megabites

• Now is the time!

  August 31, 2009 @ 11:23 pm | by Tom

  

  If, like me, you want to ensure that you have salad crops through the winter, you need to start sowing right away. In an ideal world you will have a greenhouse or a polytunnel but covering plants with horticultural fleece is better than leaving them to the mercy of the elements.

  In terms of lettuce, it’s tempting to think that the variety known as Marvel of Four Seasons (or M4S as I write on my plant labels) will do the trick. But this is an old French variety and, while it’s probably fine and dandy in Provence, it gets a bit wispy in the darker days of a Cork winter. It will sulk and then bolt in the spring. (Sow under cover in February and it will make a lovely early summer lettuce, as pictured above). What you need now is a lettuce bred for short day-lengths and the best that I’ve grown is Montel, a nicely dense butterhead that will bulk up even in December and January. Even out of doors it will do reasonably well but it needs a lot of shelter to perform properly. In the depths of winter, Montel delivers crunchy leaves.

  It’s not too late to sow a crop of cut-and-come-again salad mixtures but outdoors these will not go much beyond December. In a polytunnel you will get a reasonable crop for a month or so longer. Likewise rocket.

  The slightly bitter Batavian lettuces are well adpated to winter cropping but, again, they will do much better under cover. Just think of that cold rain and those icy breezes and consider how much better you would feel, even if night temperatures fall, with a bit of shelter.

  Anyway, the window of opportunity is small. Get your winter salad crops sown within the next week.

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• End of an era in NYC

  @ 11:01 pm | by Tom

  I was sorry to see that Frank Bruni, restaurant critic of the New York Times, is hanging up his boots. In his final column he answers some questions which may be of help to Irish Times readers who find themselves occasionally, and hungry, in The Big Apple. He seems to favour the kind of places I like when he’s spending his own money (but he has been so busy in recent years I’m amazed that he has managed to eat off-duty).

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• The Aga Saga and other rural themes…

  August 29, 2009 @ 11:13 pm | by Tom

  We turned on the Aga again during the week because the dying days of what was Summer in name only had become so dreary. In fact, it was our children who demanded the rekindling. Not quite an ultimatum but they made it pretty clear that we would all feel better if the kitchen had a bit of a glow and if we didn’t have to depend on a Baby Belling (splendid machine though it is in many ways) and a gas ring for cooking. And they were, as is so often the case, quite right. I still find myself putting a pot on the hot plate and trying to find the switch but it’s truly lovely to be able to cook without waiting for the oven to warm up. And it’s bloody good to warm the posterior against the Aga’s polished rail while we watch the rain obscure the otherwise rather lovely view.

  This is, it can be argued, is environmental vandalism. George Monbiot claimed, not long ago, that running an Aga (ours is oil-fired) is a pretty inexcusable thing to do but he got his figures wrong, saying that a large coal-fired Aga produces 9 times the CO2 output of the average home, whereas, in fact, it produces 35% more. These figures were corrected in due course. The piece was headed “This is indeed a class war, and the campaign against the Aga starts here.”

  Now, let’s consider, for a moment, that we are talking about the large (4 oven) Aga as against the much more common 2 oven version. And that most Agas run on either gas or oil. The Aga, large or small, reduces the need for central heating to a minimum, obviates the need for a separate cooker, produces as much hot water as anyone could want and renders the tumble-dryer pretty well redundant. At that rate of going, given that a coal-fired big Aga produces 35% more CO2 than the average home, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the smaller Aga, run on gas or oil, might actually mean the household around which it gathers produces less CO2 than the average. Or at least the same. And, in terms of class war (something that seems to obsess the English, God bless them), I would stress that our Aga was secondhand and cost less than many of the electric cookers that adorn those trophy kitchens in which very little, if any, cooking is actually done.

  Anyway, I’m not going to get hung up on figures. Life is short, and in our own case we grow much of what we eat and don’t take long haul flights very often (even as often as we might like) and we recycle like mad despite the difficulty in doing so in this little country of ours.

  This Summer has been a disaster in the garden. Our spuds were few and small and ravaged by both slugs and scab. The celeriac has provided a feast for the burgeoning slug population and, I am sorry to report, the aspargus bed is in very sore need of weeding. Weeds, which are only plants that grow in the wrong place, of course, are the only plant organisms that have thrived in the warm and the wet. The tomatoes have sulked and we only get to eat them about once a week at this stage when we would normally be getting a bit offhand about the pleasures that they offer.

  But wild mushrooms have been popping up all over the place. There’s a great new website devoted to mushrooms in the wild in Ireland and, while I would not suggest you depend on it to identify what you’re going to eat, it’s a great starting point and it has the particular merit of being produced in and for Ireland.

  This evening we had organic chicken thighs and legs pot-roasted with chanterelles, butter, garlic and a bit of cream. We simply sweated down the mushrooms until all of the inevitable moisture had evaporated and the flavour had intsensified, then added a glass of white wine, the chicken and some seasoning. Then put the lot into the Aga, covered, for the better part of two hours and stirred in the cream at the end, giving it a bit of heat to thicken the sauce.

  Beforehand we ate a salad of wild rocket (actually not wild at all; the “wild” describes the strain), some Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce, a little Fat Hen (that great and very common salad plant), and some young cos leaves. We threw in some blue sheep’s cheese, some croutons and toasted pine kernels and a dollop of vinaigrette based on walnut oil.

  It’s a good year for blackberries. So much so, I was amazed to see those plump, glossy cultivated blackberries in a restaurant the other night when the wild crop was growing within a few hundred metres of the door!

  Anyway, it’s odd to think that the Aga was originally a Danish invention, as it seems particularly suited to the Irish climate. Ideally, we would like to run ours on wood pellets or even our own biomass but, for the time being, we will continue to feed it oil. Our central heating has been turned on for a total of about 72 hours over the past three years. We have depended on the background heat of our gallant little Aga and our couple of woodburning stoves (fuelled, in the main, from our own logs), reasonable insulation and decent sweaters. Clothes are the unsung heroes of the fight against the cold and the damp.

  Finally, I’m sometimes amused by the anti-4×4 tendency. I had an old Range Rover (still have, indeed, but it’s in retirement now although it can run, without adapting, on vegetable oil) which delivered a better MPG than most chunky estate cars. It’s true, of course, that most people who drive so-called Chelsea Tractors don’t go off-road and they should really drive something sensible like (to take a luxurious example) a BMW 320d. When our Land Rover was last in for a service the mechanic said “Of course, this vehicle spends a lof of time off-road”. In fact, it just did the Conna-Midleton run several times a week but cross-country in rural Ireland is the equivalent of “off-road” in most EU countries. Our Land Rover is getting old and shaky but it has done more than 120,000 miles on less than ideal roads. A “normal” vehicle would have given up long ago or, at least, cost us a lot of money on suspension repairs.

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• A chanterelle feast

  August 23, 2009 @ 11:32 pm | by Tom

  

  What a lousy Summer! The tomatoes in the polytunnel are sulking in a vaguely pink or orange manner, the slugs are rampant, the weeds are like triifids, the spuds are tiny and afflicted with scab (and slugs, once again) and there is a natural tendency just to call it a day.

  Thank heaven, though, for the polytunnel where I can work while the rain drums down on the plastic covering. The aubergines are doing famously, the cucumbers are not too bad and the tiny padron peppers, that old tapas staple, are really coming in to their own (especially when tossed on a hot pan with a little olive oil and then sprinkled with sea salt flakes). And, if I could only remember to sow lettuces regularly, the salad crops would be fantastic.

  However, today was a day for mushrooms. My youngest daughter Roberta and I went out and gathered a vast haul of chanterelles - mainly the variety pictured above but also a few examples of the more fleshy C. cibarius, the apricot colour of which forms a lovely and easily identified contrast with the moss in which it likes to grow.

  We sweated them down with a big knob of butter (actually, a big slice of butter) until all the liquid had evaporated, then fried them gently with a little garlic until the slightly fibrous texture had softened. Then we added some salt and a lot of cream and cooked a bit more to make a very rich and dense sauce for papardelle (from Aldi, as it happens). Superb!

  We also did aubergine beignets and slow-roasted belly pork and stir-fried pak choi, another crop that has performed well under cover.

  I have a feeling that this is going to be a good year for mushrooms. Warm and damp. If it stays that way we’ll have a bumper crop.

  However, a brief word of warning. We also came across a clump of lovely, ripe, plump Death Caps, Amanita phalloides (see the second picture) the innocent-looking mushroom that will kill you; a single mushroom will do it. Not that anyone will confuse this deadly fungus for any of the so-called “choice edibles”. Having said that, a woman died after eating Death Caps last year on the Isle of Wight. But, for heaven’s sake, be careful. Never pick a mushroom that you can’t identify exactly. You need a really good book with exceptional photographs and a compelling certainty that what you are eating is safe. Ideally, you need someone with you who can tell you what is what. And, believe me, there is no simple rule of thumb as to what is safe to eat, just dangerous Old Wives’ Tales.

  In Italy, the local constabulary and all of the pharmacists are expected to identify wild mushrooms for the populace. And in the north of Italy, there’s a theme park called Gardaland. Hmm…

  

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• Balance is everything

  August 17, 2009 @ 10:03 pm | by Tom

  I’m suffering from cabin fever, writing and researching a new restaurant guide for The Irish Times. I spent virtually the whole day at the keyboard. When Johann came back from work she cooked excellent hamburgers, made with freshly minced beef provided by Bart O’Donoghue our excellent local butcher in Tallow, with wild rocket leaves, a bit of fat hen (that really is wild stuff) and what little lettuce we have at the moment. All stuffed, with mayo, mustard and Heinz organic ketchup, into big floury blahs, the Waterford take on the bap. Gosh, they were gorgeous. And, shock horror, we had oven chips with them, followed by blackberries from our vast country estate with good old Bird’s Custard.

  Now, people suffering from orthorexia will not be impressed. Indeed, they will be horrified. Orthorexia was first “identified” by a Californian doctor (what else?) over a decade ago. It is supposed to describe a psychological disorder in which people become unhealthily obsessed with “healthy” food, the need to “detox” and to avoid stuff like saturated fat, alcohol, salt, caffeine and a whole lot of other substances which taste good.

  I’ve no doubt that there are a lot of people who develop an unhealthy obsession with food. The irony is that it can be based, however wrongly, on a notion of “healthy eating”. I reckon it’s just as bad to be obsessed with doughnuts and burgers as it is to focus entirely on foods that we have been told are bad for us. In both instances, it’s the obsession that is a disorder. not the foods in question.

  GK Chesterton, that awful old anti-Semite, once remarked that people go mad when they lose, not their reason, but everything other than their reason. He also said that when people stop believing in God, they will believe in anything (which is not entirely true, of course, but I’m sometimes amused at how people who have rejected the traditional notion of theism on the basis of logic can be quite keen on the power of crystals).

  Whatever you might think of organised religion (and I like mine rather nebulous and disorganised, hence a fondness for the Anglican Communion) its absence does seem to create a vacuum that is filled by all sorts of new and zealous beliefs such as the obsession with healthy foods and superfoods. It’s a kind of desire for penance and shriving, purification and redemption.

  It’s certainly no more logical than religion and, in my view, a lot less benign than say Buddhism or Quakerism.

  For a start, it tends to be based on received wisdom of dubious merit. We really know very little about what food does to us and narrowly focussed research projects come up with new superfoods every week. Some foods, like butter, are unfairly demonised and others, like broccoli and blueberries are presented as minor miracles. It’s no wonder that people are confused.

  Red meat (by which is meant grain-fed, hormone-fed beef which has been treated with chemicals to make it look more appetising) is implicated in all sorts of dietary horrors while grass-fed, naturally reared Irish beef is tarred with the same brush.

  What is the answer? Well, it’s so obvious that a lot of us have yet to twig it. The answer is a balanced diet with plenty of fresh vegetables (ideally with zero pesticide residues), good meat (from non-intensive production systems), proper dairy produce, wholegrain bread, extra virgin olive and other healthy oils, little in the way of sugar and refined carbohydrates, moderate amounts of red wine, plenty of water, a few cups of coffee and tea (or lots of tea with no milk) and a Jaffa Cake (or whatever you fancy) once or twice a month. The last bit is not mandatory.

  The ancient world has much to teach us. The Greeks loved cabbage and were wont to say that dis crambe thanatos or “too much cabbage is death.” Literally “cabbage twice is death” but that’s not what they meant. And I apologise for the lack of Greek letters. Well, quite. What they were getting at is that you can have too much of a good thing and then it’s not good but bad.

  Food writer Matthew Fort says that he would rather be an Epicurean than an orthorexic and I’m with him on this. Read him and shed your possible orthorexia. Balance, you see, is everything.

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• A slippery problem

  August 16, 2009 @ 12:12 am | by Tom

  On Thursday night I ate a very fine smoked eel mousse prepared by Gary O’Hanlon at Viewmount House in Longford. The eels in question were amongst the last ones fished in the Republic of Ireland prior to our ban on this activity. From now until 2012, and possibly for longer, the only Irish eels you will eat will be from the UK part of this small island.

  To be honest, I simply don’t know the rights and wrongs of the eel argument. But I do know that we have been accused of being over-zealous in the application of EU directives in this respect. And how often does that happen? The total eel catch in the Republic is worth considerably less than €1m and I have a feeling that the poltical clout of the eel fishers is proportionate.

  Maybe the the ban is wholly justified. I don’t know. But it’s interesting, to say the least, that we are so zealous in pursuing the alleged interests of eels when we are pretty hopeless at improving our general water quality. Maybe the eels of Ireland are fortunate in being a prey merely to powerless and generally harmless people. If they really are endangered they should be thankful that their persecutors have no political clout. Otherwise they would be well and truly doomed.

  Ireland is rarely accused of being over-zealous in following EU directives. “Food safety” is the only other issue I can think of in this respect and, curiously enough, this, too, tends to effect small, powerless operators who are mainly interested in providing us with good food.

  Oh dear, I do hope I’m not being cynical…

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• Life beyond Dublin

  August 14, 2009 @ 10:43 pm | by Tom

  I have been accused, not without reason, of concentrating too much on restaurants in Dublin. In fact, elsewhere I have been accused of concentrating too much on the southside. I am, in fact, so much a southsider (although I grew up in Drumcondra) that I now live some 150 miles south of Dublin, right on the border between Counties Cork and Waterford and smack between the valleys of the Bride and the Blackwater. I mean no disprespect to Dublin, a city that I still love dearly, when I say that I prefer home to the metropolis.

  So why the Dublin-orientated reviews? Well, there are several reasons. Most of our population is concentrated there and so are, by and large, the restaurants that attempt, with mixed success, to go beyond the basics. This is a simple matter of critical mass. We are the tiniest country in Europe, to all intents and purposes. It’s tough to run a decent restaurant in the capital, it’s not easy in Belfast and it’s hard in Cork and Galway. Outside of the cities, it’s well nigh impossible - not because there are no people who would appreciate the effort but simply because there so few people in the first place.

  Many of the best restaurants in rural Ireland don’t bother to open for lunch because it’s simply not worthwhile. And many of them, especially these days, open for dinner only Thursday to Sunday (or Saturday). This means that there is a fairly narrow window of opportunity for reviewing in practical terms.

  However, I promise to amend my ways and to do my damndest to visit the brightest and the best that are doing their best outside the big areas of population. And to do so in a non-seasonal way, eschewing the notion that such places can survive solely on the tourist (domestic and foreign) trade.

  With this in mind, I want to appeal for help from readers. I want to hear about new restaurants in far-flung parts of the country, restaurants that demonstrate real passion for food and local or fairly local ingredients. Restaurants that tick all of the boxes. This, I hope, will serve to negate the notion that restaurant critics, or this one at any rate, go looking for trouble. Look, my job is to recognise the brightest and the best. And, occasionally - hopefully only very occasionally - to condemn places that charge far too much money for lousy food and, in some instances, seek to promote themselves as interesting and exciting places when this is far from the case. All we are asking is for honest food, properly sourced and cooked, served with some degree of grace and at a price that doesn’t make us blink. That can be in a tiny cafe or in a restaurant with suggestions of grandeur. Frankly, I don’t care. It’s the honesty, value and local produce that I want.

  I ate a superb - no, a glorious - meal at Viewmount House in Longford town last night. It was cooked by Gary O’Hanlon, most certainly a chef to watch. A year ago, Longford was a culinary desert. Now they have some of the best food in the country. And you know what the difference is, cooking skill aside? Gary recognises and supports suppliers who are truly passionate about food and he has employers who allow him to do so.

  Anyway, please let me know about good food wherever you find it.

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• “Food critics are a snide, contemptible bunch…”

  August 11, 2009 @ 12:33 am | by Tom

  That’s a quote from a recent comment posted here in response to my suggestion that Ireland, in general, and rural Ireland, in particular, is rather conservative about food.

  If you trawl the internet in search of such views, you will tap into a rich vein of invective. And it strikes me that “food critics” can never keep all of the people happy all of the time. Which is hardly surprising, I suppose. We are either too harsh or too easily pleased, too snooty or too democratic.

  Some of us don’t know a lot about food and conecentrate on the entertainment value of eating out. Some of us get hung up on detail: like how, precisely, a dish should be constructed. Most of us are a bit subjective - in fact, anybody who pretends to be otherwise is either a saint or a fool or both. Some of us are pretty close to being charlatans who get away with writing damn all about the food itself because we entertain in other ways. We are often accused of writing more about ourselves than about what appears on the plate but, believe me, there are times when that is the kindest thing to do (for the reader rather than the restaurant).

  Our first duty should be to the reader. Our role is to give the reader a reasonably clear idea of what eating in a particular restaurant is going to be like. If the reader doesn’t know silage from soup there may be difficulties in communication. And if we are too easily pleased (bearing in mind that we are not spending our own money), this is not going to help anyone.

  It’s not that we should go out to eat with a view to picking holes in everything we encounter. It’s just that we need to keep our critical faculties firing on all cylinders. All of the time. And we need to be constantly vigilant about the “restaurant critic experience” by keeping a firm eye on what is happening at the tables near us.

  If restaurant critics lose that sense of vigilance, they are not doing their jobs. A lousy kitchen can’t produce great food for a restaurant critic and dish up rubbish for the rest of the punters. But the service can be tweaked and the critic can be - and is often - love bombed. Critics have to keep their heads cool and look around them at all times.

  We also need to have a real and passionate interest in eating. Not eating as entertainment but just eating. A meal is just a meal, whether it’s in Guilbaud’s or McDonald’s. It’s the passion that makes the difference. Passion is what it’s all about.

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• Only ourselves to blame? Rambling ruminations…

  August 10, 2009 @ 3:09 pm | by Tom

  Last week I contributed to a programme on Radio Kerry. A listener had complained that the 10-ounce steaks which she and her husband had been served in a local restaurant had come with so little in the way of vegetable matter that it could be taken up on the tip of her fork. On the other hand, she said, chicken and ham served in a local pub had come with both chips and boiled potatoes, carrots, “turnips” (by which most Irish people mean swede), cabbage and…I forget what else but it certainly wasn’t in season. However, the listener in question was delighted with herself and was of the opinion that this is the way restaurants should go.

  Now, I spend a lot of time berating chefs and restaurateurs for a certain lack of imagination but this radio experience (and there were lots more calls in a similar vein) has given me pause for thought. I mean, what is the point in making any effort at all when there are so many customers like this?

  Perhaps the simple and sad fact is that your average Irish punter doesn’t want baby courgettes, new season carrots, pak choi, local tomatoes, spring onions, baby leeks, chard, beetroot… Even mangetout, for pity’s sake. Perhaps they want just potatoes (chips AND boiled, you can never have too much of a good Irish staple), swede that was harvested last Autumn, woody batons of carrot from God knows when (and where), and the ubiquitous cabbage. I like cabbage. Cabbage can be great. But surely in the summer, when there’s a plethora of other stuff around, it should watch the performance from the wings for a while.

  And it’s not just vegetables. A friend of mine who knows good food when he sees it, has just returned from a tour of the West. From Donegal to Kerry, he said, there was good seafood (even if you had to look hard in some places) but that it was invariably overcooked. He spoke with several chefs about this and was told, quite plainly, that “if it was cooked like it would be in Dublin, people would send it back and say it was raw.”

  So, there you are. We take our plant and marine food resources and destroy them because the average customer hasn’t a clue how to eat. It’s how you stay in business in certain parts of the country. But properly cooked fish is A Good Thing and overcooked fish is A Bad Thing. The French, the Italians, the Spanish, the Greeks, the Japanese would all agree. And they don’t have seafood as good as ours (which is why so much of ours ends up in Rungis or Tokyo where it’s appreciated).

  And now to a delicate issue. If you talk to chefs about issues like this you will find that there is a wide divide between Dublin, Cork and some of the larger connurbations around the country and more rural places as far as customer expectations are concerned. Put very simply, the cosmopolitans like food as you would find it in Paris, Rome or London while the provincial palate wants everything overcooked and served with - you’ve guessed it - potatoes. Martijn Kajuiter at The Cliff House in Ardmore does a splendid (and very delicate) dish called “Potatoes Seven Ways”. He is frequently asked for extra spud on the side. Honestly.

  And even if you don’t talk to chefs but eat in places like London or Paris or New York from time to time you will notice something of a divide between Dublin restaurants in such places. There are several conspicuous exceptions, of course, but I have a feeling that many of our best chefs (Michelin stars and all) need to get out more, need to travel more and need to eat in restaurants overseas that are making waves (and I know this takes a little research). Dublin food, in some unexpected places, is becoming a bit dated and jaded. I don’t usually encourage people, let alone chefs, to follow fashion but just now, with the new emphasis on stripped-down simplicity, quality of ingredients and a degree of informality on the plate, the fashion looks bloody good to me.

  And you don’t have to go far. Just take a couple of nights in London which is (a) close, (b) Anglophone, (c) huge and (d) a culinary melting pot with some very, very impressive stuff happening. In fact, I’ll volunteer to chaperone chefs around the British capital…

  Finally, a word about restaurants that are bucking the trend and which I ate with the family over the weekend. First Pichet, as good as ever, efficient, soulful, thoroughly packed and thoroughly enjoyable. Then Caviston’s for dinner on Saturday (Peter has given in at last and does evenings on Fridays and Saturdays), which was as, ever, a Dublin classic, a fine example of how Simple is Better, and then lunch in the cafe at IKEA on Sunday (of which more anon) before returning home and cremating some lovely organic chicken (thanks to a new barbecue arrangement which almost melted the grill rack).

  Finally, just as a rider to Saturday’s review of Chez Hans. Do I really feel that I’d prefer to eat at Chapter One, given the similarity in prices? It just seemed a rather ungracious note on which to conclude a highly positive account of a lovely, pretty well flawless meal. And so, I take it back. The two restaurants are very different and it just isn’t fair to compare.

  But I do wish Chez Hans would get good wine glasses (yes: thin rim, tulip shape). And I wish every restaurant in the country would take a long, hard look at their stemware and consider that it (a) is very important in its own right and (b) can help sell wine.

  And now I’m off to pick chanterelles and courgette flowers. Which will, of course, be served this evening with chips, boiled spuds, mash, saute potatoes, potato cakes, jacket potatoes, rosti and a simple wedge of swede.

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• Farewell Conrad, Hello Dylan?

  August 6, 2009 @ 5:41 pm | by Tom

  Conrad Gallagher is something of a media darling in certain quarters. A South African newspaper has referred to him as a world-renowned master chef. Which, talented as he undoubtedly is, is a bit rich. News of his return to Dublin took an interesting turn today.

  Louis Murray phoned this morning to let me know that any deal with Conrad Gallagher is well and truly off. He referred me to a story in The Times of South Africa today in which it is revealed that Mr Gallagher is having financial problems and that unpaid staff recently walked out of his restaurant leaving guests waiting, in vain, to be fed. Creditors are taking legal action. According to Louis Murray, Gallagher failed to mention these issues when discussing the idea of his taking over the kitchen at Balzac/La Stampa in Dawson Street. He is understandably annoyed.

  Louis Murray commented to me, when we first discussed the possibility of Conrad Gallagher moving into La Stampa, that a lot of people thought he was mad to consider such a venture. But, he said, he is always willing to give someone a chance. Which is commendable. However, a recent profile of the controversial Irish chef read like a cross between a hagiography and a press release. Including the suggestion that he could take Dublin “by storm.” Hmmm…

  As somebody commented elsewhere here this kind of thing suggests that Dublin is a big town rather than a real capital city.

  Anyway, you know who could do wonders in that great dining room in Dawson Street? Dylan McGrath. I gather he may well end up there and, if he does, it could be a great combination.

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• Child of her time

  August 2, 2009 @ 11:17 pm | by Tom

  In today’s New York Times there’s one of those mega-essays that intelligent U.S. newspapers occasionally like to publish from time to time. In this instance it gives Michael Pollan of In Defence of Food fame an opportunity to write about Julia Child, America’s answer, in a sense, to Elizabeth David.

  It being America, of course, Child’s stardom was not so much based on her monumental book Mastering the Art of French Cooking (the Penguin edition of which was part of my mother’s kitchen equipment) but a live TV series on the same subject which first aired in 1963. (We should remember that our own Monica Sheridan was doing something similar on Telefis Eireann at the same time.)

  Anyway, Meryl Streep plays Child in a new film, Julia and Julie, and does so, according to Pollan, with characteristic panache. It’s based on a clever idea for a blog (and a book deal) that struck one Julie Powell some years ago: to cook her way through the 500+ recipes in Child’s magnum opus in a year, posting reports every day. And, of course, upon the doyenne of US food writing and broadcasting and her life and times. (She died in 2004).

  Pollan remarks that Julia Child’s TV programmes took the fear out of cooking. Today’s wall-to-wall food programming, he says, has taken the fear out of ordering stuff in restaurants. Ten years ago you might have been daunted by such menu items as bottarga or boquerones or even, heaven knows, the humble pesto of Genoa, but thanks to the likes of Jamie and Valentine and Nigella we are now armed with some idea of what they are.

  But Michael Pollan’s most compelling point is a question. Why is it that the average American now spends less than the half the time preparing food than they did when Julia Child issued her first rather breathy word on the small screen? Especially when food TV is still vastly popular. Why do people want to watch it but not do it? It can’t be just so that they can go to a restaurant with a degree of confidence.

  He also touches on the fact that cooking has been redefined. Where once it required a modest degree of skill and techniques that you had to learn, from a book or a mentor, a lot of people consider unpacking and assembly as “cooking”.

  Unpacking and assembly is what happens in quite a few restaurants these days. Once you de-skill the home kitchen, the de-skilled commercial kitchen follows in its wake. No matter how many food and lifestyle TV programmes would have us believe otherwise.

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