A meal by any other name

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 Vegie​s? 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

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

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

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

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!