friend she describes as 'a large, greedy and basically unthinking man'. The point of the story is that food prepared with some 'warmth and understanding', with honesty and generosity will always please even if the food itself is dreadful. Mrs. Fisher asserts that 'A truly innocent cook or host is never guilty of the great sin of pretension, while many an ignorant one errs hideously in this direction'. And a man capable of pretension is not only cheating his guests but is also 'incapable of telling the truth to himself'. Strong stuff, but Mrs. Fisher is nothing if not opinionated.
I wouldn't have said that the three pages of this anecdote represented the very best of her writing but then I am no W. H. Auden, nor, to be truthful, am I a fan of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. I admit this with some trepidation given the praise lavished on her by the likes of Paul Levy, Allan Davidson, Jane Grigson and a host of other writers. On the whole I found her prose dense and convoluted and a bit obscure. There is something about the tone of her writing that smacks of smugness and superiority which made me think of her as rather uncharitable and unsentimental. Would you say of someone who is a friend that they were 'large' and 'greedy' and 'basically unthinking'? Would you, to prove a point, tell the world that this man produced the ghastliest food you had ever eaten? So whilst I understand and appreciate what she is getting at in 'I is for Innocence' I feel very uncomfortable with the way she goes about it. It's not what she says that I object to, just the way that she says it.
Some of her pieces, particularly those in The Gastronomical Me, are highly personal, almost embarrassingly so, but at the same time strangely impersonal. She tells you just so much and no more so that many of the stories are inconclusive and you find yourself wondering what it was all about. Obviously fiercely independent she paints a portrait of herself as both feminine and staunchly feminist but somehow never seems to quite let you see her real self.
That's not to say that she doesn't have a way with words and she can tell a good story, more importantly she has some good stories to tell but in the end I felt unwelcome. I didn't feel that we had been on the journey together or that she cared much about her reader. Overall the tone of much of her prose struck me as not just self-confident but studied and self-indulgent.
Friends tried to convince me that I was the one being ungenerous, that perhaps I should allow for the writing having dated somewhat, and of course for every one of my negatives they were able to point to pages of positives, to expressive and perceptive passages, to eloquent descriptions and witty analogies.
Whilst I could see what they are getting at I still felt disappointed. Perhaps Mary Frances and I were just not on the same wavelength. I searched to find anyone who agreed with me and then I found Gay Bilson's admission that she finds M. F. K. Fisher's prose 'toe-curling' and objects to 'an ever-present sense of self-congratulation' in Fisher's writing*. Like Gay Bilson I was relieved to find that there is a 'cadre' of others prepared to admit foodie heresy.
I was left wondering what it was I had expected and what it was I wanted from food writing. The simple answer of course is that good food writing should just be good writing, and that good writing is about words and not about food. Mrs. Fisher's oft quoted reasons for writing about food make it clear that she sees herself as a writer not as a food writer.** Food writing is writing about food; food writers are writers who write about food. But, as any member of a book group will tell you, one person's idea of good writing is another person's complete waste of time. Ultimately you either like it or you don't.

*Plenty. Digressions on Food. Lantern, 2004

**In the forward to The Gastronomical Me she writes

'People ask me: Why do you write about food and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?
They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.
The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one.'

Lumberjack Cake?

2011-02-11T18:32:00.000+11:00

Today I made Lumberjack cake - following the tried and true recipe on the Women's Weekly recipe card - it's one of my staples. Always a success, always enjoyed and easy enough to put together for afternoon tea so long as you don't leave it too late to prepare the dates. But why is it called Lumberjack cake?
Searching the Internet doesn't provide any clues other than that it is sometimes referred to as 'Loggers cake'. But what does it have to do with lumberjacks or loggers? The specific ingredients which make this cake different to any other - dates, apples and coconut - aren't specific to lumberjacks, are they? Nor are they likely to be the sort of staples you would expect to find in a logging camp, are they? It's all just a little bit mysterious.
Even Python lumberjacks don't eat cake, well not on Wednesdays anyway.

I'm a Lumberjack and I'm okay,

I sleep all night and I work all day

I cut down trees, I eat my lunch

I go to the lavatory

On Wednesdays I go shopping

And have buttered scones for tea

The Bocuse d'Or 2011

2011-02-07T17:43:00.004+11:00

The Bocuse what? you might ask - although you would know all about it if you had read this post from 2009 (which discusses a film about the Spanish 2007 bid and also explains the workings of the competition). While at home Queenslanders have been a bit preoccupied with floods over in France one of their number has been flying the Australian flag at the Bocuse d'Or in Lyon, France. You wouldn't know much about this event if you relied on the Australian press (I could only find one recent reference here) but it seems to be taken pretty seriously in Europe and increasingly so in the USA.
This year the 24 contestants had to prepare a meat platter, using two saddles of lamb, including the kidneys, and one shoulder, and a seafood platter using two monkfish, twenty langoustines and four crabs. The end results are presented on huge platters and paraded before the 24 judges, 12 of who sample the meat dishes and the other 12 taste the fish.
What remains a bit of a mystery is what the judges are looking for. The Americans were very disappointed with their performance, coming 10th, and attribute their lack of success to not understanding the 'game', 'the defined game in the way that the food should be presented'. Given that any bid doesn't come cheaply it would seem fundamental to understand what is expected before competing. Obviously all the chefs who enter know how to cook so is the competition less to do with execution and more about style? Apparently the winning platter needs to demonstrate passion and originality and be a true expression of the chef.
The winning team from Denmark scored 1014 points; only six other teams scored more than 900; the Americans scored 864. Of the thirteen competitions held since 1987 France has won six times and Norway four times. The place getters have always been European or Scandinavian teams with the exception of Singapore who scored a bronze in 1989. Clearly some contestants have a better idea of what the judges are looking for than others in particular Rasmus Kofoed who won gold for Denmark this year, silver in 2007 and bronze in 2005!
This clip sums up his approach to the 'game'

What I don't really understand is what the chefs gain from this sort of contest. As Grant Achatz points out competition cooking has little or nothing to do with restaurant cooking and, despite the fact that he was a judge of the Bocuse d'Or USA which chose the team to go on to Lyon this year, he quite bluntly says

'Historically, most chefs in the U.S. could not see the benefit of devoting time and energy to train for a competition that would not further their careers, even if they did win.'

Our local boy was Russell Clarke, senior sous chef at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. Perhaps one of the reasons why there hasn't been much publicity of the event here has something to do with the result - the Australians came in at number 20 with a score of 711.

For information about the Bocuse d'Or see here
For Grant Achatz on the Bocuse d"or USA see here
For Michael Ruhlman's coverage of the 2011 event see here, here and here
For another first hand report on the US bid see here, and for a report on how the British team fared see here

And if anyone can tell me how to embed a YouTube video so that it doesn't take over the whole page I would be forever grateful.

What to eat on Australia Day.

2011-01-30T16:54:00.002+11:00

The celebration of Australia Day (26th January) always leads to discussions around issues of national identity such as the flag - when are we going to get rid of the colonial connotations of the Union Jack - or the national anthem - when are we going to get a decent one -or even perhaps when is Australia going to become a republic. The Prime Minister however is never asked what she (or he) is going to do about a national dish, about the lack of any defining Australian cuisine. I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily a matter of great national importance and don't intend to get into a discussion of the whys and wherefores of traditional cuisines (fascinating though that might be) but I am intrigued with the idea of what might be, and indeed is being, promoted as the most appropriate meal to consume on Australia Day.

To begin with the notion of a national day. Australia Day commemorates the landing of Captain Arthur Phillip in Sydney Cove in 1788 and the beginning of European colonisation. The anniversary of that event has been officially marked, at least in New South Wales, one way or another since 1818. Not all states celebrated Australia Day, even after Federation (1st January 1901) and it wasn't until 1935 that the 26th January became a day of national celebration. When I was growing up Australia Day was just an excuse for a long weekend and Commonwealth Day seemed a more significant event because, as I remember, it involved a half-day off from school. Having a public holiday on the actual day - the 26th day of January - was only introduced in 1994 and it seems that it is only since then that there has been any significant promotion of Australia Day. Even so it seems that celebrations have less to do with nationalism and patriotism than they do with enjoying a day in the sun and the last of the summer holidays before the new school year commences.

Last year the Australia Day Council ran this advertisement

with the clear message that barbecuing on Australia Day is the right and patriotic thing to do. As the picture suggests in Australia barbecuing involves 'cooking meat on a metal grate directly over the heat source' be it glowing coals, an open gas flame or an electrical element. This however is the definition Harold McGee gives for 'grillling'. According to McGee in America 'barbecuing is the low-temperature, slow heating of meat in a closed chamber by means of hot air from smoldering wood coals. It's an outdoor cousin to the slow oven roast.' Americans have a very clear idea of what constitutes barbecue and it usually involves smoke and sauces and cuts of meat which require slow cooking. It seems a bit odd then that the initiation of the Australian enthusiasm for barbecuing should be attributed to American troops who came here during World War II, although it seems that they probably did introduced the idea that cooking in the outdoors was both socially acceptable and socially desirable.

Clearly the barbecue (neither the method of cooking nor the apparatus itself) is far from being uniquely Australian - in fact every culture must have some tradition of cooking food over hot coals predating modern kitchen gadgets and the use of gas and electricity as heat sources.
Barbecuing certainly suits our climate and is consistent with a general preference for casual entertaining and a relaxed eating environment. You could also argue that cooking over an open fire appeals to our pioneering instinct, to some sort of desire for simplicity and communing with nature and lets not even get started on the image of the rugged, Australian male wielding the barbecue tongs. (Surely the modern 'outdoor kitchen' has done away with any suggestion that the barbecue is a primitive and impromptu way of preparing a meal and the notion that there is something intrinsically manly about cooking food out of doors?) Even so there is nothing new or traditional or specific about the way Australians barbecue.

None the less lets say we are prepared to accept having some friends around for a barbie could be an appropriate way of celebrating Australia Day what would you actually cook on the grill? Some would argue that the completely charred 'snag' (sausage), which is often the result of over exuberant 'grilling', is most representative of traditional Australian barbecuing. Certainly the 'sausage sizzle' is a quintessential phenomenon - no school fete or fundraiser, voting day or even trip to the hardware store is complete without the smell of hot fat and frying onions. Most home barbecuers would opt for something a little more exotic but how many would opt for lamb?

Since 2005 Meat and Livestock Australia has been trying to convince us that it would be un-Australian not to eat lamb on Australia Day.

Sheep of course are not indigenous but they have been here since 1788 and after all what we are celebrating on the 26th January is the arrival of the first Europeans. Kangaroos are an indigenous animal but eating them and more specifically promoting their consumption is always somewhat controversial - there are those who would consider that eating them was more un-Australian than not eating them.
The assumption in the Meat and Livestock advertisements is that the meat is destined to be barbecued. Lamb is a good choice for the barbecue be it cutlets, chops or a butterflied leg and, although the price fluctuates a bit, good lamb seems to be available here all year round. What's more eating lamb, as distinct from pork or beef, is acceptable to a large percentage of the population, vegetarians excepted of course. Lamb figures in many of the traditional cuisines of the 25% of the Australian population who were born overseas to say nothing of the household traditions of the 20% of Australians who have at least one parent who was born overseas. So whether you can trace your ancestors to the First Fleet or you arived here yesterday chances are you could celebrate Australia Day by barbecuing something lamby which would both suit your cultural tastes and demonstrate your Aussiness.

Overall then, as Sam Kekovich so eloquently puts it, it does make sense. But as Mark Thomson points out, barbecuing in Australia is not so much a style of cuisine as a form of behaviour. It might well be possible to suggest a tradition of barbecuing lamb on Australia Day, and some of these advertisements do state explicitly that there is a 'custom' of eating lamb on Australia Day, but it would indeed be un-Australian to try to proscribe how that lamb should be prepared - this year it might be a butterflied leg spiced up with chermoula and then maybe next year souvlaki or kefta or perhaps cutlets marinated in a spicy tandoori paste.

The Meat and Livestock campaign might be clever and entertaining but I think perhaps it might be advertising eating lamb on Australia Day which becomes more traditional than the actual practise.
And finally, I can't resist this image from the newspaper

The young man in the photograph was fined $800 for careless riding.

To read more about the history of the celebration of Australia Day see here

To see the 2011 Meat and Livestock Australia Australia Day advertisement see here
To read more about careless riding see here
For more on Australian barbecues read Mark Thomson's Meat, Metal and Fire (Harper Collins, 1999)
The quotes are from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking.

Chocolate Wars

2011-01-24T18:23:00.000+11:00

This time last year I read the news that Kraft had taken over Cadbury. How could this be? How could such a thing be allowed to happen? I don't know quite why I found this news so appalling but I guess it had something to do with the end of an era, with the notion that I had grown up with that Cadburys was something fine and British which stood for more than merely chocolate. No doubt my English heritage and a certain jingoistic streak in my parents contributed to this somewhat exaggerated notion of the righteousness of the Cadbury family company, still I had a profound sense that something was being lost now that the business was being subsumed into Kraft.

       Many moons ago I was paid to spend long hours with chocolate coated almonds and sultanas - watching them tumble backwards and forwards in the large copper kettles, checking the temperature and humidity in the room and experimenting with different glazes to give the finished product a healthy sheen ( in those days we used a gum solution). I most remember going home at the end of the day smelling like warm chocolate (which was better than smelling of peppermint, but that was in the chewing gum factory which is another story). Reading Deborah Cadbury's Chocolate Wars. From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 Years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry (and yes, Deborah is one of those Cadburys) reminded me of those days and other confectionery memories. My father used to bring me home Rowntrees fruit pastilles and fruit gums which I adored. Once I started on the pack I couldn't stop - always leaving the black ones until last. Whatever happened to the fruit gums which were actually shaped like fruit - little orange and lemon segments, and little limes and strawberries? And wasn't there a wonderful Fry's dark chocolate bar full of peppermint cream? Sadly the sweets and the companies which manufactured them are no more.
      In Chocolate Wars Deborah Cadbury tells the story of the Frys and the Rowntrees and the Cadburys, all Quaker families, who started their enterprises in the early years of the nineteenth century and prospered
thanks to a mixture of sensible business decisions and a bit of good luck. When John Cadbury began selling a fatty, unappetising beverage at his tea and coffee house in Birmingham in 1824 no one had any notion of the true potential of the cocoa bean or any thought of mass produced confectionery. Deborah Cadbury traces the fortunes of her own family and along the way introduces lots of other chocolaty characters such as Randolphe Lindt, Coenraad and Casparus van Houten, Jean Tobler, Milton Hershey, Domenico Ghiradelli, Forrest Mars, Henri Nestlé, describing the technical achievements and personal rivalries which resulted in their respective chocolate empires.
     Consumerism really got going in the late nineteenth century - an urban population largely cut off from the means of producing necessities for themselves, an increasingly affluent middle class seeking novelty, changing eating habits (earlier breakfasts and later diners) and advances in the mechanisation of all aspects of  manufacturing, developments in packaging, distribution, retailing (think motorised transport, advertising, the grocer's shop) all came together to make fortunes for the likes of the Cadburys. Many of the names we still regard as mainstays of food manufacturing ('industrial food' as Jack Goody calls it) began around this time -

William Arnott opened his bakery in Hunter Street, Newcastle in 1865

Joseph A. Campbell began his preserving company in 1869

Henry Heinz began bottling in 1869

Dr. John Kellogg produced his first 'granola' in the 1860s

Thomas Lipton began his grocery shop in Glasgow in 1872

and even the demon Kraft, James L. to be precise, began a wholesale cheese business in Chicago in 1903

The Australian version of the Cadbury story is that of Macpherson Robertson who began his own confectionery business, Macrobertsons, in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in 1880 (which was eventually taken over by Cadbury Schweppes).

   Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Cadbury story is the approach the family took to business. As Quakers they were not solely interested in personal gain, wealth-creation was not an end in itself , any bounty was for the benefit of the workers, the local community and society at large. They believed that everyone was equal and that they had responsibilities and obligations to all those who worked for them. According to Deborah Cadbury the factory was a world in miniature and 'an opportunity to improve society'. George Cadbury's vision of a perfect little world came to fruition at Bournville and their legacy continues in the trusts they established . Philanthropy however was not confined to Quakers - of the chocolate manufacturers both Milton Hershey and our own Macpherson Robertson made significant and long lasting contributions to the community.
      George Cadbury and his brother Richard had spent time on the factory floor themselves, they knew their employees personally and they understood what they made and how they made it. Now, one hundred and thirty odd years since the brothers established Bournville, Cadburys is just another division of a huge industrial food manufacturer, making money for nameless and faceless shareholders who know little or nothing about what the company makes and give little thought to who makes it.
It could perhaps be argued that Deborah Cadbury presents a rather too rosy picture of the Cadburys and their motives and ideals.  Whilst she is very good on the who, what, where and when, she is a little sketchy on how the brothers reconciled their Quaker beliefs with, for example, advertising their products and although she does suggest that they were criticised at the time for paternalism she doesn't expand on this.  Bournville sounds like a workers paradise but  we don't get to hear much from the workers themselves. But this is rather churlish criticism of a thoroughly interesting and entertaining book; the story moves along at a good pace, there's enough but not too much technical detail and Deborah Cadbury manages to make her main characters come to life.

Her final paragraph sums up exactly what I was thinking this time last year -

Will Kraft act for the betterment of the world - not just the top management? Will it be a tangible force for good in our global village? It is difficult not to feel sceptical. And that is why, despite all the benefits of globalisation and the excitement of giant takeovers, it is hard not to believe that something irreplaceable and immeasurable in the neat columns of a balance sheet have been discarded as effortlessly as a sweet wrapper.

And any scepticism is well justified - Kraft have ceased production at the Somerdale plant (originally established by the Fry family one hundred years ago) which will close completely in March and do not intend to officially mark the closure with any sort of celebration of the contribution the factory and the workers have made to the success of Cadburys or in recognition of the significance of the factory to the workers and to the surrounding community.

To read more about the Kraft takeover see here.
For Jack Goody ' Industrial Food, Towards the Development of a World Cuisine', see C. Counihan and P. van Esterik, Food and Culture. A Reader, Routledge, New York, 1997.
To learn more about Sir Macpherson Robertson see here.
To find out about Bournville today see here.

Meeting Mrs Beeton

2011-01-18T18:00:00.001+11:00

Usually the Christmas wish-list includes at least on recipe book but I really don't have room for very many more and I am certainly not prepared to part with anything to make space so I am trying hard to resist more recipes - surely I must have enough inspiration already? That does not of course mean that there is a moratorium on all books and it certainly doesn't mean a ban on food-related books.
The summer holiday reading so far has been almost entirely food related.
I started with Mrs Beeton - The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes. I'm a great fan of biography and a firm believer in fact being both more interesting an infinitely stranger then fiction. I also have a bit of a fascination with the Victorians. The mid- to late-nineteenth century really saw the beginning of life as we know it, the beginning of the rise and rise of the middle class, and so often sounds like a gas lit version of the late twentieth century. The Beetons - Isabella and Sam - were first and foremost middle class entrepreneurs, on the look out for new ideas and ways of making money and a name for themselves. The gorgeous irony in Mrs Beeton's case is the contrast between the reality of the young woman and her limited experience and knowledge of household management, let alone cooking (Isabella got most of her material from other sources) and the authority which has been attached to her name. Although of course by now we are used to the idea that credentials or expertise of some sort are no longer a prerequisite for fame or at least notoriety.

Mrs Beeton is a big read. At 428 pages (plus notes, extensive bibliography and excellent index) even my eyes glazed over from time to time and I would have to concede that it may not hold the attention of anyone only concerned with how the Book of Household Management came in to being. The author has done an enormous amount of research (both exhaustive and no doubt exhausting) and presents a detailed discussion of both Isabella's life and family background as well as that of her husband, Sam, and their social milieu all of which is interesting if at times a little overwhelming. The final chapter is a brief analysis of what Mrs Beeton has come to stand for and the myths that have been perpetuated relating to both the woman and her book. Kathryn Hughes organises her material well and her writing is clear and entertaining but this is, I think, a book that might appeal more to history tragics than general readers although that said it is worth reading if only for an insight into how we got to where we are today.
The late nineteenth century saw the benefits and burdens of the Industrial Revolution really start to come in to their own bringing the gradual move towards the mechanised household run by a lone woman in charge of mechanised servants. Mrs Beeton advocated prudence, patience and perseverance. Her book was aimed at effective and efficient management of the home, emphasising system, organisation and productivity. Many of the ideals espoused in The Book of Household Management were alive and well when I was young and were certainly still entirely desirable when my mother was a young woman starting a home of her own. It seems to me that today we undervalue the work and skill involved in efficient household management - the work of planning, shopping, preparing and serving meals, balancing the family's tastes and nutritional needs, the allocation of resources and finances, washing, cleaning, ironing etc. Whether these tasks are undertaken personally, by the lone housewife, or sub-contacted to someone outside the home, somebody is responsible for the management of the household or at least someone should be responsible for the organisation and monitoring of the household activities. Perhaps we need a latter day Mrs Beeton who could again 'elevate domestic duties so that they became something you could be proud of doing well' (Hughes, p.472).
My great grandmother and her sisters, like their mother and aunt before them, were all domestic servants. Grangran was born in in 1875 and by the time she was 16 she was working as a general servant. When she married in 1898 she was employed as a cook. I wonder if she owned a copy of The Book of Household Management or whether she had learnt enough from her experiences 'in service' not to need a manual.

The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton
Kathryn Hughes
Harper Perennial, London, 2006
ISBN-13 978-1-84115-374-2

A change is as good as a rest.

2011-01-11T17:05:00.001+11:00

If a change is as good as a rest then it must be even better to have a change and a rest.
In this case I have changed the look of the blog, partly because I could and partly because I couldn't work out how to update the old design, and I've also had a rest.
Rather than risk another Moroccan outcome, in November/December 2010 we spent almost three weeks in France - twelve of those days spent in Paris - and post-Christmas we spent two weeks doing nothing much more than sit on the beach and read.
So now it's time to think about writing again and catching up with everything food related. The garden also looks like a scene from The Day of the Triffids - it is just amazing how plants thrive on rain and sunshine and the various diseases they are prone to thrive on humidity. The tomatoes and zucchinis have succumbed to mildew and the capsicums are a bit unhappy. On the bright side the eggplants look fabulous and there are so many of them that there is a chance we may overdose. The basil is lush and tall and begging to be turned into pesto and the tomatillos and ground cherry have overcome their initial hesitation and now look almost bushy.
If nothing else trying to grow some of your own food makes you much more appreciative of the effort that must go in to producing the abundance in the shops - and how little remuneration there must be for all the work and time involved. And given that farmers have to contend with land which is either parched and desperate for water or literally washing away you would have to question why anyone would consider being a primary producer. Perhaps the inevitable increase in prices as a result of the dreadful flooding in Queensland will make a few people stop and think a bit more about where the food they eat comes from - and perhaps choose not to buy French eschallots imported from Holland or even Spanish red onions from the USA but support someone local instead.

This Time Last Year

2010-11-23T10:43:00.016+11:00

This time last year we were on holiday in Morocco. It has taken me a year to write about this because during our time there I spent four days confined to either the bed or the bathroom sicker than I have ever been in my life. We were all ill to varying degrees, but all ill enough to have to make arrangements to go to a doctor and check out the local hospital. The upshot was that none of us has been over fond of coriander since and none of us will ever touch pastilla again. In a bizarre way it was a good family holiday - we all got to bond in ways we had never anticipated.

So Fes particularly will always be etched in our memories, not least because it was a very interesting place.

Was it something we ate? This is what we ate for breakfast on the first day - milk coffee, fresh goats cheese, honey and a variety of breads

We sampled a variety of different bread-y things.The most interesting were the giant crumpets although we now suspect that they might also function as giant petri dishes.

We were there for Eid el Kebir (or Eia al-Adha) the Feast of the Sacrifice of the Lamb or just the Feast of Sacrifice or even the Grand Feast. This is a major event with every family who can afford it purchasing a sheep to slaughter. The streets were busy before the event with sheep being transported around one way or another and after the event it is very hard to avoid coming into contact with some evidence of the deceased.

We didn't try camel or smen the amazing fermented butter that is a traditional ingredient (apparently blue cheese is a reasonable substitute). We did consume large quantities of mint tea and we did get to see warka pastry being made and we even got to play with it at a cooking class we did.

The markets were endlessly fascinating.

And tempting though the food stalls in the Djemmaa el-Fna in Marrakesh may be we didn't push our luck.

Cooking History

2010-11-11T12:07:00.002+11:00

Although the recent Sydney International Food Festival was mainly about restaurants, chefs and eating out there were one or two non eating events. One was the screening of this little film 'Cooking History', a documentary about army chefs and the logistics of feeding armies during wartime - but also about food and nostalgia, food and memory, food and identity. Filmed in Europe and dealing with conflicts from WW2 to Tchechnia it was interesting and thought provoking. Worth looking out for if it ever gets a run on television - or at a film festival?

Foraging Frenzy

2010-10-28T14:13:00.020+11:00

Luis Melendez, Still Life with Gherkins and Tomatoes

October is Food Festival month in Sydney which means an orgy of chefs and restaurants strutting their stuff. This year the highlights included a presentation by René Redzepi at the Sydney Opera House. Over the preceding weeks and indeed subsequently there has been much written about Mr Redzepi, his restaurant and his food philosophies. So although I haven't actually met the man I would have to say that I feel reasonably well acquainted with him. He is a pleasant enough young man, he speaks well, he has some interesting things to say and he has a sense of humour, something which few others appear to have noticed.
How else would you explain the fact that he gets away with foraging for bits and pieces in the forests, fiddles with them in the kitchen, charges a fortune for them and gets called the greatest chef in the world? I had thought that I was perhaps the only person who had seen the irony in taking wild raw materials, torturing them a bit (quite literally in the case of the live shrimp he dishes up), serving it on a warm rock and then suggesting to the consumer that they were in some way communing with nature. Many of his dishes take hours if not days to prepare, how can he suggest that he is keeping the link from origin to plate as unbroken as possible? Can he be serious in suggesting that anything you eat in a restaurant is likely to bring you close to the forces of nature? So it was with a sense of joy and relief that I read Keith Austin's piece on his experience sitting at the feet of the great man - here.
Don't get me wrong - I find the Redzepi approach fascinating and I wish the man well but doesn't it make you stop and ask 'Que?'
The big disappointment is that Mr. Redzepi's visit does not seem to have engendered any on-going interest in some of the bigger questions about our fascination with restaurants (why we go out to eat, what we expect from the experience ) and with celebrity. The media has however taken up the cause of indigenous ingredients and why we don't use them or even appreciate them (see Carli Ratcliff here) which gets us back to the old problem of culture and cuisine. If, as Mr. Redzepi affirms, cuisine is 'a palatable experience of your culture' then what do our palatable experiences tell us about our culture?

David Mitchell Chews Over Public Mastication

2010-10-25T11:41:00.002+11:00

The anthropologist in me just loves this piece. I've been doing a good deal of reading about dining out and the rituals of the restaurant and this was a refreshing change from academic writing.

I told you so

2010-10-23T13:54:00.002+11:00

Van Gogh Interior of a Restaurant
(oil on canvas, 1887)

Science comes to the rescue! The fact that I don't like noisy restaurants may well be due to the fact that I am a grumpy old person but the fact that noise does affect the enjoyment of the food you are eating is just that - a fact! So noisy restaurants beware!

Revisiting Elizabeth David

2010-10-20T13:16:00.002+11:00

Last night I attended a tribute dinner to honour Elizabeth David at Bird, Cow, Fish restaurant. Coincidentally the evening also celebrated the 60th Anniversary of the publication of her first book A Book of Mediterranean Food.
There were a few speakers who reflected on Ms. David's work, her influence at the time and her legacy which provoked some interesting discussion of her relevance today, somewhat along the lines of a similar discussion in the Guardian (here) which, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, most of those in attendance had had the time to read before coming to the dinner.
The general conclusion would seem to be that whilst we have come a long way since 1950 we haven't actually travelled very far - more like just going around in circles. David celebrated fresh, seasonal ingredients, handled simply and well which might have been revolutionary at the time but since then we have just been reinventing the wheel.
Whilst there is some truth in the argument that some of what she wrote sixty years ago is perhaps a little outdated and some readers might find her authoritarian approach both intimidating and rather old fashioned, the general consensus last night was that what might be perceived today as her weaknesses are more correctly appreciated as her strengths. As Alex Herbert herself remarked a 'teacup' full of this and a 'handful' of that do not make for a precise formula but the idea of David's recipes was to inspire people to experiment, to taste, to gain confidence to learn how to cook and to enjoy doing so. In that context another strength of her books is that there are no pretty pictures - there is no 'plating up', there is no template to aim for, there is no in-built expectation.
And almost universally around the table there was a lament that there seems to be so little good food writing in print today. Newspapers and magazines in Australia simply do not publish anything much other than restaurant reviews, recipes and brief, journalistic advertorial. Print media is supposedly in its death throws - perhaps that's as much because there is never anything in the daily paper that is worth reading as anything else. I would venture that most of us interested in more than just the consuming of food get most of our reading via the Internet but even so there is precious little that is well written, stimulating and informative - unless I am missing something.
As to the dinner, Alex Herbert did us proud -

Chicken Liver Crostini (An Omelette and a Glass of Wine)

Moules Mariniere with grilled olive bread and rouille (A Book of Mediterranean Food with a nod to Damien Pignolet and Claudia Roden)

Grillade au Fenouil

(Grilled Snapper on a bed of grilled fennel with Pommes Anna)

A Provencal salad with celery, watercress, orange and parsley (A Book of Mediterranean Food)

Lemon Soufflé with strawberries and vanilla ice cream (French Provincial Cookery)

Yarra Valley Black Savourine goats cheese, panforte, lavoch and 'fruitons'

and finally coffee with Budgi Werri prunes in Kennedy and Wilson chocolate

All washed down with some very delicious wines including a luscious 2008 Ata Rangi Crimson Pinot Noir.

Certainly those at dinner last night have a lot to thank Elizabeth David (and Alex Herbert) for.

Rolling in Clover

2010-09-30T17:00:00.001+10:00

Last weekend my daughter and two friends, slightly hungover from the night before, wanted eggs Benedict for 'breakfast'. I know I could have made this for them myself and had they wanted breakfast at 9am rather than 11am I might have considered doing so but as it was I suggested they go out to one of the local cafes. Rather than trust to chance my daughter rang ahead to make sure that what they wanted was on the menu but no one answered the call. While they were pondering what to do next our phone rang and it was the proprietor of the cafe ringing back returning our call.
Me: 'Oh, is that Clover?'
Clover: 'Yes. I just had a missed call from this number.'
Me: 'Yes that was my daughter wanting to know if you have eggs Benedict on the menu.'
Clover: 'Um no but I could do them. How many do you want?'
Me: 'That would be fabulous. There's three of them.'
Clover: 'Fine. I'll get the hollandaise started now and I'll reserve a table for them.'
Me: 'That's wonderful. Thank you so much. They're just about on their way so they'll see you in about five minutes.'
Now that is what I call service!!
Although we live in an inner city suburb, surrounded by some very busy thoroughfares we also have a small, local 'village' shopping area with a couple of independent supermarkets, two bread shops, a butcher cum deli, the post office, two chemists, a good book shop, two hardware stores, an independent plant nursery and several cafes and restaurants all within a short stroll from the front door. All these places depend on the patronage of the local community and reciprocate by offering friendly, personal service which usually comes with a smile and a chat and the willingness to listen to customers and respond to their needs.
I do most of my weekly shopping locally. I travel a bit further afield for fruit and vegetables but even then only to the green grocer in the next suburb.
But Woolworths have their eye on this best of all possible worlds and plan to build a supermarket at the end of our street. Not in the local shopping strip but only three blocks away. Why? Because they can I suppose. Do we need a Woolworths supermarket? No we don't. Do we want a Woolworths supermarket within easy walking distance? No we don't. Can we stop it happening? Worth a try but Buckley might have as much chance.
And by the way the verdict was that the eggs were delicious!

Clover Cafe
78 Booth Street
Annandale
0433 258 252

Month in Review - September 2010

2010-09-30T10:11:00.002+10:00

Jar of Apricots, Jean Simeon Chardin (1758)
oil on canvas, 57.2x50.8 cm
Art Gallery of Ontario

I have spent most of the month busy pretending to be an anthropologist. Reading, reading and more reading with a bit of eating and gardening thrown in.
It is a long time since I have grown anything from scratch. Our last two gardens were already well established when we inherited them and all we had to do was make sure nothing died. Growing vegetables is much more exciting. I prowl the garden several times a day and now the weather is warmer you can actually see things growing by the hour. My first attempt at tomatillo seedlings was a disaster because I tried to start them too soon. The seeds I planted out two weekends ago have gone berserk. I now have a forest of little green plants growing stronger everyday. And there are beans on the broad beans. Did you know that the pods grow upwards? During the month I've planted eggplants. If they all survive, and at the moment it seems that they will, we will have nine bushes which means we should have enough fruit to set up our own stall at the markets. And there are zucchini - only six plants this time. I am so excited about harvesting my own vegetables.Even though the choice is a bit limited at the moment it is such a joy to wander out at dinner time and come back with fresh lettuce and 'squeaking' spinach leaves.
This month we have also planted a lemon/lime (Eureka lemon grafted with a Tahitian lime) and a passionfruit vine - at the moment just a stick with half a dozen leaves but we hope that it will eventually sprawl over the outside loo.
Over the years I have made a collection of bromeliads and orchids of one sort or another and most of them are in flower at the moment. At the bottom of the garden we also have an old cottage rose - one I planted twenty years ago - which I have nurtured and nursed back to health after many years of neglect and that too has flowers. So with the roses and the orchids and the borage and the flowers on the beans the garden looks very festive.
The bromeliads are grouped around another new addition - the frog pond. The other week I enlisted a friend to help me drag home one of those blue plastic shell sand pits which was discarded on the footpath. Then I enlisted my son to dig out and level a shallow depression to sit it in. We filled it with water from the tank, organised some duck weed, an aquatic plant or two and some tiny little fish. Now all we need are the frogs. Despite the fact that we live in the thick of the inner city suburbs in a row of narrow terraces there are frogs in the neighbourhood because last summer we heard them calling every night. Surely they won't be able to resist our luxurious accommodation?

Month in Review - August 2010

2010-08-31T16:14:00.001+10:00

Highlights
1. Starting to pick green leafy things from the garden - goodness that mizuna is prolific. The borage is all in flower and so are the broad beans. The rhubarb is doing well, the tomatoes are in and the chilli plant has its first flower.
2. Reading weighty tomes with titles like 'The Sociology of the Meal', 'The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating' and 'Consuming Passions. Food in the Age of Anxiety' for the anthropology class I have enrolled in this semester. All very interesting even though there are rather a lot of multi -syllable words to get through. And reading keeps me away from writing - have yet to find a way of being able to do both at once.
3. Making bread. Have decided to stick with the Dan Leppard idea of baking the loaf in a covered container so that it generates its own steam - so far so good.

Low lights.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old person.......the other weekend we ate out a a newish venue in nearby Newtown, much reviewed and highly regarded. First gripe - the policy is not to take bookings. I know there are probably very good reasons for this approach but for us it meant going there at 6pm on a Saturday rather than risk having to wait around outside in the cold (in a part of town where there isn't much else to do) and/or fill up at the bar on drinks we didn't really want or need. As it happened we got a table straight away.
Second gripe - the tables were so close together that I was actually sitting closer to the strange next to me on the bench seat than I was to the person I was sharing dinner with. It wasn't possible to move from my seat without (and I quote) 'having to hang your arse over someone's dinner'.
The food and the service were fine - an interesting menu, attentive staff - but, gripe number three, the noise level was almost unbearable. The quasi-industrial decor with all those hard surfaces is not conducive to private conversation. It was hard to hear the waiter, it was hard to hear my partner across the table, it was even hard to hear everything that the stranger next to me was saying to her partner. In fact all the noise made it hard to concentrate on the food and even though the duck with cumquats was delicious we couldn't finish it fast enough so that we could get out of there. Rounded off the evening at home with a slice of homemade cake and a cup of tea watching an old James Bond movie on the telly and still got to bed before midnight.

Cookbooks - useful or good?

2010-08-22T16:57:00.001+10:00

Last weekend the Observer Food Monthly (OFM) published their list of the 50 best cookbooks. Who decides these things? In this case the panel was made up of restaurant critics, food writers and chefs (some of them the authors of books which appear on the list). Who defines what is best? How 'best' – good to read, most interesting, most original, best researched, recipes most likely to work, most original recipes, most comprehensive? In 2005 Waitrose Food Illustrated published a list of the ten most useful cookery books ever. Now useful I understand. Like any collector of recipe books and books about food there are many volumes on the shelf which are there largely because they are important to have and then there are those which are spattered and dog-eared and regularly used.

What makes a book useful obviously depends on who you are, where you are and what you want to cook. I would turn to Stephanie Alexander's The Cooks Companion before I would consult Delia Smith because Stephanie speaks my language, she uses the ingredients I know I can find locally, and although both of them are a bit bossy if I had to choose one of them to be trapped on a desert island with it wouldn't be Ms Smith.
The good people at Waitrose put The Cooks Companion at number 10 on their list with Delia's Complete Cookery Course at number 2. Over at the Observer they rated number 31 and number 12 respectively but I would guess that a similar list compiled in Australia would reverse those rankings, if indeed Delia got a look in.
If I wanted definitive Italian food I would probably go to Marcella Hazan and Jane Grigson for English food and David Thompson for Thai but if I had to limit myself to only one food book would I choose the really useful book which would get me through pretty much any situation? If I could have only one book on the shelf would it be The Cooks Companion?
Comparing the Waitrose list with the Observer's top ten it appears that good and useful recipe books don't fall into simple categories of instructive versus informative although there are more books that have stood the test of time and/or broke new ground, either in subject matter or format, on the good list, for example, Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World (1963, number 10), Jane Grigson's English Food (1974, number 6) and David Thompson's Thai Food (2002, number 7).
Whilst obviously 'good' and 'useful' aren't mutually exclusive categories precious few authors made it on to both lists. Elizabeth David scores at number 7 on the useful list (for a compilation volume of Mediterranean Food, Summer Food and French Country Cooking) and number 2 on the good list (for French Provincial Cooking). Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food is useful (number 3) his Kitchen Diaries is good (at number 4). Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food is useful (number 5) and her The Book of Jewish Food is very good (number 3).
It goes without saying that the latest list generated a slew of comments with poor Nigel being criticised not only for his close association with the OFM but for his purple prose and, worst of all for any recipe writer, for recipes that don't work.
For all the back and forth in the comments about the pros and cons of various books and authors there was no mention, for or against, of the one book which appears on both lists, which Waitrose ranked as the most useful and the OFM rated at number 5 – Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories.
Because I have made myself a promise that I will limit my purchases of food books, due both to lack of space and difficulty in justifying the expense, I have only recently acquired my own copy of Roast Chicken – the American version, purchased from the bargain table at at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. (I seem to be able to find room for the book somewhere if I haven't had to pay full price for it.)
This is a small, unassuming collection of some of Hopkinson's favourite recipes for a selection of his favourite ingredients which dates from 1994. It's interesting to read, Hopkinson is an engaging personality and his writing is entertaining and informative. But, in a book of only forty chapters, does devoting space to ingredients that are hardly main stream or universally popular - brains, kidneys, liver, sweetbreads and tripe, squab, rabbit and grouse - really help to qualify this book as a kitchen essential? True, if you are after a definitive recipe for roast chicken, or aȉoli or rice pudding or custard sauce, or poached salmon or slow braised pork belly or Saltimbocca alla Romana then this would be a good book to turn to. Also, buried in recipes for more complicated dishes, are classics like mayonnaise, vinaigrette and béarnaise but this book makes no pretence to be comprehensive. (Read my full review at The Gastonomer's Bookshelf.)

Some of the comments relating to the OFM list suggested that I am not alone. For many cooks there are two classifications of recipe book – those that you read, enjoy and learn from but rarely cook from (either because the recipes are too complicated, the ingredients are too esoteric or simply because the book has more to do with memoir/travel/history/ethnic background/ process etc., is more of a reference than an instruction manual) and those that you turn to regularly for recipes, cooking ideas that are both relatively straightforward and trustworthy, like those of Delia, Stephanie, Margaret Fulton, Marguerite Patten and the Women's Weekly. These are books more concerned with sustenance than fashion.
For me Hopkinson's book fits somewhere between these two - it is good but not likely to be come overly besmirched and bespattered, although it could become a good deal more useful if I ever decide to put the family on an offal diet. If I should ever have to confine myself to choosing only ten food books Roast Chicken might well be one of them, I just hope I never have to face that challenge.

Month in review - July 2010

2010-08-02T17:56:00.002+10:00

Foodscape by Carl Warner

As always at the end of the month there are a few items still lingering on the 'to do' list. Rather than add then on to the list for the next month I'm giving them a bit of space here.

1. Spent a good deal of July agonising over a review of Ottolenghi The cookbook. This is a book I love. There is something about it which is invigorating and exciting but I found it very hard to put my finger on just what it was that made it so. In part my enthusiasm stems from having eaten at 'Ottolenghi' in Islington and so going through the recipes and the photographs in the book I can relive that experience, but there is also something about the generous use of ingredients and the imaginative combinations which give the recipes a vitality and joyousness which is sadly lacking in many cook books. You can read the final result at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf.

2. Not too many notable eating out experiences of late although we did encounter something called 'Watermelon crème brûlée'. Ordered in the interests of gastronomic enquiry this dish turned out to be a thin, pink, slightly vegetable tasting custard topped with a crisp caramel shell – not something to be repeated at home or anywhere else for that matter. Where do people get these ideas?

3. I have an on-going fascination with food and art – food used to portray non food (as in the photograph above – for more Carl Warner see here) and vice versa (like crocheted and knitted food, food made from felt, sculpture etc), food in paintings (nothing better than a good still life) and food in literature and the movies. Wouldn't it be fabulous if Sydney could have an International Food Film Festival – they have one in New York, they have one in Chicago, they have one in Coffs Harbour so why can't we have one here?

Life beyond the blog.

2010-07-21T12:21:00.012+10:00

There is more to life than blogging. Despite having grand plans to write something for this blog every week more often than not real life intervenes and the time slips away. These are photographs of some of the other ways I spend my time.

Patchwork - hand pieced and machine pieced - and hand quilting eats up a lot of time but is very satisfying. Every Tuesday I spend a day with friends stitching - better than therapy.

Just for a bit of fun I've started playing around with the idea of using non-food materials to represent food stuffs. Below are my first attempts at knitting and crocheting cakes, biscuits and tarts.

And then because I spend a good deal of my time in the kitchen I like to be well dressed.

Never say never.

2010-07-19T13:08:00.001+10:00

After reading the Bourke Street Bakery book the thought of baking my own bread has haunted me, despite my declaration that I didn't ever want to become involved in the whole sour dough process.
So .... I began by going back to the Dan Leppard approach which involves preparing a leaven which is then frozen in loaf size nuggets. When you want to make bread you revitalise the frozen chunks, and add flour and water . The rest of the process is pretty simple, a few seconds kneading every hour or until the dough is ready to bake. What put me off this method was the 4 or 5 hours of messing about with kneading the dough - like it or not this would mean having to devote a whole day to the process.
A bit more web based research came up with the technique for baking Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The real appeal of this approach is that there is absolutely no kneading involved. All I have to do is remember to get the dough our of the refrigerator a couple of hours before dinner and we can have freshly baked bread with our soup and cheese. I'm still playing around and getting mixed results. Finding the best flour involves a bit of experimentation. Developing a good starter takes patience - rather than start from scratch with each new batch I am adding a portion of the last batch every time I make up a new mix. I'm also varying the time I allow the dough to rise before baking and I want to try Dan Leppard's method of baking in a covered pan rather than messing about trying to create steam in the oven.
The results look a bit rustic but all the loaves so far have had a very acceptable texture and flavour - and if there is any left over it makes great toast. And whats more baking bread is not a chore - it's fun!

The latest on the garden.

2010-07-07T09:05:00.001+10:00

Before (the garden in December 2009) and after (July 2010)

Progress on the garden has been slowish but steady -getting rid of rubbish, finishing the paving, building the walls to define the garden beds (using the sand stock bricks recycled from the building renovations) and finally, last Friday, taking delivery of 3 cubic metres of garden soil - and suddenly we have a garden! Not a finished garden by any means - there are still some edges to fix up - but planting has begun!!

The herb garden now boasts marjoram, thyme, lemon thyme, bay, parsley (both flat leaf and curly), chervil, lemon verbena, lovage, borage, sage, mint, rosemary and tarragon. The garlic has all sprouted and elsewhere there are rhubarb crowns, and seedlings of kale, sorrel, spinach, tatsoi, rocket, mizuna, cos lettuce, red oak leaf lettuce and radicchio. The seed potatoes and the seeds - broad beans, nasturtiums and marigolds - should arrive this week.

We have been collecting the inner tubes from toilet rolls and I am using the old fish tank as a little hot house hoping to get the seeds I saved from the ground cherries and tomatillos to germinate.

It is so exciting to be growing things again - going out every morning to check on progress (there hasn't been much yet). It is also wonderful to see everything looking so green and healthy thanks to the recent rain and despite the cold weather - last week we had frost on the car which is almost unheard of here in the inner city. There's also some vivid colour in the garden - spikes of red and purple bromelliads, which always flower at the most surprising times, and the cerise, frilly, droopy bells of the zygocactus which the native soldier birds love and go through all sorts of contortions to get at. All the orchids are full of flower buds and this year even the cymbidiums have come to the party - out of the 5 or 6 pots there are only four flower spikes and three of those are all on the same plant but that is a big improvement on nothing at all for the last couple of years. All these plants along with my collection of succulents have had a bit of a hard time over the last year, moving around from one place to the next in pots or neglected on the building site to fend for themselves, so I am more than grateful that they have survived and thrilled to see them thriving now that they are getting some care and attention.

Bees on film

2010-07-05T15:08:00.002+10:00

Home from San Francisco there was barely time to unpack the suitcase before heading off to the 57th Sydney Film Festival. I always scan the programme for anything to do with food and of the few films I managed to see this year only two had prominent food content.
Food was unexpectedly significant in I am Love, a lavish Italian film which has Tilda Swinton falling for her son's friend who happens to be a chef. She is seduced in part by a dish of prawns which said chef prepares for her which looked none too appetising on the screen, certainly not the sort of thing you would be prepared to leave home for. The dramatic ending hinges on sharing the recipe for a favourite Russian soup which also seemed to have lost something in translation and didn't look as though it deserved all the emotional turmoil it unleashed. Obviously it is not so easy to make food look as glamorous as Tilda Swinton in a simple, beautifully cut dress or to use a plate of prawns to convey messages in the same way as scenes of Milan wrapped in snow. There is a lot more going on here of course than just cooking and eating although the scenes which showed food being prepared and served were used to good effect to demonstrate a range of important elements in the story such as power, class, sensual pleasure, desire, satisfaction, love, reciprocity, nurturing and belonging.
The one film which was specifically food related was Colony a documentary about bees and bee keepers in America and the threat of Colony Collapse Disorder to their livelihoods, focusing on David Mendes (Vice President of the American Bee-Keeping Federation) and Lance and Victor Seppi, novice bee keepers of Pixley, California.
The Seppi family are worthy of a documentary in their own right. Fundamentalist Christians they struggle with the conflict between their religious beliefs and the need to be business men and to do business in difficult times and with the tensions doing business creates within the family. The parallels between the workings of the bee hive and the family are obvious, especially the role of the Seppi matriarch and that of the Queen bee. More subtle is the mirroring of the collapse of the hives in the collapse of the life of the bee keepers and the suggestion that whilst bees normally know their role and work in harmony for the common good the same cannot always be said for humans. The Seppi's struggle to keep their fledgling business alive, meanwhile David Mendes tries to find a cause for Colony Collapse Disorder and to keep the members of his association informed.

I was especially interested in this story because I had just returned from seeing acres and acres of almond trees in California. What I didn't know then was that the pollination of these trees is the biggest managed pollination event in the world. American bee keepers make their money out of shipping their bees around the country from Florida to Maine and over to Washington and California to pollinate various crops like apples and blueberries as well as almonds. Thousands of hives are packed onto semi-trailers and moved from one pollination event to the next. In California the pollination of the almond trees takes place in February and requires more than 1.3 million hives! A grower usually needs 2.5, 6 frame hives per acre and negotiates a contract with bee keepers to supply the number of hives he needs. Growers pay somewhere between $US 120 -150 per hive which means that the cost of pollination accounts for around 20% of their overall costs.

Bee hives suffer attacks from fungi, viruses, bacteria, parasites and other insects most of which are understood and manageable. Numbers of bees also decrease in winter because of the colder weather. Colony Collapse Disorder is a newly defined phenomenon, first properly identified in 2006, without, it would seem, any one particular cause. Just how significant loses from CCD are seems difficult to determine. Figures suggest that US bee keepers typically lose around 30% or more of their bees over winter but keepers who suffer CCD can lose 45% of their bees hence their concern to know what to do to either combat the problem or prevent it. David Mendes is shown as prosecuting the case with pesticide manufacturers who appear to be typically uncaring, convinced they are in no way responsible and uninterested in finding a solution. There seemed to be no move on the part of the growers themselves to help the bee keepers either financially or politically.

The film covered the tense and mutually dependent relationship of the growers and the bee keepers. The bee keepers have to contend with growers who renege on contracts and source cheaper bees elsewhere or drive hard bargains, arguing that $120US per hive favoured by growers is not economical. The growers on the other hand do not trust the bee keepers to supply healthy bees or to be able to honour their contract based on the number of frames/hive/acre. In the case of the almond crop the situation gets even more complicated when you add in problems for the growers such as decreasing prices for almonds and decreasing yields and acreages because of issues with water allocation in California, and increasing cost for the bee keepers.

No bees does in truth mean no honey, no work and no money on a vast scale. This was a very interesting and thought provoking insight into just one corner of our food supply and the complicated, fragile web of interdependence so vulnerable to influences that we cannot control.

Colony Collapse Disorder gets a mention in the press from time to time – the latest suggestion is that it might be caused by radiation from mobile phones.

What I did on my holidays - part two.

2010-06-27T13:04:00.060+10:00

Our time in San Francisco wasn't devoted entirely to food but where you are going to eat and what you are going to have become serious preoccupations when you are away from home. One of our first stops was Wholefoods on 4th Street to stock up on some basic bits and pieces.

I was excited about having a look around here but in the end it was just another supermarket - albeit with an extensive range of organic products and high prices. I don't quite know what I had expected but the diverse and interesting cheese counter and the bakery and the displays of vegetables, the demonstrator sampling barbecue flavoured organic chicken sausages, the shelves lined with boxes and packets of processed foods looked pretty much like Coles or Woolworths to me.

Nor was it necessary to trudge all the way to Wholefoods to find organic products. Because we were intrigued we purchased a tub of 'Wallaby Organic' Dulche de leche creamy Australian style low fat yogurt which claimed to be "as delicious and distinctive as the Australian yogurts which inspired it". Apart from not approving of their spelling of yoghurt I was more than a little surprised that the manufacturers had spent their holidays in Australia studying our product.
According to the label "Wallaby's signature style comes from a small batch cooking process that includes long culturing and gentle handling" and the tub we sampled (which was classified USDA organic) contained

organic cultured pasteurized reduced fat milk (sourced from pasture-based family farms in Northern California)

organic evaporated cane juice

organic tapioca syrup

natural flavour

organic caramel colour

pectin

organic locust bean gum

organic vanilla extract

salt

Clearly it is important not to confuse 'organic' with 'natural'. I don't really think I felt any better about eating this than I would do about eating any other flavoured yoghurt - which now I am no longer on holidays I am not likely to do.
For me it wasn't possible to be in San Francisco without going over to Berkeley and eating at Chez Panisse.

I have to admit to being a little concerned that the reality might not meet my expectations but I was oddly reassured from the beginning when we actually walked right past without realising we had arrived. We ate lunch in the cafe upstairs - timber floors; simple chairs and booths opposite the long narrow open kitchen; paper covering the white table cloth, linen serviettes; not full but busy and tables turn over quickly; lots of friendly and very knowledgeable floor staff; a simple photocopied menu with plenty of choice - 9 'starters', 5 main courses and 7 desserts; smallish, manageable portions presented on small coloured plates - cream and mushroom*; no fancy cutlery or other doo-dads on the table. A relaxed and comfortable atmosphere, with no hint of international notoriety, which obviously belies the careful thought which has gone into its creation.
The open kitchen was a revelation - long and narrow, with the wood fired oven blazing away - not only could you see what the chefs were doing but many of the raw materials were on display, so close that you could reach out and touch them - should you want to of course.
The food was excellent, unfussy, fresh and tasty. The Terra Firma Farm grapefruit and avocado salad with ginger vinaigrette and the Monterey Bay sardine toasts with cucumber salad and anise hyssop were followed by Sweetcorn pudding souffle with morel mushrooms, spinach and cipollini and Northern halibut baked on a fig leaf with snap peas, carrots, little turnips and herb butter. And then we squeezed in Bing cherry tart with pistachio ice cream and a plate of Meyer lemon puffs with Lucero Farms strawberries and kirsch cream . The former was the best cherry anything I have ever tried. The latter translated as three profiteroles filled with a mixture of lemon curd and creme patisserie served with macerated strawberries and a dob of cream - the pastry was magnificent (not hard and chewy, not soggy) and the balance of the lemon tang was swoon-worthy.
I was a bit surprised to find that the majority of the wines were imported - from Italy, France, Germany, Spain and even Austria. We stuck to local product and even tried the Natural Process Alliance Sauvignon Blanc from the Russian River Valley which apparently comes in 750ml reusable stainless steel containers. This wine is so virtuous that it has no added sulfites and is unfiltered which means that the glass comes to your table looking like a sample you might take to the doctor with some trepidation - unfortunately it didn't taste as morally uplifting as it sounded.
So no disappointments or downsides at all although this restaurant does have the smallest 'ladies' I have ever encountered (even this can be forgiven because of the fabulous handbasin - you need to see for yourself).

Another must-do eating experience was to visit a taqueria in the Mission District. We made our way to La Cumbre, because this was the most convenient for us, and waded through an enormous plate of puerco with all the trimmings. How anyone eats one of their burritos without wearing most of it is a total mystery. Chez Panisse this is not but lots of fun all the same.

Other food related experiences involved eating freshly cooked Dungeness crab with our fingers down at Fisherman's Wharf and hunting for recipe books. I had most success at Green Apple Books on Clement Street but loved going into City Lights - the only bookshop which has a category headed 'muckraking'.

And we didn't eat here but it did put me in mind of our garlic lunch at Sunnybrae!

* The dinnerware at Chez Panisse is made by Heath Ceramics, based in Sausalito. The colours of the Chez Panisse range are in fact jicama, ginger, cardoon and forest! The food actually filled the plates which brought to mind Gay Bilson's ideas about the isolation of food on a white plate with a wide rim. Here the food tended to blend into the dish it was served in, making it seem more interesting and less intimidating, much less 'restauranty', altogether more approachable. Heath Ceramics have an outlet at the Ferry Building and if I had had a way of getting some of their plates home I would have been very tempted, even though it is cheaper to have the menu de jour at Chez Panisse ($26US for 3 courses) than to buy just one of the plates on which it is served ($42US for the dinner plate).

What I did on my holidays - part one.

2010-06-25T14:54:00.002+10:00

It might seem a bit self indulgent to fly all the way to the west coast of the USA for just one week but that's what we did. I'm fascinated by America - it's vast and diverse and the reality is both very familiar and quite different from expectations founded on television and movies. I was seduced by the culture when we lived there briefly many moons ago and have jumped at every opportunity to visit again since then.
Our destination was San Francisco but our first stop was Yosemite National Park. Not normally one to wax eloquent about scenery and natural wonders I have to admit that Yosemite was spectacular. Five million visitors a year are similarly impressed! We were there for the Memorial Day weekend which pretty much marks the beginning of the summer holiday season, the weather was fabulous and the traffic jams in the park had to be seen to be believed.

Yosemite Falls and Mirror Lake

All the accommodation - hotels and camp sites - had been booked out for weeks so one of the really interesting aspects of our few days there was to see how all these people were catered for. All the hotel accommodation and food is handled by Delaware North Companies and they provide a range of eating options from restaurants, fine (and expensive) dining at the 'rustic and elegant' Ahwahnee Hotel in the cavernous dining room and less formal, noisier dining at the busy Mountain Room Restaurant with its view of Yosemite Falls, to burgers and other fried goodies at the Village Grill in Yosemite Village. There was nothing especially surprising or different about the food we ate here - very good braised lamb shoulder, seared duck breast, Alaskan halibut, juicy and perfectly cooked flat iron steak - but I was intrigued by the information about what we were eating provided on the menu.

The Ahwahnee Hotel (the Dining Room is on the ground floor at left)

To start with there was a little warning at the bottom of the page

Thoroughly cooking foods of animal origin such as beef, eggs, fish, lamb, pork, poultry or shellfish reduces the risk of food-borne illness. Individuals with certain health conditions may be at higher risk if these foods are consumed raw or undercooked. FDA Consumer Advisory 3-603.11.

Less scary was finding out where the food had come from and how it was produced. The seafood is chosen based on the Best Choices and Best Alternatives lists published by Seafood Alliance and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch while local , organic and seasonal vegetables are sourced from T&D Willey Farms based in the San Joaquin Valley. The beef used at the Ahwahnee is produced by Brandt Farms who maintain 'a pasture to plate philosophy which involves raising .. livestock humanely and naturally without hormones or the use of antibiotics' and at the Mountain View Room they use grass fed beef from Open Space Beef. Free range chicken and duck comes from the Pitman family who run Mary's Chicken. Whilst this sort of attention to the provenance of their food might be expected at a place like the Ahwahnee it was refreshing to find that the same attention was paid to the ingredients at the 240 seat Mountain Room. What I couldn't determine was whether this sort of information was expected by their customers or whether it was just a reflection of the policies of the Delaware Group.
The drive from San Francisco to Yosemite takes you through the amazingly lush farming areas in the valleys of the San Joaquin and Merced Rivers, where these businesses are based , through Modesto, Merced and Madera or along the 120 through Oakdale - past acres (this is America) of vegetables and fruit and nut trees - pistachios, almonds, plums, peaches and cherries. Modesto is not only the setting for George Lucas's American Graffiti but also the home of Blue Diamond Almonds.
And if you live in San Francisco you can buy produce from the farms in the valley at the various farmer's markets which operate in the city. On Saturday morning our first stop was the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market which is based in and around the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero at the bottom of Market Street almost in the shadow of the Bay Bridge. It was stone fruit season and there was a bewildering number of varieties of peaches available, huge mounds of cherries, 'pluots' for sampling and glorious displays of fresh vegetables. Again there was nothing we didn't recognise but it was interesting to see bunches of dandelions, stinging nettles ($US10/lb), amaranth ($US5/lb), lemon verbena, borage flowers and lemon balm which are not regular features of the markets we go to in Sydney.

The market was very busy but how many of the crowd were locals actually doing their weekend shopping and how many were tourists like us was hard to determine. The Ferry Plaza Farmers Market is a California Certified Farmer's Market. This means that only California Certified Producers can sell there. To quote from their brochure -

'All of the farmers who sell at our market are certified as producers by the counties in which they grow. This guarantees shoppers that their purchases are grown in California by the people who are selling them. Growers submit to their county a production list complete with crop types, number of acres, location, estimated harvest and harvest season. Based on this information, a producer's certificate is issued and the county's Agricultural Inspector visits the farm to confirm that the farm is growing what they claim to be.'

They also make the point that being a Certified Producer is not the same as being certified organic.

Whilst on the one hand this sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare the stipulation that anyone selling in the market should have to identify the source of their wares is something I would very much like to see happen at my local market.
We spent the morning wandering around the stalls in glorious sunshine and then sat by the bay enjoying coffee and sandwiches - watched over by a statue of Mahatma Gandhi which for some reason was given to the City of San Francisco by the Gandhi Memorial International Foundation.

Original thinking or just chanelling Gay Bilson?

2010-06-16T17:48:00.003+10:00

Punch 15 August 1951

Every now and again I think I have come up with a good idea or have at least managed to harness enough grey cells to come up with a thought that is somewhat original. Sometimes I even get organised enough to write these ideas down with a view to writing about them here. Unfortunately I should have written about some of them before I read Gay Bilson's Plenty. Digressions on Food because it appears that she has had the odd bright idea herself from time to time.

Thought number 1.
While we were in Adelaide recently we were eating with friends who always say grace before their evening meal. Whilst I don't share their religious conviction I was impressed by the idea of taking a moment to pause, with your plate of food in front of you, before starting to eat. You might want to give thanks, you might want to reflect on your good fortune or you might just want to contemplate the food and anticipate how it will taste. Whatever the reason taking the time to pause gives you a moment to think about what you are doing and to bring your mind to the table as well as your appetite. See Bilson page 171('there is a point to saying grace for it makes us pause to think about the circumstances of our well-being') for confirmation that this may not be an original idea although it is still a good one. Recently I also came across this piece by Suzanne Lenzer on 'an eating meditation' which requires that you sit in front of your food for a full minute and think about what you are feeling. Then you start eating slowly and mindfully, paying attention to all the sensations eating produces. This meditation doesn't sound like something I could manage too often – meal times usually involve a fair bit of conversation which tends to interfere with the mindfulness bit.
I also recently read a justification for photographing your food which argued that by pausing before you attack the food to make a record of what was on your plate was perhaps not a bad thing. Well you can see what they are getting at but I don't think taking a photograph is in the same league with saying grace.

Thought number 2.
Most meals in our house are served at the table, that is everyone helps themselves to what they want. I don't do 'plating up' in part because we have a small kitchen and finding room for four plates on the bench is sometimes a bit of a stretch; in part because when my children were younger it seemed that they would be more prepared to eat if they weren't presented with a daunting plate of food but had some chance to choose exactly what and how much they would like to eat. It also seems to me that helping yourself to food not only gives you the chance to choose but gives you some involvement with what you are about to eat and suggests a commitment to eat what you have chosen. It also allows you to think about the arrangement of the food – what goes with what, which bits get sauce on them and which don't . Sharing the food in this way also means you don't need to put everything on your plate all at once if you don't want to and you can come back for second helpings whenever it suits.There also has to be some acknowledgement of the amount of food available and the exercise of a certain amount of self restraint if there is to be enough to go around. One way or another serving yourself gives you some connection to what you are about to eat.
Gay Bilson notes that although at home you don't get a choice of what you will eat for dinner in the same way as you would in a restaurant at least, at home 'food is not prescribed in portions' She criticises the notion of 'plating' calling it creating 'pictures on plates' and taking away 'the loveliness of eating as much as you want, of a whole dish and of different parts of a dish'. Another notion Bilson considers is the isolation of the food on the plate ('The spotless, great white border of the plate is still the defining difference between restaurant food, which is presented, and domestic cooking, which is served.' pages 189-190) and the idea that doing something at the table combats that isolation. I can only agree with her idea of the perfect restaurant -

In the perfect restaurant, which more and more I equate with eating at home, there would be no choice and all the food would be set down on the table so that diners helped themselves.(pages 302-303)

Thought number 3.
When I wrote my piece on the book Bourke Street Bakery I quite liked my analogy of sour dough starter being like a teenager. Well Ms Bilson has a far better relationship with her sour dough starter which she 'mothers'. I was pleased to read though that she gave herself 'about two years to begin to understand the interaction of temperature, humidity and the health of the culture, different flours, different ovens, and many more variables', and that even after 3 years 'I know I am only just at the point where I might start to say I make bread.' (page 121). I rest my case!

Thought number 4.
I have complained here before that recipe books tend to talk only in terms of what to do rather than what not to do and/or why you should do things a certain way and in a certain order. In other words, Bilson's words, most cookbooks are 'manuals of practical instruction' and as such a poor replacement for 'generational instruction' (page 255). Cooks learn by cooking and in the domestic situation cuisine is transmitted by a tradition of manual skills and instructions within the family (page 285).

Of course, all this points to the obvious: you need to learn to cook by working with someone else, not by reading books ...The point of a recipe is the final product and you need to know what the final product should be like. All recipes should include what many of them don't; a guide to what you are aiming for – texture, taste, consistency.' (page 61)

According to Julian Barnes* mere photographs in a book don't do the job. I would suggest that Nigel Slater is the best example of a writer who makes a conscious effort to use language to try to bridge the gap between sterile, written instructions and the look and feel and taste of the food he presents.

Which leads me to thought number 5, perhaps the success of Master Chef and all the other chefs on television has to do with this idea of learning to cook by cooking along with some one. If you haven't learnt to cook by standing next to someone in their kitchen then perhaps the next best thing is to at least see the process in the comfort of the lounge room. Whilst most television programmes don't necessarily show the whole process they do demonstrate most of the significant steps– how big the vegetable dice should be, how finely the herbs are chopped -– and some of the concepts difficult to put into words like what egg whites look like 'whipped to soft peaks'. And when chefs demonstrate processes and have to actually explain what they are doing they do tend to talk more about why they are using a certain technique and what might go wrong at various stages of the preparation – if only to fill in the time.
Please do not take this grudging acknowledgement as in some way legitimising programmes like Master Chef. On page 191 Bilson quotes Michael Carter (from a paper delivered at Aesthetics of Food symposium, Sydney University, 1998)

A rise in the esteem in which cooks and cooking are held is not in itself fatal. It is the aestheticisation of culinary activities which opens the gates to decadence since it is the aspiration to art which subordinates the nutritional role of food to the demands to spectacle, performance and transgression.

Which pretty much sums up what I think too (and attempted to articulate here ) and just goes to show that having the thoughts isn't much use unless you also have the words to communicate them. (But is 'aestheticisation' a real word?)

*The Pedant in the Kitchen (Julian Barnes, Atlantic Books, London, 2003) pages 56-63 where the author struggles with the photographs in Nigel Slater's Real Cooking.

Plenty. Digressions on food.
Gay Bilson
Lantern, Camberwell, 2004
ISBN192098903X

An apple a day.

2010-06-16T16:51:00.002+10:00

The plan for yesterday was to write about what I had been doing (spending a week in San Francisco) and what I had been reading (Plenty by Gay Bilson) but that was before I read the morning paper.

The article which caught my attention was entitled 'Crunch time as apple growers wait on import ruling'. In summary Australian apple growers are expecting to hear soon from the World Trade Organisation as to whether or not they (the WTO) will approve the export of apples from New Zealand to Australia. The article suggests that growers are primarily concerned about the risk of introducing Fire Blight, an infection which is described as 'the foot- and- mouth disease of horticulture', into Australia and the effect this would have on their future.
Like many newspaper articles the information presented raised more questions than it answered so I set out to try and educate myself on this issue.
I am in no way qualified to ague the pros and cons of an international body which regulates trade nor any sort of expert on how that body works. However it appears that in this case the New Zealanders have 'complained' about the existing 'phytosanitary' measures which Australia applies to the importation of apples from New Zealand. This complaint was made back in August 2007 and it is only now that the WTO is ready to give its findings.(See here for a summary of the goings on.) . The WTO regulations do allow countries to put their case as to why certain products should be restricted and in this case Australia has argued for the present restrictions to remain in force on the basis of biosecurity.
At the moment Australia does allow the importation of apples from Japan and New Zealand and pears from China subject to quarantine policies. Biosecurity Australia is also in the process of considering the importation of apples from China. (China is the world's largest producer of apples (26 million tonnes in 2006), accounting for around 50% of global apple production, of which they only export about 3%. These figures are taken from Biosecurity Australia's Issues Paper July 2008).

According to the newspaper growers are 'aleady struggling with an oversupply of apples on the domestic market' and apparently we have not imported any apples despite the policies which would allow that to happen. Over the period 2003-2008 Australia exported 3,351,113 kilos of apples but I have no idea what proportion this is of our total apple production (see here).
What I still haven't discovered is why New Zealand wants to export it's apples to Australia. If they have a glut of apples too then obviously they would want to off- load them but why do they imagine Australia would want to buy them? Do they intend to try to sell off their surplus at ridiculous prices? Are they just interested in the principles involved? If the WTO finds in New Zealand's favour then they can export apples to Australia but we don't have to import them. Similarly the claim by Australian apple growers that 'we'll see Chinese apples here by Christmas' is only valid if an Australian food distributor/retailer decides to import them. The Chinese/New Zealanders won't send boat loads of apples just in the hope that someone might buy them?

It appears that the WTO has already communicated its decision to the Australian and New Zealand governments and the gossip is that they have found in favour of New Zealand. As far as I can tell no official announcement will be made until the Australian government has had the opportunity to review the decision and make any corrections to the data already presented.
Local growers are surely right to be concerned about the possibility of Fire Blight being introduced into this country and the consequences for their business. That New Zealand's complain has required a complex investigation is evidenced by the time it has taken for the matter to be resolved. I still don't understand why we would need to import apples from anywhere or why anyone would want to but I suppose if we are already bringing in asparagus from Peru and fish from Uganda we might as well add apples from New Zealand and coals from Newcastle to the list as well.

Latest update here

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY

2010-06-01T10:00:00.002+10:00

It's hard to believe that it is a whole year since I started writing here and I haven't saved the world yet or become famous.

It was last year that I wrote about having seen Food Inc at the Sydney Film Festival and it is only now that it is being released in cinemas here. Talking about this film with friends who are interested in going to see it has made me reflect on what effect, if any, the film has had on me. Certainly I have made a conscious effort this last year to try to make more informed decisions about what we eat as a family, although I would have to admit to not necessarily knowing that much more about the Australian food business than I did before seeing Food Inc.
Last week I attended a session at the Sydney Writer's Festival hosted by Griffith Review and listened to a panel discussion on ethical eating. The panel members – Pauline Nguyen, Tony Barrell, Rebecca Huntley and Sarah Kanowski – were all contributors to the Griffith review Food Chain edition. As with most sessions at the SWF held on a weekday, at lunchtime, the audience were predominantly female, middle aged and middle class. Not surprisingly the panel were talking to the converted and there was much nodding in agreement with what was being said. What concerned me is that simply being earnest and interested is hardly enough. What can you actually DO to make a difference?
Tony Barrell's piece on Nile perch 'How many miles?' I think nicely encapsulates the sort of problems faced by anyone serious about trying to eat ethically and responsibly. The Nile perch on sale in supermarkets in Sydney is fully imported from Uganda. Although the fish isn't native to Lake Victoria it now represents 90% of Uganda's fish exports and the livelihood for fishermen from Kenya and Tanzania. The fish has become so popular that stocks are being depleted, fish processing plants are closing and there is a moratorium on fishing.
As an individual I can choose not to buy Nile perch (I don't think I have ever knowingly eaten any) but that won't stop it being available in the supermarket. Woolworths could make the decision not to sell the stuff, surely customers would buy something else if Nile perch were not available. But what about the poor Tanzanian fisherman – who is going to find him another source on income? And isn't is all too late anyway now that the Nile perch has eaten its way through all the indigenous fish in Lake Victoria?

Too many of the issues surrounding ethical eating involve these damned if you do and damned if you don't scenarios. For example, Walmart is now the biggest seller of organic produce in the USA but giant agribusiness comes at a cost – pollution, food miles, food security, work practises – whether the product is organic or not. (See here for a report on Stonyfield Farm the manufacturers of the organic yogurt featured in Food Inc.). At a household level eating ethically also involves a fair degree of commitment, a certain amount of confusion and can be time consuming and expensive. Just trying to get your head around the multitude of issues is daunting but there are some very good sources of information, like Barry Easterbrook's blog The Politics of the Plate , which at least keep you up to date.
In the end though I think that all we can do is remain optimistic - if everyone took a small stand, made incremental changes in their eating and buying habits then big changes would be possible. If more people questioned the big supermarkets as to their policies and required them to justify themselves perhaps they would be forced to make some changes themselves. I was interested to discover that Woolworths do in fact have a Sustainability Strategy but I haven't seen it available in any of their stores. In the UK at least consumers do seem to think that supermarkets have a responsibilty to make it easier for consumers to shop ethically (here).

For my part I I have made the commitment not to buy any fresh fruit or vegetables or any meat from the supermarket. Not buying from the supermarket is partly a protest against the control the two big supermarkets have over what Australians eat and partly because I want to support my local retailers and buy real food from real people. This is an easy decision for me to make because I have four independent butchers, five independent green grocers and two weekly growers markets all within easy distance of home, and I don't have to worry over much about the extra I might be paying for the goods that I buy. Not everyone in Sydney is so fortunate.

A meal by any other name

2010-05-28T17:59:00.002+10:00

Cartoon from Punch 26 September 1951

English is supposed to be a very rich language so why don't we have more words to describe eating – or at least eating events? Breakfast for example describes the first meal of the day but to say that you have just had breakfast, or indeed that you have just finished breakfasting doesn't give any clue as to what you might have eaten. Similarly lunch, or luncheon in its original form, is usually taken these days to mean the meal taken in the middle of the day. Lunch could be anything from a three course meal to a sandwich. Dinner commonly refers to the main meal of the day so dinner could be lunch but lunch could never be dinner. In other words you could eat your main meal at lunch time but your evening meal could never be called lunch, although you might call it supper. Supper is a word that doesn't seem to be used very much but I understand it to mean a light meal taken in the evening but again this could be anything from cheese on toast or a bowl of soup to a pasta dish.
I don't know enough about other languages to know whether other cultures have more definitive terms which describe not just when but what is eaten. Yum cha as I understand it describes the whole event of eating dim sum but does the term imply when the food is eaten? And what then is Greek Yum Cha which one restaurant proudly advertises? Tapas refers to the way the food is presented rather than any specific food stuff and, as bar food, is available whenever bars are open. Perhaps terms like merenda or merienda (an outdoor meal, a shared meal, a snack during the working day) hold more specific meaning, a clear idea of not just what might be eaten but when, for those who use them.

This ruminating was partly prompted by trying to write a review of Nigel Slater's Tender Volume 1 and thinking about why he might have come up with such an odd title. Briefly Tender is the diary of Slater's experiences with growing vegetables in his London garden with recipe ideas for using them. Why not Nigel Slater's book of the Vegetable Patch or Real Vegies? And given that Mr Slater is someone who chooses his words carefully he would not have happened upon tender by accident. As it turns out it is in fact an almost perfect word to use to describe both his relationship with the food he grows and cooks and his role in the garden.
A tender (noun) is a person who tends or waits on another; a person who attends or has charge of something - in this case the tender of the vegetable patch. A tender is also an offer of anything for acceptance, as in the author offering his ideas and observations to his readers.
Tender (adjective) describes something soft or delicate or soft or delicate in texture or consistency, easily broken, cut, compressed ,chewed etc; something needing protection, not hardy – which describes the state of the young vegetables as they grow and often also the cooked vegetable .
Someone who is tender is gentle or sensitive towards or about others, kind, loving, mild, affectionate; careful of the welfare or integrity of people and things, as in the tender loving care Slater lavishes on both his garden and his cooking. And of course he writes tenderly and affectionately too.
As a verb tender means to be affected, softened as in to become tender or make tender – as in cooking. A tenderer is a person or thing which makes something tender – so a cook is a tenderer.
To tender also means to hold forth, to offer, to present for approval, as in to tender an apology or perhaps to tender a book for approval or use.

Do you imagine Nigel lay awake at night thinking about all these connections? I wouldn't put it past him! Anyone who can call a recipe idea 'Squeaking spinach, sizzling bacon', who talks about dishes bubbling 'enticingly', whose ingredients become 'acquainted' and who eats 'supper' regularly and often obviously spends a good deal of his time thinking about the subtleties and meaning of the words he uses.

Read my review of Tender for The Gastronomer's Bookshelf here.

Let the baker bake

2010-05-22T17:51:00.000+10:00

Bread made at Sunnybrae. Even scoring the loaf so that it looks interesting isn't as easy as it sounds!

I know before I turn the first page that I am unlikely to make anything from Bourke Street Bakery (the ultimate baking companion). I adore freshly baked bread. I love the feel of the dough and the aroma of bread cooking but I have been there and done that and I am not tempted to try again in a hurry. All bread making is part science experiment, part black magic but sour dough bread comes very close to a pact with the Devil. (Remember 'double, double, toil and trouble'? Well it's a little known fact that Macbeth's witches were the local custodians of the sour dough starter.) Inviting a sour dough starter into your home is like taking in a teenage lodger. It needs constant attention, always requiring to be fed and made comfortable; unpredictable and uncommunicative and never learning to look after itself. With luck a teenager lodger will eventually develop some survival skills and may even move on but the only way you will get rid of your sour dough starter is to let it die!

This is one of those eponymous books of the business – in this case a chain of bakeries (if three outlets can be said to be a 'chain') - which started on Bourke Street in Surry Hills,Sydney, run by the authors Paul Allam and David McGuinness. Why would they want to share the secrets of their successful enterprise? Well the cynic in me could argue that publishing a book is very good cross promotion. The few customers they might lose because one or two readers do start making their own bread and pastries will be more than compensated by those who read the book and throw their hands up in despair and rush to their nearest Bourke Street store. A more charitable approach would suggest that writing a book is a natural extension of the passion and enthusiasm these two have for what they do. And given the amount of time which must have gone in to the testing of the recipes here I think this interpretation is the truth of the matter.

The book begins with how to source the best ingredients for your baking – the right type of flour ( bread baking flour can be sourced directly from them), salt, filtered water, Belgian butter and compressed yeast. If that list doesn't put you off then you won't be bothered by the need to also have an electric mixer, with a dough hook, and, ideally, a temperature probe*. Of course you can make perfectly decent bread without a fancy machine or any sort of probe and without having to import special butter, it's the having to wait the best part of a week for the starter to be usable and the need to be patient and prepared to experiment that really puts me off. How many years worth of practise before you can produce anything which comes close to the perfection you can purchase from the bakery? Even the authors admit that the only hitch to making sour dough is 'a day long process that involves a few stages'. Less of a hitch and more of an insurmountable obstacle. Not that sour dough is the only bread dealt with here - in fact the olive oil beads sound almost manageable.When I was at Sunnybrae last month George Biron made wonderful bread using a combination of sour dough starter and dried yeast along the lines of the yeast raised breads recipes in this book. His method of dealing with the starter was a simpler process but producing the final dough – how much water to add, how long to mix – requires practice and experience. No book can tell you exactly how the dough should feel.

That said the information here is very detailed and I am sure someone so inclined would find it all very useful. For me just looking at the photographs makes me feel helpless and hopeless. I do understand that bread making can be an addictive and extremely rewarding past time – but not for me, well, not at the moment anyway.
Bread making however is only part of the story. There is also a section here on pastry making. Now I don't really do pastry either. I'm more than happy to buy good quality ready made puff pastry, prefer to get up early to buy my croissants rather than get up even earlier to make them and only make apple pie for special occasions. I have spent my cooking lifetime finding ways of avoiding making pastry. The very best bit about this section of the book are the recipes for the pie and tart fillings - the rabbit and quince pie sounds well worth a try. And finally there are recipes for cakes, biscuits and desserts but by now it's a bit too late for me to be enthusiastic.

I won't be buying this book but I will continue to make my visits to the Bourke Street Bakery and enjoy their delicious breads and pastries. I would sooner spend the cost of the book many times over than put myself through the anguish of all those disappointments when the results of my experiments didn't measure up to my expectations. Why should I try to improve on the products Paul and David have spent so long getting just right?

*One point that did intrigue me was that despite all the details about ingredients and equipment this book, and perhaps even Grisewood's Manna from Heaven (I can't check this because the book has gone back to its rightful owner), doesn't address what sort of oven these recipes are designed for. If it is important to have enough moisture in the oven to achieve the best end result then surely the type of oven will make a difference?

Bourke Street Bakery. The Ultimate Baking Companion.
Paul Allam and David McGuiness
Murdoch Books, Millers Point. 2009
ISBN 9781741964332

Manna from Heaven

2010-05-17T10:45:00.005+10:00

With my new found enthusiasm for reviewing books (my review of Kitchen Garden Companion has been published on Gastronomer's Bookshelf!) I borrowed Rachel Grisewood's Manna From Heaven from a friend to practise on.
The title of this publication is also the name of Grisewood's business – she manufactures cakes and biscuits which are sold fairly widely throughout Australia and even turn up on Qantas flights. A brief web search suggested that her products are well known but I can honestly say that I have never knowingly eaten either of her 'iconic' (surely there is a better word?) products – that is Chocolate Crunch and Lemon Polenta Cake – before making them according to the recipes in her book. More of that later.

On first appearances Manna from Heaven is very appealing. A bright fuchsia pink and orange cover, lots of vivid orange and purple, bright pink and lime green inside, 'hand written' titles and line drawings, minimal photography all conveying a feeling of fun and perhaps a touch of eccentricity. The organisation of the book is also a bit quirky – each section is organised around a theme and tells a story based around Rachel's experiences as a chef, as a business woman , a mother and a friend. The chapter 'Everything but the kitchen sink' for example includes recipes for a variety of dishes from 'Braised chicken legs with star anise' to 'Andrea's Pineapple Upside-down cake' sandwiched together with musings on kitchens and cooking equipment. Whilst much of what the author has to say is reasonably interesting somehow the words don't quite live up to the vitality promised by all the colourful exuberance and for me some of the personal detail got a tad tedious.
There is a preponderance of recipes for bakery items here, since these are clearly Grisewood's first love, which means that this is not a book for the non-baker. Although there is a broad enough range of other dishes – main meals, salads, desserts – to make this a useful book there was nothing that struck me as terribly exciting or new. In a chapter entitled 'Words on Food' the author discusses her favourite books and writers, a fairly predictable list including Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, Richard Olney and Nigel Slater. Manna from Heaven might be a good investment for anyone who does not already have the seminal works by these authors on their shelves, and in fairness I assume that Grisewood does in fact intend that her book should appeal to a younger audience who may not have already discovered these classics for themselves.
Although it didn't take me long to determine that this was not a book I needed to add to my own collection I did give it the acid test and attempt some of the recipes. I should make it clear that I am not a baker. I don't like having to fiddle about carefully weighing ingredients so over the years I have accumulated my own repertoire of foolproof cakes and I am rarely tempted to torture myself with further experimentation.

Grisewood's Chocolate Crunch however is almost nothing more than shortbread biscuits embedded in rich dark chocolate. Even I was able to make this and the result was pretty much what I expected. Mine even looked like the photograph in the book in as much as it was dark brown and had clearly visible lumps of biscuit. On closer inspection however Grisewood's biscuit pieces were somewhat more uniform in size and shape and arranged much less haphazardly than mine.

Manna from Heaven?

Emboldened I proceed to the next 'iconic' recipe – Lemon Polenta Cake. I have in fact made a similar cake before using an almost identical recipe clipped from a magazine. The ingredients are few and the method straightforward. I complicated things slightly - rather than making one large cake or 24 smaller ones I made only twelve small cakes and one medium size- in a 7” tin (it is an old cake tin which I inherited from my mother so it is very much measured in inches and not centimetres).
This is one of those super simple bung-it-all-in-together-and-mix recipes which appeal to me. The resulting large cake certainly looked good but my mini cakes steadfastly refused to allow themselves to be removed from the pan (serious greasing and baking paper not withstanding) and I needed to add considerably more than just a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice to make an icing out of 225g of icing sugar. The general consensus from the tasting panel was a definite thumbs up which means that this cake is worth attempting again. Another characteristic in its favour is that it is rich and moist and keeps well.

In a former life I worked in product development for a company which manufactured a wide range of flour based products including cake mixes. Those experiences taught me the litany of variables - oven temperature, the type of oven, the position of the cake in the oven, size of the cake tin, weight of the egg, how long or how little the batter was mixed for, the accuracy of all the weights and measurements, the strength of the flour etc – which bedevil bakers. Grisewood does address some of these issues – she gives both the number of eggs and the weight of egg, she specifies the type of butter – but to be really foolproof the recipe still has to work assuming that the cook has taken absolutely no notice of any of this information. When I made the Lemon Polenta Cake I didn't weigh the eggs; I used ordinary, everyday Australian butter; I used coarse polenta not fine and the scales I had available were only accurate to the nearest 20 grams – on that basis then this recipe would appear to be a pretty resilient. And on reading the fine print I discovered that the author does specify the 'the icing sugar is always pure' which would explain why icing made with 225g of icing sugar mixture requires much more than a teaspoon or two of lemon juice.
Take note, if you do buy this book remember to read pages 12 and 13 before proceeding further.

Manna From Heaven. Cooking for the people you love.
Rachel Grisewood
Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2009
ISBN 9781741757286

Birthday Dinner

2010-05-07T17:26:00.000+10:00

I do most of the cooking in this household (sometimes this statement would read 'I do ALL of the cooking around here!'), with the exception of the odd breakfast (usually at the weekend) and weekday lunches (which generally involve raids on the left overs). Part of my role as head chef is to prepare something special for birthday dinners. I enjoy making a bit of a fuss for birthdays so the birthday person is allowed to have whatever they would like (within reason) and usually chooses a favourite dish but sometimes something we haven't tried at home before. For the next birthday at the end of the month the special request is steak and kidney pudding which is a far cry from the fancy cakes and fairy bread of the past.
Last weekend it was my birthday and the tables were turned. What did I want cooked for me on my birthday? I had no idea.
I have actively encouraged my family to take an interest in the food they eat and they are all quite capable of preparing a meal. All I had to do was provide them with a recipe and some of the ingredients. This wasn't meant to be a 'Masterchef 'challenge – I needed to choose dishes that I knew they could manage and ideally didn't need either too much preparation or too much last minute attention. The final decision was less about what I wanted to eat and had more to do with what I thought was achievable.

In the end we had braised lamb shanks with couscous, more or less according to The Cooks Companion, followed by rice pudding and baked quinces. And it was terrific!

However as they were preparing and I was enduring an excruciating banishment from the kitchen I decided we would do things differently next year.

Because I cook for four of us every night usually my first conscious thought every morning is along the lines of 'what are we going to have for dinner?' Although I often ask for guidance the responses aren't always helpful with the result that most nights we eat what I want to have for dinner – either simply what I am prepared to make, something that has tempted me when I've been shopping or just something new that I want to try. In that sense every day is my special day because I make the choices.

Preparing food for someone else is an act of giving. Every meal requires at the very least the giving of your time and your attention in one form or another. For me preparing meals for my family every day is both a necessity – we all need to eat – and an act of, mushy though it may sound, love. (It might be instructive to draw up a relationship between what we eat each night and what sort of mood I am in!)
When I prepare something special for someone on their birthday it is really just a way of giving them a more personal gift – this meal is first and foremost for you, we are just sharing it with you.

When it comes to my birthday next year I want my family to cook for me and to give me what they want to prepare, what they want me to have. I don't want to make a choice, I will be more than happy with whatever it is they make – sausages from the barbecue, cheese on toast, bacon and eggs - because it will be what they want to give.

Month in Review - April 2010

2010-05-01T17:00:00.002+10:00

Harvested at Sunnybrae

For a long time I have been fascinated by the restaurant kitchen. I don't ever really want to work in one but I've often wanted to be a fly on the wall, actually in there feeling the heat and smelling the food rather than just watching bits and pieces of the action on television. I'm intrigued by the whole process of getting food onto the table from knowing what to prepare ahead and how much food to have on hand right down to making sure that it gets to the table hot enough. And I'm fascinated and awed by the dedication and enthusiasm of those who devote their professional life to cooking for other people.
Anyone can learn how to cook – basic stuff like boiling water, frying an egg – and how to follow a recipe. But for me to be a really good cook requires innate ability and almost an obsession with experimenting and learning and creating. A good cook understands ingredients, can read food by the way it looks and smells and mixes flavours and textures the way an artist might mix colours to get just the right combination. I regard myself as a competent home cook rather than a good cook. I'm a little too afraid of failure for one thing and tend to be more of a recipe follower than a generator of ideas – although I have often been heard to lament that most of my real failures have come about because I have followed the recipe rather than my own instincts. I don't think I was born with any great talent for cooking but I do find it a satisfying and enjoyable creative process and I'm always on the look out for inspiration.

Which leads me to the highlight for this month – cooking with George Biron at Sunnybrae. I have made no secret of my enthusiasm for all things Sunnybrae and it was a simple matter to convince myself that a day or two in Victoria was exactly what I needed as an early birthday present. George's Mondays are less of a cooking class – although there is plenty to learn – and more of an opportunity to cook together, to try some new techniques, to experiment with new ingredients and gain a little more understanding about food and cooking. Anyone who attends can request a particular ingredient or technique that interests them and George structures a menu around these requests based on his philosophy of using locally sourced, fresh, seasonal and sometimes unusual ingredients. There's a lot to take in and trying to take some notes while watching, listening and doing required a good deal of concentration so that sitting down to enjoy the food we had helped to prepare was very welcome at the end of the day.

Lunch consisted of bread fresh from the woodfired oven, home made taramasalata, a vegetable strudel made with yufka pastry, a tomatillo salad, and a green papaya salad with farmed prawns followed by braised beef ribs served with potatoes salardaise and a sweet and sour cucumber and tomato salad and finished off with crème brûlée and persimmons, pomegranates and ground cherries in a lemon verbena syrup served with star anise and lime flavoured ice cream.

Taramasalata, tomatillo salad and the wonderful fresh bread straight out of the oven

I came away full, happy and reinvigorated and reminded that good food, good cooking is also about generosity – being generous with ingredients, with knowledge and ideas and with your time. Many thanks George.(My family should thank you too because they have already been treated to the beef ribs and the tomato and cucumber salad.)

After Sunnybrae we drove along the coast road to Adelaide. I am no fan of driving holidays but the coast road is a bit of an exception because the outposts of civilisation are reasonably frequent and the scenery was magnificent. The only real disappointment was a distinct scarcity of lobsters in the lobster capitals of Robe and Kingston which we should have anticipated as it is the end of the season and the quota already accounted for.
Being away from home food becomes even more of an obsession than usual- it is no longer just a question of what to eat but where. Scouting for restaurants and eating three meals a day purchased from unfamiliar sources and produced by unknown hands gets a bit tiresome. I don't know how vegetarians cope when they are away from home but I was desperate for something green and crunchy by the time we reached Adelaide.

Eating wasn't our main reason for being in Adelaide;

we were there for the Special Olympics National Trials to cheer on the lovely Lisa who was competing in Bocce. She came away with three medals including the Gold Medal for the teams event!

Gold Medal Winners!!

However after the competition finished we did indulge in a trip to the Adelaide Central Markets – a wonderful place to be on a Saturday morning, full of life and tempting goodies (including this amazing selection of glace fruit) - and we spent a day in the Adelaide Hills home of my latest favourite cheese Paris Creek Nuage Blanc (which is the best cheese you will ever buy in a supermarket gorgeously oozy on the outside, firm and crumbly in the middle) AND of Woodside Cheese Wrights AND Udder Delights – so much cheese, so little time!

Back home and eager to get back into the kitchen I was interested to read Michael Ruhlman's 'Message to food editors: What 30 minute meals really mean' (and see also here) because there really isn't any good excuse for not eating well – fresh, seasonal produce, prepared with a bit of care. Which does not mean buying the white asparagus from PERU which was available at the green grocer this week!

Reviewing cook books and the Gastronomers Bookshelf.

2010-04-18T10:56:00.002+10:00

from Punch 14 November, 1951

Last week I discovered the Gastronomers Bookshelf a site dedicated to reviews of books about food. Given my on-going gripe about recipe books not getting the attention they deserve in the main stream media I was thrilled to discover that someone takes these books seriously enough to put the time and effort into maintaining this website.

I immediately decided that my mission in life was to help Duncan and Mark and make my own contribution to their efforts. So I launched myself into a review of Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion. A week later I am still writing.

Initially I was wildly positive about this book, carried away in part by my own enthusiasm for starting a vegetable garden and in part because I had been very impressed when I heard Ms. Alexander talk about her Kitchen Garden Foundation . It is hard not to admire her determination and dedication. I even went as far as to describe her book as 'inspirational, indispensable and irresistible'! (I've always been a fan of alliteration.)
A good review however needs to be at least somewhat objective even allowing for the reviewer's admission of their own bias. It wasn't until I really tried to see this book through someone else's eyes and tried to summarise why I liked it and why I thought others should buy it that I realised there were flaws and omissions. In fact in the end I found it hard to know who I would recommend it to, especially given the price tag (in excess of $A100) and seriously began to question why I had bought it myself!

Part of the problem of reviewing the Kitchen Garden Companion lies in
1.clearly defining what the book is about - Is it a gardening guide? Is it a recipe book?
and
2.defining the intended audience - adults? Children? Families? Gardeners? Inexperienced cooks? All of the above?
The book has grown out of the author's experience of establishing her own vegetable garden and her work with school children and combines gardening information with recipes and instruction on how to involve children both in cooking and gardening. Much as I admire Ms. Alexander I suspect that she tends to have a bit of an authoritarian, take no prisoners approach which manifests itself here in an uncompromising confidence in children's latent enthusiasm for gardening and cooking, their abilities with kitchen equipment and their predisposition to appreciate sophisticated flavours.

In the end I think I have decided that anyone wanting to start a kitchen garden, whether planning to involve children in the process or not, would probably be better off buying a more comprehensive gardening guide. For example, Lolo Houbein's One Magic Square covers most of what you would ever need to know and offers all sorts of sensible, practical advice – like raising seedlings in the cardboard cylinders from toilet rolls. Anyone interested enough to start growing their own food probably already has a reasonable selection of recipe books and anyone wanting to teach children the basics of how to cook would want recipes less complex than those in the Kitchen Garden Companion. Stephanie's book makes a worthy attempt to be two (perhaps even three) books in one volume but for less than the cost of the Kitchen Garden Companion, you could actually have two books.

Along the way I also compared the Kitchen Garden Companion with another book in my collection, Nigel Slater's Tender. Although we have long been advised not to judge a book by its cover, book designers are there to try to persuade us to do just that. What struck me when I looked at these two books side by side was how each reflects its author, not just in the writing and the recipes but also in its physical look and feel.

Stephanie Alexander's book is big and weighty (running to 771 pages and weighing in at 3 kilos)– it looks authoritative. The photographs are bright and clear and the layout is neat and regular so that flipping through the appearance is very sunny, very primary colours, very clean and precise, very no-nonsense. There's almost a feeling that this is educational and good for you even before you start reading.

Tender – the very title suggests something fragile and delicate – is almost the antithesis of authoritarian despite also being a hefty tome. There's a fuzziness and an unpretentiousness to the photographs here and the whole book has a sort of greyness and softness to it– the recipes are in fact printed on grey paper and there are one or two shots of snow – which has the effect of somehow making it seem very English in contrast to Alexander's book which seems very Australian. Even the titles of the recipes 'A tomato salad …', 'A mildly spiced supper …', A stir-fry of broccoli …' suggest a certain hesitancy, a desire to share ideas rather than instruct. I've only ever seen photographs of Nigel Slater but he always looks a bit dishevelled and unkempt (as though he hasn't combed his hair) and slightly whimsical which is, to me at least, exactly how this book presents itself. He calls himself a cook who writes and here even his words are tender - romantic and seductive. (Some might even say that some of his writing verges on the erotic!) There are a lot of words here so there is a sense that you need to spend time reading this book to really understand what it is about – time that is well rewarded. Just to tempt you, how about this:

'I regard a baked onion as a fine but humble supper. It will probably have been steamed first to keep its flesh juicy, then left in a low oven to bake with a little butter and salt until its translucent, golden layers are at the point of collapse. Its edges may have caught and even blackened here and there, and the juices may come embellished with a little cream and grated pecorino ...There will be hand-torn bread, and maybe some lightly cooked spinach at its side. Oh and a glass or two of wine, something velvety, would do nicely.'

I'll have what he's having thanks.

See here for a very interesting piece on what's involved with establishing a school kitchen garden under the auspices of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation and here for my final review.

Artisanal Preservation - Tomato Kasundi

2010-04-08T17:30:00.003+10:00

Sharing food with friends is one of life's great pleasures. Making food with friends is right up there too as a wonderful way to spend time together and end up with something useful that you have all helped to create. Thanks to a cheap box of tomatoes three of us got together yesterday to make tomato kasundi (from the recipe in Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook). We had far more tomatoes than we had jars to fill. Undaunted we then decided to make tomato sauce (from the recipe in A Year in a Bottle by Sally Wise) as well.
Then we needed to hunt around and find another pan so that we could have three huge pots bubbling away on the stove together.

Our next decision was to make twice the quantity specified in the sauce recipe. After a lot of chopping we realised we had mis-read the scales and had weighed up the tomatoes in pounds rather than kilos. This explained why our 16 kilo box wasn't emptying as fast as we had anticipated.
We were stalled for a moment while there was much discussion and reweighing and a bit of back and forth about who had added what and how much. Our deliberations were complicated somewhat becasue the sauce was being cooked in two pans so the recipe was being 'doubled' (although not really) and halved at the same time. Fortunately we discovered our scaling problem as we were about to add the salt to the sauce but not before we had added the sugar, some of which had to be carefully retrieved.
Part way through we also realised we didn't have all the ingredients for the sauce and perhaps not quite enough of some so a little improvisation was necessary.
Miraculously the kasundi proceeded without any set backs once we worked out how many more tomatoes we needed to add. (For your information it would appear that there are around five Roma tomatoes to the pound.)

Thanks to both good recipes and good old commonsense the end results tasted fabulous. Is this what you would call artisanal preservation? The products are certainly unique - we couldn't reproduce them even if we tried.

Month in Review - March 2010

2010-03-31T18:38:00.001+11:00

At last autumn is in the air - it is fractionally cooler, not quite so humid and daylight saving is about to come to an end. Time to give the salads a bit of a rest and actually start eating cooked, hot food again.
Herewith a summary of foodie happenings this month -
1.Every year I wait less and less patiently for the arrival of figs - and finally they are here, although not many! I've managed to make Fig Cake a couple of times already and have stored away some more figs in the freezer.
2. And quinces are available at last. Yesterday I baked some magnificent specimens which I bought at the Kitchen Cabinet a little shop selling local produce attached to the restaurant at Old Parliament House.

I also bought some tomatillos having sampled them at Sunnybrae. We had some of them in a salad with avocado and cucumber which was very good but I have yet to decide what to do with the rest.

We were in Canberra to visit the exhibition of masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay at the National Gallery. And it was worth braving the crowds to see these works in the flesh - although I would have been more than happy to wait to see them sometime in Paris.

Paul Cézanne Kitchen table (Still-life with basket) (La table de cuisine (Nature morte au panier))

3. March was a very good month for reading. First there was the Griffith Review No. 27 entitled 'Food Chain' which as the name suggests was devoted entirely to writing associated in some way with food. Can recommend the article by Margaret Simons 'Sustaining a Nation'.
Then the latest edition of Gastronomica arrived in the mail with more interesting and thought provoking reading - Why are there no Great Women Chefs?, and who would have thought that Sylvia Plath liked to cook.
Finally I got hold of a copy of Frank Moorhouse's Loose Living in which he chronicles our Australian hero's adventures in Europe. This is an odd little book but parts of it are absolutely hilarious.

4. Apart from the very good lunch we had at Cafe in the House in Canberra we also managed dinner at two local restaurants.
Glebe Point Diner is consistently good but because they have two sittings for dinner I was very conscious that mine wasn't the only bum that had been on the seat that night. Perhaps it is just me but there is a sense here that this is very much a business and although the food and wine are very good the atmosphere is a bit sterile. (And isn't $15 corkage for BYO just a little bit over the top? although it must be admitted that the wine list here is extensive and varied.)
At The Codfather (83 Percival Street, Stanmore) on the other hand the service was friendly and attentive, the food was excellent and the corkage on our BYO very reasonable. And you have to love the name.

Blogs and Blogging

2010-03-31T17:22:00.002+11:00

During the month I've been doing a bit of Blog maintenance- changing things around a bit and adding some new favourites to the list of blogs I follow. All of which has given me pause to think about blogs and blogging in general.

I started one crumb at a time largely as a vehicle for my own writing about food. I wanted to hone my writing skills and improve my computer skills. I also wanted the discipline of writing on a regular basis and having to put my thoughts into some sort of logical order. As it has developed the broader idea of the blog as a diary and a record, a place where I can store ideas as well as photographs and art works, record events and references, has become just as important.

The blogs I follow obviously reflect my interests. In general I'm not interested in blogs devoted almost exclusively to recipes – I would sooner keep up with Nigel Slater in the Guardian or consult my own collection of books. I would rather read about the history of the dish and/or the ingredients or perhaps comparisons of versions of the same dish or even critiques of different recipe books (and in fact these are some of the areas I want to explore myself in the future). Nor am I excited by restaurant reviews – where the 30-somethings are eating, what they ate and who they shared it with isn't always riveting reading. (And where do they find the time and the money?) I am by no means against restaurant reviews and I do like to keep up with what's new and popular but for general reading I would sooner Jay Rainer or Alan Richman or A.A. Gill even if there is little or no chance of ever visiting the restaurants they frequent. I also worry a bit about the trend to taking photographs of what we eat rather than taking the time to describe the food, that bloggers are spending too much time documenting and not enough time thinking (and I am not alone - see here).

The blogs I do enjoy reading are not cluttered with advertising nor do they confuse with too many extra pages and diversions. If I am going to take the time to read I like something that is well written and/or something that is thoughtful and informative. And so the blogs I reference here are ones that are updated fairly regularly (if not daily) and offer something of interest.

This month I have also started another blog called Recipes for my children which you might not be too surprised to learn is a record of recipes I want to hand on to my children along with some family history and general, I hope useful, kitchen information.
As far as I can tell no one has read either of my blogs. I don't know that I would welcome comments anyway - certainly not if they are along the lines of 'great photo' or 'loved the recipe'. On the other hand genuine interaction, thoughtful comments which could lead to some sort of on-going conversation, would be appreciated.
In the meantime I'm not interested in advertising or making money - I am more than happy to entertain myself with my own little on-line project.

Fearlessly eating at Sunnybrae

2010-03-22T15:41:00.003+11:00

Over the weekend of 13th and 14th March, George Biron hosted the Fearless Vampire Killers lunches at Sunnybrae as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.

Sunnybrae is about my most favouritest place to eat and the chance to sample a menu featuring garlic in every course – except dessert – was too good to miss. There was nothing about our lunch on the Saturday which wasn't glorious – five courses spread over an afternoon of magnificent autumn weather with a 'Fearless Cookquiz' thrown in to provide a bit of cerebral stimulation.

(Tomatillo guacamole, smoked beetroot relish, tarama, smoked ricotta with samphire-cured ocean trout)

For me the most memorable dishes were the snapper broth with prawns flavoured with sesame and cumin seeds; the tomatillos – crunchy and surprisingly citrus-y; the watermelon and garlic salad with pomegranate dressing – another surprise of texture and flavours; and the amazing verbena-poached figs with liquorice labna and vanilla ice-cream. Lunch started with a 'Gartini' and the rest of the meal was washed down with some very tasty local wines 2006 Bannockburn Saignee, 2004 Barwon Valley Pinot Noir and 2007 Pinnochio Moscato to go with dessert.

Eating at Sunnybrae confounds my recent rant about the differences between eating in someone's home and eating in a restaurant. For most of us eating at Sunnybrae is as close as we will get to eating at home with George and Diane. The atmosphere is relaxed and home-like – Diane's artwork on the walls next to George's library of books, the warm and friendly greetings from them both, the cheerful and relaxed service, being able to wander around the garden and admire the vegetables – see where the tomatillos came from – and sip a glass of wine on the verandah between courses. There is a real sense that everyone involved in the occasion is enjoying themselves - the guests want to be there and the chef and his staff want to feed you and share their food with you – which makes for a very different sort of restaurant experience.

George is an intelligent and thoughtful chef and his wide ranging interests were well represented in the Cookquiz which was great fun. And thanks to some arcane knowledge and lots of judicious guess work we managed to come away with the consolation prize – one of Diane's Sunnybrae aprons and enough garlic to keep the vampires away for some time. (We toasted our success with 2008 Leura Park Bubbles.)

On the Sunday, flushed with success and seduced by the wonderful weather I had to make some purchases at the Lorne bookshop (while waiting for breakfast to be served next door) - Nigel Slater's Real Fast Puddings because I hadn't seen it before and I am a Slaterite, Jane Grigson's English Food because I didn't already have it and Lindsey Bareham's A Celebration of Soup just because it was only $10.

In defence of home cooking

2010-03-19T18:16:00.002+11:00

Cartoon from Punch, March 5, 1952

Why would any one willingly invite perfect strangers into their home solely for the purpose of having them criticise the food that had been prepared for them? Why would you, except perhaps as a joke, attempt to transform your home into a restaurant?
Stranger still why would anyone want to sit in front of television and watch other people doing either or both of the above?

Programmes like My Restaurant Rules and Come Dine With Me are hardly edifying and I think are in some ways down right offensive. (Brian Whitaker takes a different view, but then he doesn't even own a dining table!)
For one thing the whole notion of food as competition is wrong. The home cook doesn't need to have their food compared to that of other home cooks let alone professional chefs. When we invite people into our home to eat we don't expect them to analyse every mouthful or comment on the presentation. Eating meals at home with family and friends is about nurturing, hospitality, commensality, about nourishment. Having friends for dinner is about more than just the food we eat; it's about sharing, about quite literally breaking bread together.

These programmes offer no encouragement to non-cooks - rather the emphasis on style over substance is intimidating. As Michael Pollan has pointed out these programmes don't actually appeal to an audience who love to cook, rather they appeal to people who love to eat. What we learn from them is 'culinary fashion' not how to cook.
At worst it could be said that these shows denigrate the home cook, whoever it is in your household who produces the three meals every day. Good basic home cooking really isn't good enough. If you don't cook like a chef and present your guests with three course meals, each course utilising fashionable ingredients and glamorously 'plated', don't bother.

On the other hand if I were a professional chef I would be alarmed at the suggestion that anyone can cook like a chef - no formal training, no long apprenticeship required. Anyone can prepare food worthy of a restaurant - style wins out over substance again.

Eating out at a restaurant and eating at home are quite separate and unique experiences. Each has it's own set of rules and traditions. We expect some fundamental differences – where we eat is linked to who we dine with, what we eat, why we are dining together and when we eat. Sharing and hospitality have different meanings in these different contexts. In fact a restaurant is a business and successful restaurants, according to A.A. Gill are more about business than food.

My final gripe is that far too many television food programmes tend to extol extravagance and excess. The logical conclusion is that 'good' food revolves around fancy, schmancy, tricked about expensive ingredients rather than being food which is actually good for you.

Slice me, Zest me

2010-03-12T17:07:00.003+11:00

Cressida Campbell; Pumpkin and cleaver.

Kitchen gadgets are the work of the Devil sent to tempt and tease until you actually purchase one. Once you lapse you are doomed to a life of regret and frustration. Buy in haste and repent at leisure. Long may you regret the money which could have been better spent. Oft will you struggle with the frustration of getting the thing to do any of the tasks of which you had expected it might be capable.
No one who cooks is immune from the lure of the kitchen gadget. I currently lust after my friend's gorgeous, new, apple green Kitchen Aid mixer which leers at me from her kitchen bench. However loyalty to my 'retro' Sunbeam Mixmaster - we have been making cakes together for 35 years give or take a month or two - makes this one temptation I can resist.

Gimmicks aside there are, as the Mixmaster proves, some kitchen gadgets worth possessing. My current favourite is a newly aquired Microplane zester. Having struggled for years with a little gizmo which was both difficult to use and almost impossible to clean I am now happy to zest anything and everything. The Microplane is effortless, and very efficient due to the fact that it is incredibly sharp - I am not game to have anything smaller than a lemon between me and the cutting surface.
Another favourite is my Zyliss V-slicer. My desire to own a mandoline was the butt of some predictable family jokes until they actually bought me one. I had envisaged something fairly basic but the Zyliss is the Rolls Royce of slicers and mine cuts both slices and juliennes (if that is a noun) of different thicknesses. At first I thought it was a bit of a contraption and felt intimidated not least of all because I could barely get the thing out of the cupboard without drawing blood (perhaps I just have a fascination with sharpness). But with a bit of practise I am now much more confident and wouldn't use anything else for slicing eggplant and zucchini and especially potatoes for a gratin.
So the Mixmaster, the mandoline and the zester get used regularly because thay all do what they are supposed to do and are designed to be efficient and easy to use. What then of the other bits and pieces of equipment which fill the drawers and cupboards? Would throwing them away compound the sin of greed with the sin of wastefulness? Surely my hope that I may find a use for them one day counts as a saving grace?

Food miles, and miles and miles

2010-03-04T08:15:00.000+11:00

Last week at the green grocer's the asparagus was from Mexico.

At the Sydney Fish Markets the scallops were from Peru (who knew that there were scallops in Peru?) and the squid had come from Chile.

Can't we live without scallops and asparagus?

Why have a choice of local or foreign squid?

Wouldn't people just buy something else if none of this imported stuff was available?

Sharing a meal at Cumulus Inc.

2010-02-28T16:17:00.014+11:00

'After Lunch' Cressida Campbell

Last week I was in Melbourne. I love being in Melbourne.

The city looks good. The streets are wide, the buildings aren't too tall and in some of the inner suburbs the street scapes with their wonderful nineteenth century architecture are fabulous - for example the view down Brunswick Street towards St. Patrick's cathedral. The parks are beautiful and moreover thay don't seem to be infested with ibis.
Who wouldn't enjoy a city where they have a public transport system which works. For $6.80 a day I could go where ever I wanted (within reason) on tram, bus or train - and I could get to everywhere I wanted to go easily, if not always quickly.
Melbourne's shopping districts still have some character. Strip/high street shopping (in fact many suburbs have a 'High Street') is alive and well here.
Melbournians care about food, they understand food and eating out and they have some fabulous restaurants. In Sydney it seems that you either eat at the local Chinese or you take out a loan and eat at some high end, reasonably pretentious establishment. In Melbourne it is possible to find excellent, casual, resonably priced eating on almost every corner.

Thanks to a friend well versed in the eating pleasures of this city we headed to Cumulus Inc in Flinder's Lane for dinner on Friday night. We were there at 6pm to ensure that we got a table (there are no bookings) and the place was already busy and noisy. (One of our party was 80 so sitting at a proper table was preferred over sitting at the bar however next time I want to sit up so that I can watch the food being prepared.)

Back in the mists of time the invention of the restaurant did away with the idea of sharing food in public. Eating out has come to mean sitting down to your own plate of food and perhaps allowing your fellow diners at best a token taste. Sharing a meal with friends in a restaurant translates as sitting at the same table with them and all eating at the same time but not actually sharing the same food. That is unless you are eating at Cumulus Inc. Here the food is meant to be shared - each plate has enough for three or four with plenty to choose from - and all of it delicious. It was great fun to be able to sample a number of different dishes and to talk about what we were eating. What's more we came away happily satisfied having only spent just over $100 for three of us on food. (The cost of the wine is another matter!) And Stephanie Alexander, who was eating at the next table, looked as though she was enjoyng herself too.

How to buy a cookbook

2010-02-26T16:16:00.000+11:00

One of my New Year's resolutions/promises to myself - along with spending more time with my friends and less time with my children - was to stop buying cook books and recipe magazines. Partly because of my belief that there really are no new recipes as such, just slightly different combinations of ingredients, and partly because I have no room for anything new - something already treasured would have to go to make some space on the shelves.

Faced with shelves of recipe books in almost any bookshop how do you choose which one to buy anyway?

Herewith my golden rule -NEVER buy a recipe book which doesn’t have a good index regardless of the other attributes it may possess.

Recipes are usually arranged into ‘chapters’ perhaps grouped around seasonal produce (spring, summer, autumn, winter or perhaps even Easter and Christmas), around specific ingredients (chapters on figs, eggplant, potatoes etc) or around types of dishes (soups, main meals, desserts, salads). The problem arises when you want to find say spinach salad – is it in ‘summer’ or with ‘salad’ or in the chapter on ‘spinach’? Always check the standard of the index. Is the ‘Cauliflower soup with Gorgonzola and pickled pear relish listed in the index under ‘soups’, ‘cauliflower’, ‘pears’ and ‘Gorgonzola’? (In fact in Skye Gyngell’s A year in my kitchen this recipe is listed under all of these headings – well not ‘Gorgonzola’ but ‘cheese’ which is fair enough). My pet hate is knowing that a recipe is in the book somewhere but not being able to crack the code in the index. I have more than one book on the shelves which indexes the recipes by the title of the dish – so ‘Warm chicken salad’ is indexed under ‘w’ and ‘Fresh tuna salad’ is indexed under ‘f’. (Is anyone at the Women's Weekly listening?) This might rate as quirky but really it is just infuriating.
Even when they get the index right one of my gripes with many recipe books is that the method is always very concerned with what to do but not often with why. How will the end result be affected if the directions aren’t followed to the letter? What are the really critical stages in the process? This is especially useful information if you are making something for the first time. Not every writer can devote their time to testing recipes a la Julia Child nor indeed does every recipe book need to include the detail of Mastering the Art of French Cooking but a little more description like "heat the butter until its foam begins to subside" and "beat the hot sauce into the egg yolks by driblets" and less reliance on convention and 'recipe speak' not only gives the book a bit of personality but also helps to make the recipes more accessible.

My own preference is for recipes which are not too prescriptive, which offer ideas for combinations of ingredients or a number of variations on a theme. And I prefer books with character, where the personality of the author comes through either in the way the recipes themselves are written or through head notes or introductions or simply in the way the recipes are presented. Books that have that certain something - perhaps it’s the illustrations, or the way the recipes are set out, the personal information included – jokes, stories, historical details – whatever it is that tells me something I didn’t already know or takes me off in another direction, inspires me to cook or simply to read more.

Some books which fit the bill (and already have a space on the shelf) are Nigel Slater's Appetite, Maggie Beer's Maggie's Harvest, Claudia Roden's A Book of Middle Eastern Food and for looks and originality Jake Tilson's A Tale of Twelve Kitchens which is absolutley essential reading for any one who may have the desire to prepare Mexican food in a motel room.

Ottolenghi

2010-02-16T10:11:00.001+11:00

Ottolenghi , 287 Upper Street, Islington is the sort of place where I would like to be able to eat much more often. ‘Fine dining’ and 'molecular gastronomy' have their place I suppose but I prefer not to get dressed up to eat out and don’t feel comfortable in the environment many restaurants perpetuate with staff who give the impression that they are lowering their standards by having to serve you. Ottolenghi specialises in simple dining.

It looks simple - the space is long and narrow and white with one communal table running the length of the room. The decoration is the food itself – front shelves piled with cakes and gorgeous billowy meringues, a table covered with bowls of salads (fabulous contrasts of colours), and boxes of groceries destined for the kitchen. The menu is a simple in form – an A4 page of the day’s choices (when I asked for a souvenir copy one was quickly run off the printer for me) – and in process – the price is set and depends on the combination of dishes you choose. On the day I am there for lunch the menu lists 11 salads and six ‘main courses’. The idea is to order as much as you think you can eat – either a choice of three or four of the salads (£9.30/£11.80), or, a combination of two or three of the salads and one of the ‘main courses’(£12.30/£14.30).
The food itself is deceptively simple. This is the sort of effortless food that results from careful experimentation with the balancing of flavours and textures and relies on the best fresh, seasonal produce.
For example salads such as

roasted beetroot with poached quince, red endive, basil, red onion, sherry vinegar and pistachio
roasted butternut squash with red pepper, pine nuts, basil and gorgonzola sauce
spicy char-grilled broccoli with chilli and garlic
roasted cauliflower with saffron, capers, sultana, red onion, green olives, parsley and lime
white and yellow Iranian rice with barberry, cumin seeds, dill, almonds and pistachios

can be teamed with main courses such as

char-grilled organic salmon with seaweed, braised leek, red onion, chilli and mixed herbs salsa
lamb and pistachio kebab with parsley, spring onion, chilli and butter yoghurt

roasted corn-fed chicken with dried figs, honey saffron, onion and basil

Little wonder then that the place is popular. When we arrived on a Saturday afternoon there was a queue at the door, standing perhaps a little too close to the food on display, and we waited 20 minutes to be seated.(It isn’t necessary to eat in Islington to enjoy the Ottolenghi experience because all the food can be purchased to take home and there are branches in Notting Hill, Kensington and Belgravia. And if all else fails there is Ottolenghi, The Cookbook.)

Eating here was really the highlight of our few days in London and this style of dining – the environment and the menu – seemed like such a perfect fit with the Sydney climate and lifestyle that it seems ridiculous we had to go so far for the experience.

Books for Cooks

2010-01-28T11:54:00.000+11:00

One of my favourite book shops is Books for Cooks in Melbourne . Here they have an excellent selection of current titles and a huge and diverse collection of second hand books. Tim knows his stock backwards, the staff are cheerful and helpful and altogether it is a great place to browse and potter about – very hard to visit without purchasing something.
The London Books for Cooks was a little disappointing by comparison – a tiny space which for some reason seemed much more intimidating. And there were no second hand books! What the Notting Hill establishment does have however is a programme of workshops (held upstairs) and a miniscule café at the back of the shop. The café is their ‘test kitchen’ where the recipes from the books they sell are prepared by one of their resident chefs and then tried out on the clientele. On the day we were visiting there was a rush for the tables at lunch time – first in best fed, although the eaters appeared rather too sophisticated to actually push one another out of the way.
The combination of books and food isn’t the novelty that it used to be and the idea that shop which specialises in books about food should actually also sell food seems so obvious that it’s incredible it doesn’t happen everywhere. And indeed it does happen even here in Sydney – the Book Kitchen in Surry Hills for one.
What was so appealing about the Books for Cooks approach was that they were using recipes from the books they had on the shelves. If you really enjoyed your slice of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Chocolate and Chestnut cake you might just feel inclined to purchase The River Cottage Year. Alternatively you could always take home a copy of Books for Cooks 9 the latest collection of the most popular recipes from the test kitchen which would also introduce you to recipes by Maggie Beer, Bill Granger and Greg and Lucy Malouf – perhaps not so surprising since almost all the Books for Cooks cooks are from either Australia or New Zealand.
Surely the best way to evaluate any recipe book is to cook from it. Unfortunately the average purchaser has no access to sampling before they buy. Doesn’t the potential buyer want to know whether the recipes actually work? Perhaps not. These days so many books are more photograph than recipe any way perhaps it doesn’t matter how well the recipes are written or how well they have been tested. Since it is unlikely that the average celebrity chef who is travelling the world opening restaurants and attending book signings has written all or indeed any of the recipes which appear in their books we can only assume that someone somewhere is doing the hard yards.
Which brings me to one of my perennial gripes – why don’t newspaper and magazine reviews do justice to recipe books? All too often the ‘review’ is a mere paragraph of publicity blurb rather than a thorough evaluation.

The illustration at the top of this post is a post card of an original oil painting by Selina Snow.