Month in Review - September 2012

Celebrating Spring

 

Donald Rumsfeld managed to get himself into trouble over the question of what we know, what we know we don't know and and what we don't know we don't know. The things we know we don't know much or anything about are those which, in my case at least, I have studiously avoided attempting to learn - quantum physics, rocket science, brain surgery all come to mind. The things I don't know I don't know are legion. So much of what goes on around us we just take for granted until someone asks a question or you come across a snippet of information which challenges your previous assumptions. All of a sudden you realise there a vast holes in your knowledge of the world that, now you've identified the void, you must work to fill. And then of course there is the gaping chasm where lie all the things you once knew but now struggle to remember.
 

As a child I had a passing acquaintance with Pontefract cakes. My parents I think considered these hard discs of liquorice an important part of my English heritage. If you had asked me a few weeks ago why these sweets were called Pontefract cakes I would have told you that they were named after the town where they were manufactured and, if I had thought long enough and hard enough I might even have remembered they were made by Bassetts and that they had a castle image stamped on them. What I didn't know then, and would never have guessed, was that the liquorice used in their manufacture was actually grown in Pontefract. Who would ever have imagined that something as exotic as liquorice would, or indeed could, grow in Yorkshire?

Another question which arose this month was why are hazelnuts called filberts? I still don't feel confident about the answer to this one. According to the Oxford Companion to Food 'filbert' is the name of a type of cultivated hazelnut, as distinct from a cob hazelnut. All wild hazelnuts are just hazelnuts in Britain but in America both wild and cultivated hazelnuts are called filberts. The name filbert is thought to come from St. Philibert, whose saint's day, 22 August, falls at around the time hazelnuts ripen. So hazel nuts are one of those things that I can no longer claim to know nothing about but I still feel they have only moved from the unknown unknowns to the known unknowns.

A while ago I drew your attention to  this post on Edible Geography about lunch.
Lunch is a very serious business for some as this piece 'A day in the life of a Mumbai sandwichwallah' makes clear. Armed with this knowledge a sandwich will never be the same again.

Monthly Catch Up

 

The Restaurant Reviewer at Work?

 



You may well be wondering what happened to July and August - let's just say they came and then they went. So before the end of September rolls around I thought to follow up on the last post about restaurant reviews.
Before there were Internet sites like Yelp and UrbanSpoon there were restaurant guide books and of course there still are - the Sydney Morning Herald Guide, Michelin and Zagat for example. One of the criticisms of these guides is that they tend to grade restaurants by arbitrary and mysterious criteria and concentrate too much on high end dining so that they don't really reflect where real people do actually eat. Two articles from the Guardian (here and here) discuss the latest Zagat Guide to London which rates places like the Ledbury, Dinner by Heston and two of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants in their top ten. Do restaurant guides promote intelligent appreciation of food and informed criticism of eating establishments? Do they help to set standards on which that criticism can be based? What criteria do they use to judge the cooking? How do they choose which restaurants will be included? The Michelin guide in particular is notoriously secretive about their methods yet three stars is still regarded as the mark of excellence never mind what it may really represent.
There can be no doubt that the anonymous voices who rate restaurants on the Internet are both more opinionated and more egalitarian than the majority of 'official' guides. So whilst sites like Yelp may give you a better idea of what to expect from your local Italian or Thai they would appear to contribute little to an intellectual gastronomic dialogue. Research has however led to the conclusion that social media sites do have an influence on 'how consumers judge the quality of goods and services' and they do influence a restaurant's takings. It's also worth remembering that not all social media sites are created equal, so, just as in the case of the more established printed restaurant guides, it is worth knowing what you are dealing with before you make any sort of decision based on their recommendations. Oliver Thring discusses Trip Advisor here and it is instructive to read some of the comments on his post eg.'I would much rather read a restaurant critic's review of a fine dining restaurant, but when it's a local chinese, indian or italian, and I care just as much about the service, cleanliness and atmosphere as I do about the food and price, tripadvisor works for me'.
And for the final word, this piece from Bruce Palling who calls homself 'Gastroenophile'. Mr. Palling has a foot in both camps - he is a journalist (he writes for The Wall Street Journal) and a blogger. He believes that 'we should all be grateful that there has never been such a profusion of fascinating accounts of fine dining so available - and provided free of charge'. Does he mean that we should be grateful that there is now so much information freely available or should we be grateful that there was a time when we were free of other people's gratuitous opinions no matter how fascinating?

More Blogs and Blogging

Le déjeuner des canotiers, Renoir.

 The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

How many of these diners are going to write a review of their lunch on their blog when they get home?
At dinner a few weeks ago the conversation ran to restaurant reviews and to blogs, blogging and bloggers. And given my interest in the latter (that is blogs, blogging and bloggers and the hows and whys of the dissemination of information about restaurants and fine dining) it was suggested that I might furnish a list of blogs that were worth following.
Well I'm not going to do that per se but I am going to point any one who is interested in the direction of some further reading in this area.
Who you might like to 'follow' depends very much on what you want to know, what information you are hoping to gain from reading someone else's thoughts/ideas/opinions. I don't 'follow' blogs so much as watch them. In the interests of my research I track a group of individuals who post fairly regular and very detailed restaurant reviews. I'm not reading these reviews because I want to eat at the restaurants myself but I am interested in the what, when, where, how and why of these dining experiences. None of the bloggers I watch ( and yes it is all a bit voyeuristic) have any credentials as such - they are  not professional writers and they don't have any qualifications as chefs or restaurateurs - they are in the main young people with healthy appetites and plenty of disposable income.
One of the criticisms of the 'amateur' critic is that they have no knowledge of how to cook and because they only know how to eat aren't really in a position to judge whether what they are eating is any good or not and certainly have no way of telling good from better or best. Now that is a criticism that could be laid at the door of many a restaurant reviwer (see below for example) and might be true for those who write  the short reviews on sites such as 'Eatability' and 'Urbanspoon' but certainly isn't true of all bloggers. It probably is true that few food bloggers are professional journalists, although of course there are exceptions to that rule too. Nor is it fair to tar all food blogs with the same brush. For one thing not every food blog concentrates on restaurant reviews (yours truly for one) and not every blog is all about self-promotion.
So let's start with some local food people and their ideas on the restaurant reviewer.
Claire, who calls herself Melbourne Gastronome, recently posted this piece entitled 'Online reviews and the race to be first' which among other concerns raises the question of reviewing etiquette, an issue which is also considered here and here.
Phil Lees, whose blog is called The Last Appetite, has some interesting observations to make about the influence of bloggers. The audience for a particular blog is hard to determine but certainly Phil's statistics and my own analysis of  the blogs I have been studying suggest that the reach may be fairly limited. However the influence of on-line reviews on sites such as Urbanspoon for example is another matter altogether, as Phil discusses here and here.
What do we expect from a restaurant review? Does it really need to be a literary masterpiece? In a recent post of her blog Will Write for Food, Dianne Jacob discusses the James Beard Award nominees including Alan Richman. Richman is perhaps not well known in Australia but he is very much the master of  the long form, the review that tells a story, and his work is usually very funny. His book Fork it Over is a great read. So Richman is a good writer who happens to review restaurants and like many well regarded restaurant critics he is a journalist first. As he says of himself

I am a restaurant critic. I eat for a living.

Chefs complain about people like me. They argue that we are not qualified to do our jobs because we do not know how to cook. I tell them I'm not entirely pleased with the way they do their jobs either, because they do not know how to eat. I have visited most of the best restaurants of the world, and they have not. I believe I know how to eat as well as any man alive.

 

Not every reviewer can be as eloquent and entertaining as Alan Richman, nor do they need to be. The success of Yelp for example rests on the simple fact that most people, deciding where to go to a particular restaurant on Friday for dinner, simply want to know whether or not the people who ate there enjoyed themselves. The fact that you don't know any of these people is immaterial - you don't know Alan Richman or Terry Durack either - and whilst there might be some common ground when it comes to over priced or undercooked and what constitutes unacceptable service no one can tell you whether you will enjoy the taste of the food, that much you have to find out for yourself.

 

One of the things, to my mind one of the good things, that an on-line review can do that a newspaper piece can't is give you a proper look at the food and in some cases at the interior of the restaurant and of people actually eating the food. There are any number of videos on YouTube of people eating at El Bulli or The Fat Duck or Alinea for example which help to make sense of some of the more esoteric offerings which don't sound all that flash when reviewers try to put them into words. Of course it is also true that many on-line reviewers fall back on photographs rather than even attempt to describe what they are eating although in fairness some modernist cuisine creations do transcend the normal culinary vocabulary. The downside of course is that not all bloggers know the first thing about taking photographs and there has to be some limit to the number of pictures any one person can take while they are eating dinner. Would you trust the opinions of anyone who could post more than 200 photographs of any one meal?

 

Like it or not on-line reviews are here to stay and this may not be altogether a bad thing. We might hope for example that the demise of print media in general will mean that those magazines and newspapers which survive will offer a higher standard of journalism and perhaps a return to the long form assuming that there is still a readership for the likes of Alan Richman. Time will also, one hopes, weed out those who have something to say from those who only want to say something on-line. To cite Alan Richman again, his reviews read just as well on the computer screen as they do in GQ magazine.

 

And finally just to go back to what we want from restaurant review here's a comparison between three reviews of l'Enclume, Cumbria. Chris Pople calls his blog 'Cheese and Biscuits' and has earned quite a reputation for his reviews (you can read more about him here). His review of l'Enclume is here. John Lanchester, in his final column for the Guardian reviews l'Enclume here, and Jay Rayner's review is here. The latter may be more 'professional' but there is a lot to be said for Chris's pictures. Perhaps what we should really hope for is less emphasis on restaurants and reviews and more time and thought given to food writing which goes beyond talking about eating.

 

 



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'.