Month in Review - June 2012

Grace Cossington Smith, The Lacquer Room c.1935-36 (Art Gallery of New South Wales)

The June highlight for me was attending the Third Annual POPCAANZ Conference in Melbourne (27th-29th June) where I presented a paper on my latest obsession, lamingtons, and had the pleasure of mixing with other food people and hearing about their research.
POPCAANZ is the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand so you can imagine the conference covered a huge range of interests - animation, architecture and design, comics, anime and manga, fashion, fiction, film, music, gender, performance, toys, romance - and food. Unfortunately I was only able to be in Melbourne for a day and a half so didn't get to do more than attend the food sessions on the Wednesday and on Thursday morning but that gave me quite enough to think about. Aside from my scintillating discussion of the lamington the food sessions included

• Carmel Cedro from Monash University who presented a paper on the Dolly Varden cake tracing its evolution from the first recipes of the 1880s to a modern incarnation as an Amy Varden cake, dedicated to the late Amy Winehouse.
• Toni Risson, who some of you may already know from her book Aphrodite and the Mixed Grill which has just be reprinted, talking about children's birthday cakes and in particular The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book. With my interest in cake this paper set me thinking about how we have transferred the time and energy and emotional commitment which might once have gone into the making of the cake to the decoration of the end result of adding egg to a packet cake mix.
• Donna Lee Brien from Central Queensland University whom I met last year at the Gastronomy Symposium in Canberra, introduced us to Maria Kozslik Donovan. Mrs Donovan was a cookery writer who began her career in Melbourne in the 1950s writing in The Age and published several books including The Blue Danube Cookbook, Astrology in the Kitchen and Continental Cookery in Australia. She had a fascinating life and her writing certainly puts a new perspective on the idea that Australia was a gastronomic desert in the 50s and 60s.
• Jill Adams, who is working on her PhD with Donna Brien at CQU, spoke about Mrs Dione Lucas. I wrote briefly about Dione here. Jill has not only found out more about Dione Lucas and her visits to Australia but has also met her eldest son and learnt a lot more about the real Dione.

There were also two papers about wine, one from Felicity Ameron on the role of Mary Penfold in the establishment of the Penfold winery and one from Lloyd Carpenter on the use of nostalgia to market wines from the Central Otago area. New Zealanders were well represented with Lindsay Neill, from Auckland, talking about kiwiana (that is the NZ equivalent of Australiana) and in particular the White Lady pie cart (which is a fixture in Auckland, imbued with all sorts of cultural and societal importance and is a significant tourist attraction), Lorna Piatti-Farnell talking about food in Katherine Mansfield's fiction and Rowan Holt arguing that the home economics teacher is a better role model for young people than the celebrity TV chef.
Tania Splawa-Neyman from RMIT (School of Arichitecture and Design) gave a terrific presentation entitled 'Food and fashion on the web: the cultivation of culture' which explored connections between food and fashion, asking questions such as - Does food design fashion, or does fashion design food? What does this linkage say about our culture? Is society predominantly concerned with the basic need to be clothed and fed? Or is popular culture shaped by how we wish to be seen while clothing and feeding ourselves? In particular the images Tania showed generated some lively discussion. Have a look at wardrobevpantry here. I particularly like this one, this one and for something to really make you think, this one.

Unfortunately there were two papers I missed altogether - Michelle Phillipov (lecturer in journalism, media and communications at the University of Tasmania) talking on the way Master Chef offers insight into debates about food and health and the limitations of current public health strategies, and Charmaine O'Brien whose paper examined 'how we might take some lessons from the eating habits, and culinary etiquette, of our aristocratic ancestors to learn how to take an approach to food that is more restrained and that might assist us to reduce our collective waistlines and develop a more respectful sustainable relationship to food'.

POPCAANZ produce a journal The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture the most recent edition of which includes articles by Toni Risson, Carmel Cedro, Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Lindsay Neill as per the above as well as papers on The Bushells tea advertising1998-2006 (Susie Khamis), the early days of coffee culture in Australia (Jill Adams) and royal wedding cakes (Adele Wessell). You can find out more about the association and the journal here.

I chose this month's illustration because it seemed to fit in with a general theme of cake and afternoon tea and perhaps even lunch. So first up here is a link to an article about a new exhibition at New York Public Library (why wasn't this on earlier in the year) which is all about Lunch. And here is another from Nicola at Edible Geography which fits in with all the talk above about cake and icing. With Dione Lucas and Maria Kozslik Donovan in mind you might also be interested in this article about another forgotten woman and her recipe book.

Month in Revue - May 2012

Both May and now June were busy months with many distractions. Nonetheless I did have a plan for what I would have written at the end of May, so here it is.
I thought this month we should concentrate on people.
For some time now I have tried to convince myself that my life will only be complete when I have either a Kenwood Chef or a Kitchenaid mixer in my kitchen. There are two reasons why I don't have either -
1.  I can't make up my mind which of the two would make my life completest and
2.  I have a perfectly decent Sunbeam mixmaster which was given to me as a wedding present along with the juicer and blender attachments and hasn't missed a beat (if I can use that term) ever and has been part of my life for so long that it is part of the family. I could not in all conscience cast it aside for a younger, showier model.
What I did not know was the the Kenwood Chef was in fact the invention of a Mr. Ken Wood who went on to become very rich. Read about Mr. Wood here and about an exhibtion to honour the mighty mixer here.

Not only was I less than well informed about the origins of the Kenwood I also didn't know very much about Mr. Craig Claiborne other than that he was an American and his name seemed to get dropped a lot by food people. A book entitled The man who changed the way we eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance by Thomas Mcnamee sounds worth reading to fill in what appears to be a huge gap in my knowledge. Two reviews here and here give a clue to the influence Claiborne had on the American, and international, food scene.

I mentioned Mario Batalli last month but here he is again in a piece which is a though provoking contrast to the articles on Claiborne. And while we are on a roll with clebrity chefs here is a piece by Mark Bittman on Thomas Keller and the influence of Fernand Point. Fernand Point was born in 1897 and died in 1955 and trained chefs with whom we are perhaps more familiar today - Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel and the Troisgros brothers for example, chefs who went on to promote French cooking in the '70s. Point was not a celebrity chef as we understand that term today and he didn't leave behind a shelf of his recipe books but he is known for his aphorisms, his rules which guided his cooking. Gay Bilson in Plenty. Digressions on Food  includes a chapter where she translates some of these and updates them and they make fascinating reading if you can get your hands on a copy of Bilson's book.
I especiallly like
'A cook who thinks every action makes him a great chef is like a man who repaints his garden gate and thinks he is an artist'
and I like his distrust of anyone who is thin
'The first time I dine at a restaurat, I always shake hands with the chef before I order. I know that if he is thin I will eat badly. If he is not only thin but unhappy, I flee.'
'Before judging a thin person, however, one must ask about his past: he may once have been fat.'

And to end on another food writer about whom I was almost totally ignorant, I was interested in Mark Bittman's piece on Colin Spencer (here), described by none other than our Germaine as 'the greatest living food writer'.

Month In Review - April 2012

Although I hadn't planned to have a theme for each month for want of any better idea this month will have a New York flavour.

Since as always I can't resist a bit of a mix of food and history I should first recommend Mark Kurlansky's The Big Oyster. A Molluscular History of New York. This book provides a very readable history of the city from its earliest European settlement, some interesting oyster recipes and a very good bibliography for further investigation.

One of the new attractions in New York is the High Line Park a disused raised freight line which has been turned into an elevated park land. The High Line sits 30 feet above street level and runs through three now quite trendy areas - the Meat Packing District, West Chelsea and into the southern section of Hell's Kitchen. A street level railway had run through this part of town from 1847 but by the late 20's there was so much traffic in the area, bringing goods to and from the slaughterhouses, meat packing houses, factories and warehouses and the docks on the Hudson River, and so many accidents between trains and other street level traffic that it was decided something had to be done to make the situation less dangerous. Hence the West Side Improvement Project of which the High Line was a part. The first trains ran on the line in 1934 and took freight directly into some of the buildings including the huge National Biscuit Company complex (home of the Oreo) part of which now houses the Chelsea Market. Partly demolished in the 1960's the last train ran on the remains of the line in 1980. Concerted and determined efforts saw what was left eventually transformed into public space - the first section of the park opened in 2009 and a further section opened in June 2011.
A walk along the High Line offers an interesting perspective not only on the New York of today - you get up close to the only Frank Gehry building in New York as well as great views of other modern buildings and the vast housing projects in this part of town, and on a good day you can see right up along the river to the theatre district - but also an insight into the city's history - what must it have smelt like, looked like, sounded like when this really was the meat packing district and Nabisco were churning out Oreos?
For more information on the High Line see here and for the history of the National Biscuit Company in New York see here. And for some of the modern antics on the High Line see here for an art event with a food theme.


The Meat Packing District is home to many restaurants of one sort or another including Del Posto which is a very posh Italian restaurant (you know it's posh because they even give your hand bag a footstool to sit on) across the road from the Chelsea Market in the bottom of what was once also part of the biscuit factory complex. Posh or not they offer a $39 lunch which is sensational. The most memorable course was dessert - Sfera di Caprino ie. spheres of goat's cheese rolled in salty, sweet, crispy, crunchy bread crumbs and served with shaved celery, fig agrodolce and celery sorbetta. For someone who would not normally give celery very much plate space this was a revelation.

This photograph of Sfera di Caprino is from the Serious Eats review which you can read here.
Mario Batalli, one of the people behind Del Posto,  is quite a celebrity (see here for example and for his own site see here) and has a finger in more restaurants than I can remember. He is also involved with Eataly an enormous market hall cum eatery, 'the largest artisanal Italian food and wine marketplace in the world', which almost defies description. Best to go and have a look at their web site here. Like Del Posto, this is a multi-million dollar fit out of an old building in this case the Toy Building, once the home of the annual American International Toy Fair. The building, situated right at the Flat Iron Building and Madison Square Park, has an interesting history which you can read about here,  With 50,000 square feet of floor space devoted to everything Italian, well everything Italian you can eat, you could probably spend all day at Eataly - they certainly cater for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's all a bit over the top but oh so tempting and the only time I have seen anyone shaping balls of fresh mozzarella outside a cheese factory.

There is more to New York than food. The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine is one of the non-food sights of New York so  an excuse for this article about fabric conservation there.

Think New York and you think The New York Times and The New Yorker - well I do anyway.
So from the Times  an article by Mark Bittman on Wendell Berry (here) American academic, writer and farmer , advocate of the simple life and traditional values of fidelity, frugality, respect for one another and the land. To find out more about him and to read his 2012 Jefferson Lecture ('It All Turns on Affection') see here.
And finally from The New Yorker an article by Daniel Mendelsohn  on the myth of the Titanic to mark the anniversary of its demise.

Month in Review - March 2012

According to Gretchen A. Hirschauer and Catherine A. Metzger in Louis Meléndez, Master of the Spanish Still Life  (Yale University Press, 2009) this painting combines several of Meléndez favourite props. The wine cooler appears in at least ten other compositions, the large spoon, the basket, the kitchen cloth and the ceramic bowl with the iron lid all appear elsewhere.  Apparently only the group of three spoons in the plate on the left is unique. Even the melon turns up again in Still Life with Melon, Jug, and Bread. But what a magnificent melon!
The inclusion of this painting here is for no other reason than I thought some sort of illustration was long over due.

This month there is no particular theme, just a collection of interesting bits and pieces.
In February the Australian Government published Foodmap:An analysis of the Australian food supply chain. The aim of this study is 'to identify the scope for improved performance of the food industry in the face of changes in consumer preferences, pressures from the global food market and the strategic responses of major food sector participants'. The report, full of graphs and tables, makes for interesting if not inspirational reading. It will perhaps come as no surprise to learn that supermarkets account for 63% of household food expenditure of which 80% is controlled by Coles and Woolworths. Nor is it any surprise that the private label brands share of grocery categories has increased dramatically since 2002 and most of the brands we buy in the supermarket are foreign owned. Pasta and margarine are the only two categories where the brands are more than 70% Australian owned, and you can add to them bread, rice and smallgoods for those categories more than 50% Australian owned. Biscuits, canned fruit, cheese, canned fish, fresh dairy, frozen vegetables, milk and sugar are all less than 10% Australian owned.
The good news is that the report concludes that Australia has relatively high food security. That is  food security,as defined by the FAO - 'a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to significant, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life'. 
So the devil is in the detail somewhere - but perhaps not in this report.

Because I like my food with a bit of history here are two links to the past - How tea was picked in the late nineteenth century here and Salvador Dali and friends dining at a 'Night in a Surrealist Forest' here.

There is also another new journal, the 'International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science', the first issue of which includes an article by our very own Neil Perry on dry aging beef. This isn't exactly light, bedtime reading but might be worth keeping an eye on in future. And another new and rather more scientific journal is 'Flavour' which you can look at here.

On the subject of reading, Claudia Roden has a new book out on the food of Spain - see here. You can read a recent interview  here and a much longer and very interesting piece by Jane Kramer for The New Yorker here.

Finally, some links on my special topic, eating out -
on taking photographs in restaurants here
on eating in the restaurant where you work here
on Mietta O'Donnell here
and finally this on what might be the newest trend in fast food.

And before I forget, the 19th Symposium of Australian Gastronomy will be held in Sydney over Easter 2013 (29th March to 1st April) and the theme will be 'The Welcoming Table'.

Mobile Food

My last post elicited a number of anonymous impassioned comments taking me to task on my review of Alain Ducasse's Nature. I have chosen not to publish those comments here because I think they would be best read in the context of the complete review. So for a different take on M. Ducasse's book please have a look at what Nikki has to say here where you can also scroll up and read my thoughts.
And while you are over at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf have a look at my latest offering, a review of Anissa Helou's Mediterranean Street Food (here). I've mentioned her blog before where she often discusses something unusual, like a recent post on Middle Eastern sheep and their fat tails (here). One of the things I like about Mediterranean Street Food is the way it celebrates the exuberance of street life and those cultures where the preparation of food, and the sight and smell of food are a not just part of the everyday but very much part of the public domain.

Ready to go in Jame' el Fna, Marrakesh

 Snack time near the spice market in old Delhi.

For the outsider though street food carries with it that hint of danger and the prospect of holiday disaster. I have to admit that we weren't game enough to actually eat any of the food in either of the situations photographed above although we came under a lot of pressure to do so. And I am sure this is not the sort of thing that  is intended when the food trucks finally roll out on the streets of Sydney.

The concept of mobile food is not new although the food truck idea might be the latest trend. Horse-drawn tamale carts worked the streets of Los Angeles more than a century ago. New York City has long had its share of mobile food -for ice cream and hot dog carts see Edible Geography here  and for the results of last year's annual awards for street food see here.

 India is perhaps one of the most exciting places for food let alone street food. For some fabulous photos of  'bicycle based commerce' in Mumbai here and for the top ten places to eat on the street, also in Mumbai see here.

Even Paris has caught the food truck bug with the delightfully named 'Le camion qui fume' which you can read about in French here or in English, albeit with an American slant, here.

Last time I mentioned the French post office style bread box which seems like a very good idea. The cupcake ATM however (which you can read about here) does not have the same appeal.

Month in Review - February 2012 .

There has been a bit of a French theme this month - by coincidence rather than by design.
First up there was my encounter with Alain Ducasse, well with his book  Nature. Simple, healthy and good which I reviewed for The Gastronomer's Bookshelf (here). I didn't know much about M. Ducasse but there was something about this book that made me think he was trying, perhaps a bit too hard, to be sort of modern and with it, to be more one of us rather than a super chef. It's all a bit cutesy and clever and somehow doesn't manage to get away from being, well for want of a better description, very French. For one thing I suspect he has shares in a company producing Piment d'Espelette (his seasoning du jour). Can you imagine going to your local green grocer and having a choice of different varieties of turnip? Still not to bother because I won't be cooking up 'Poached foie gras with turnips' any time soon. And I am forever going to wonder whether a pumpkin gratin tastes better made with a Queensland Blue or a Muscade de Provence or a Courge Longue de Nice  or even a humble potimarron.
M. Ducasse deserved a better editor and/or a more thorough translation to make this book both more appealing and more user friendly but what struck me more than anything was the implication that there was something new or revolutionary about his approach to food

Plenty of fruit and vegetables, raw and cooked, cereals, preferably wholegrain, a little meat or fish, and all cooked in olive oil. That's the basis of my cuisine and of the recipes in this book

Is it just that M. Ducasse isn't normally associated with the sort of food you and I might cook at home or is this enthusiasm for simple, healthy food meant to come as a surprise to the French? I'm still not really sure of the answer to that question but it did send me off on a quest for more information.

Which meant that I finally got around to reading Michael Steinberger's Au Revoir to All That. The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine. According to the blurb Marco Pierre White considers this 'one of the greatest books I've read' which perhaps says something about the amount of time Mr. White spends reading. This is not a great book - no book which includes a sentence which begins 'One hundred years later, it was déjà vu all over again,' could ever be called great - but it is a jaunty journey through French culinary history and the political, economic and social issues which have contributed/are contributing to the current malaise in France in general and French cuisine in particular, and he devotes a whole chapter to Alain Ducasse. Hot on the heels of Skye Gyngell's decision to throw in the towel at Petersham Nursery now that she has earned a Michelin star Steinberger's stories about the scandalous influence of the Michelin Guide made for very interesting reading.
If nothing else Au Revoir to All That gave me a clearer appreciation of the influence of the French and the changes in the restaurant business over the last twenty years or so and I would recommend it as an easy and sobering read especially for those of us far enough away to be pretty well insulated from the nuances of European life.
Depressed by the news that la malbouffe has been not so much warmly welcomed as enthusiastically embraced by the French (France is McDonald's second most profitable market and their latest promotion sees hamburgers served on a baguette and topped with POD (that is Protected Designation of Origin) cheeses such as Cantal) it was another cruel blow to read about the French bread crisis! But all is not entirely lost. This little piece (here) about an entrepreneurial French baker bringing fresh bread back to the village suggests that there is some hope for  the future.

I also have to thank Mr Steinberger for introducing me to a new word - zaftig. This looks for all the world like one of those desperate combinations you come up with in Scrabble and then reject because it seems so unlikely, but  no, it is in fact an adjective which describes women who have a full figure -and as such should be used with some care.

Month in Review - January 2012

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.