Month in Review - August 2010

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?

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



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?