megabites

• Taking pleasure in not eating things

  October 30, 2009 @ 12:36 pm | by Tom

  Some of the most sensible - and concise - comments about vegetarianism have been made by omnivores. I recall Oliver Peyton saying to Pat Kenny that while we go to lots of trouble to cook vegetarian foood for our vegetarian friends “do they ever cook us meat when we go to their houses?” But my favourite is AA Gill’s declaration that vegetarians are people who “take pleasure in not eating things.”

  Not that we should underestimate the pleasure involved in occupying the high moral ground. I’ve no doubt it beats a McDonald’s Big Mac any day.

  Now, just as there are thoughtful, contemplative, well-informed omnivores (no, not carnivores: we eat more than meat), there are the same amongst vegetarians. But a lot of vegetarians, wanting to eschew factory farming and industrial meat processing, throw the baby out with the bath water. I hate the idea of factory farming but I salivate with an easy conscience at the thought of a roast of free-range, organic rare-breed pork. There is no connection between the two.

  But, then again, that rare-breed pig will almost certainly have been fed some grain. And you can argue that growing grain to feed animals is morally dodgy in a world where there doesn’t seem to be enough grain to feed human beings. When this is taken into consideration, the conscience is not so easy. A more persuasive example would be Irish beef which is largely (some of it wholly?) grass fed. So, there you have it: guilt-free salivation at the thought of a medium-rare rib-eye steak with garlic butter.

  And it’s relatively cruelty free, eh? Those cattle are dispatched with…er…such such dispatch that there is no pain, as far as we can gather. Not that we want to be there when the deed is being done. Appetite and hypocrisy make great companions. But what about the butter? If you have ever heard cattle mourning their separation from their calves - and this is how dairy farming works - I can tell you it’s a pitiful sound. But then again, as a friend of mine says of foie gras, “you can’t taste the cruelty”.

  I suppose what I’m getting at is that (a) if you have concerns about eating meat vis-a-vis the fate of the Third World and/or the planet you don’t have to give it up entirely and that (b) it’s hard to think of an animal-derived food that is entirely devoid of cruelty.

  However, there is a huge amount of complete cobblers spouted about vegetarianism and, in particular, veganism. Actress Natalie Portman recently treated readers of The Huffington Post to her views on how eating meat and animal-derived produce is simply wrong. Her sweeping generalisations and very peculiar logic strike me as being part and parcel of the extremists’ mindset and I’m glad to see she has been taken to task for some of her more barking mad assertions.

  Perhaps, like me, you missed the news that Heather Mills (who she?) has gone vegan and is opening a vegan restaurant to which she has given the name VBites, which sounds like a supplement you have to take when on a vegan diet. “My vegan meals will taste like meat,” she told Now magazine before the opening. If this is true, surely most true vegans would be horrified? Or am I just confused?

  Vegetarians are understandably browned off when ignorant omnivores do the “You know Hitler was a vegetarian?” schtick. “You know Heather Mills is a vegan?” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

  Comments (6)

• First, bake your stinky cheese…

  October 28, 2009 @ 11:49 am | by Tom

  

  I know that food miles are a complex issue but, broadly speaking, I’m not keen on encouraging the consumption of food that has to travel long distances. But there are exceptions, of course. At the decadent, peel-me-a-grape end of the scale are truffles. Have you ever tried to buy an Irish truffle? They exist, I believe and I have heard of one man who lies on the ground and watches the almost microscopic truffle flies as they seek out the mysterious subterranean tubers. But I suspect he doesn’t do this on a commercial basis. Indeed, he may be confined for his own safety at this stage.

  While we have truffles in Ireland, they remain infuriatingly unseen. I can’t pass an oak tree in the Autumn without wondering would it be worthwhile spending a day digging small random holes around its roots but so far sanity has prevailed.

  What we don’t have in Ireland is a native equivalent to the cheese known as Vacherin Mont d’Or (although I realise that making a bald statement like this will mean that I will soon know about someone who is trying to produce an experimental version, using bark from trees on the slopes of Lugnaquillia - in which case I shall let you know).

  They say that truffles and Vacherin Mont d’Or go very well together but I’ve never had both together at the same time so I can’t say if it’s true. I have, however, been told, that it’s a good way to ruin two very lovely things. On balance, I’d keep them separate.

  The thing about this soft, runny and often distinctly stinky cheese, the zone of production of which straddles the Swiss-French border, is that it makes the most glorious meal when put into a hot oven until it is thoroughly heated through and is even more molten than at room temperature. You then tear up lots of crusty bread and dunk until you have removed every last scrap, right down to the bare birch wood that forms the cheese’s wrapper. Actually, the cheese comes in a little box made of pine, while the cheese itself is contained with a circle of birch. All in all, quite woody stuff

  Strictly speaking, you’re supposed to punch holes in the cheese and drizzle with white wine. The trouble is, if the cheese is ripe, the holes close up as soon as they’re made and the wine seeps out of the wooden container. Some people like to sprinkle on a finely chopped clove of garlic (something I’ve yet to do) but I prefer a lot of coarsely crushed black peppercorns and a splash of wine just for luck. The Swiss, being a terribly organised people, put some foil around the box to keep everything inside, which is a good idea. Don’t forget to put the lid back on before putting it in the oven. (Our Vacherin Mont d’Or came from Iago in Cork’s English Market, but you can get it from all serious cheesemongers; people argue about the French versus the Swiss version but this is way beyond me; the bread was Declan Ryan’s Arbutus sourdough).

  One small Vacherin, a loaf of good bread and a simple green salad makes one of the best meals you can have. And it’s not exactly cooking. It’s a seasonal treat, because this is, essentially, a Winter cheese. Next time, I think I’ll try it with thyme.

  Strictly speaking, of course, this should be drunk a wine from Jura or Vaud but neither is easy to get in Ireland. And the celebrated Vin Jaune of Jura, which smells and tastes like fino sherry that has been left open in the sun for a few years, is not the sort of thing that I want to drink at all. I’d be inclined to go with the Rhone, ideally a white, odd as it may seem. The cheese should cost you between €7 and €9, so it’s not a hugely expensive treat even if it does simply drip with decadence. The only flaw in this lovely little meal is the fact suspicion that it gave the Swiss the notion of inventing the fondue.

  Comments (3)

• Irish beef is better…but watch those omega-3s

  @ 12:48 am | by Tom

  At last, confirmation that Irish beef, which is largely grass-fed, produces better meat than the stuff that is fed cereal in feedlots (as in most of the EU and pretty much all of the US). Grass-fed beef has a higher omega-3 content than the rival product and Bord Bia is planning a promotional campaign based on this fact (about time, if you ask me). Mind you, we must be vigilant. A lot of people think that all Irish beef is 100% grass-fed thanks to our grass-friendly climate but this is not true.

  It seems that some Irish beef is sold in the UK as being from “the British Isles” which will cause apoplexy in certain quarters. But I am assured that “British Isles” is an ancient geographical description, not a political one. The more politically correct “Product of These Islands” is probably a bit too vague.

  Have a listen to this week’s Food Programme from BBC Radio 4 - all about omega-3, 6 and 9 and how we need to keep a very strict and informed eye on food labels. Can we trust the claims? And are plant-derived omega-3s all they are cracked up to be? Fascinating stuff. This is the best kind of radio.

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• Read before you grow

  October 27, 2009 @ 1:23 pm | by Tom

  

  Everything in the garden has a season. Soon we will be sitting beside the fire poring over seed catalogues, wondering if the new varieties can be nearly as good as their descriptions and making a mental note not to order too much lettuce seed. And some of us will be reading gardening books - in much the same way as musicians read scores (for the pleasure without the effort). There are some very well written gardening books, by which I mean books which actually give a degree of pleasure in addition to the instruction, but we consult most of them just to help us get a job done.

  Isn’t strange how new, glossy books about gardening, with their colour photographs and step-by-step instructions tend to end up being curiously unsatisfying? Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found the old gardening books much more useful, in the end, and much more interesting to read, than the contemporary stuff.

  Mind you, Joy Larkcom’s Grow your own Vegetables (Frances Lincoln, 2002) is an exception in some respects. It’s not glossy and it has no colour pictures; in fact, it’s a very chunky paperback; but it is very up-to-date and it’s probably the best manual for would-be vegetable growers. It’s not currently in print but is still around. Joy lives in West Cork and is the doyenne of British veg writers. A particular fan of salad crops and Oriental brassicas, she is a polymath (I think she graduated from Cambridge in Chinese) and lively company. Her style of writing is concise; she simply wants to cram as much useful information into each sentence as possible and she uses lots of abbreviations in order to keep things neat. Don’t expect lyricism but you can depend on the advice. Her classic book on Oriental vegetables is still in print.

  The book that really got me going when I became an allotmenteer was not in print even then. This was the ambitiously titled The Complete Vegetable Grower (Faber 1975) by the amazingly prolific W.E. Shewell-Cooper of whom I know virtually nothing. It’s dated, the varieties mentioned are, by and large, no longer available and style is often a hoot (there are frequent references to the need to “consult the housewife” but the advice is sound and if you had no other book to hand you would do fine. He was also a great enthusiast for the “no dig” gardening method (which relies on vast amounts of mulching) which remains, for many the Holy Grail.

  I can’t find out much about Shewell-Cooper, other than a list of his appointments at various horticultural colleges in Britain, but he seems to have an Irish connection. Of cardoons (the close relative of the globe artichoke in which the blanched stems are eaten), he says “The author used to grow this vegetable well when he used to live at Queenstown in the south of Ireland. It seems to love the climate of that country…” (I tried growing cardoons near Cobh, as Queenstown is now called, a few years ago and the slugs loved them).

  Quite a few years ago, Johann bought me the first volume of The Gardener’s Assistant edited by William Watson (Gresham Pubishing Co Ltd., 1925) which crams a huge amount of information between its scuffed green covers. The suggestions for kitchen garden design take no account of World War I and are firmly rooted in the Edwardian halcyon days (you must have a vinery and a peach house along the south-facing wall, for example). However, the advice on growing vegetables is very sound if rather dogmatic (you know the way books of that era tend to thunder things like “double trenching is imperative in the cultivation of…”?). And there are few gardening books that tell you how to grow potatoes and onions, on the one hand, and licquorice, skirret and samphire on the other. It seems to be easy enough to find on sites websites like abebooks

  Eleanour Sinclair Rohde’s Vegetable Cultivation and Cookery (Medici Society, 1938) is another volume from another era that somehow stands the test of time. She was a very prolific and scholarly writer on plant matters (The Old English Herbals is quite a classic and The Scented Garden is still valid in a lot of ways). Here she really gets her hands dirty and you can see that she did actually do the gardening (although I’m sure it was with the assistance of her staff). My only complaint about Eleanour is that she cooked a lot of things to a mush. Purple sprouting broccoli was to be boiled for half an hour! On the other hand, leeks were to be put in “as little water as possible” and stewed until tender. Not bad advice. She also tells us how to grow and cook all manner of unusual stuff from asparagus peas (which I recommend with melted butter) and rocambole (which is a kind of onion) to scolymus (a bit like a cardoon, apparently) and New Zealand spinach. Eleanour must have been quite a character and I would love to know more about her but I have pretty much drawn a blank.

  Now, here’s a book that is as beautiful as it is practical and helpful: The Book of Apples by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards with stunning illustrations by Elisabeth Dowle (Ebury Press, 1993). This bible for apple enthusiasts was published in association with the Brogdale Horticultural Trust which keeps the UK’s national fruit collection near Faversham in Kent. This wonderful book will either inspire you to plant a whole orchard of wide and varied sorts of apple or you will just gaze, entranced, at the superb watercolour illustrations of Sturmer Pippin, Norfolk Beefing and Egremont Russet. There’s a lengthy history of the apple and a very detailed directory of varieties.

  

  Spuds don’t have quite the same romance to them as apples, somehow. But Alan Romans’ The Potato Book (Frances Lincoln, 2005) is worth having if you take these tubers seriously. What you get is a slim volume with a history of how the humble spud (why are they always humble?) found its way from the Andes to McDonald’s (if you see what I mean) and a directory, with colour photographs, of lots of varieties. Each potato is also rated for blight resistance (Sarpo Mira scores a staggering 9 out of 10 in this respect, something to bear in mind when choosing a maincrop). Alan Romans is not only one of the world’s greatest authorities on potatoes, he also sells seeds.

  Finally, if you want a book that tells you about the history of edible plants and how they have come to be like they are today, try to get hold of The Kitchen Garden by David Stuart (Alan Sutton, 1987) which is both a great reference work but also a darn good read. It does for vegetables, herbs and fruit what Geoffrey Grigson’s An Englishman’s Flora did for wild flowers and sadly has been out of print for years. Mr Stuart is (was?) clearly a great scholar but he also demonstrates a hands-on appreciation of what it’s like to grow most of the plants of which he writes.

  I have not counted recently, but I reckon our collection of gardening books must stand at around 400 at this stage. These are just a few of the landmark ones, the ones to which I keep returning even if, as in the case of Shewell-Cooper, I can probably recite passages from memory).

  Does anyone have any suggestions for books that really inspire, get you itching to be digging and sowing and planting? Or that contain descriptions of the gardening life that are particularly real and vivid. Heaven knows, there’s plenty of gardening prose that is as heavy and as unyielding as compacted clay…

  Comments (3)

• Following the recipe…for a change

  October 23, 2009 @ 12:48 pm | by Tom

  It’s not that I am totally averse to following recipes. When it comes to any form of baking I’m happy to do so, in almost laboratory-like detail. But in most other cooking, I’m a bit slapdash (although I like, in my deluded way, to think of it as “instinctive”) and I rarely if ever follow step-by-step instructions when producing, say, a casserole. I suspect that a lot of people are in the same boat: we know the basics, the principles and the rest is easy, using what we have to hand and maybe adding our own little flourishes.

  And so it was unusual for me to take a book - Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (the 1972 Penguin single volume edition) - and proceed to…er…follow a recipe in almost forensic detail. At least, that was the idea. But could I break with my old habits? And what would the resulting dish be like? Would it be sufficiently different from my “instinctive version”?

  There was a time when “marketing” didn’t mean persuading people to buy stuff that they may not need and don’t want. In the EF Benson Lucia novels (and if you have yet to read them, you have a luscious treat in store) “marketing” is what the women of the town did with their baskets in the morning: going from greengrocer to butcher to poulterer in search of food for the day. I like the idea of “marketing” in this sense. Shopping suggests a list of things that you’re going to buy, whether they are good or not. “Marketing” is about seeing what’s good on the day.

  On this occasion, I can’t claim to have been “marketing”. I had a shrewd notion that I would get some excelent rump steak from Bart O’Donoghue in Tallow, and so it proved. But would this be transformed into Carbonades a la Flamande or Boeuf a la Catalane or Estouffade de Boeuf? No. As I browsed Julia’s recipes, the one that cried out to be cooked, on a leisurely Saturday afternoon) was Boeuf a la Bourguignonne (page 342). It has one great advantage over other versions (such as Elizabeth David’s, Elizabeth Luard’s, Hume and Downe’s, Mireille Johnson’s and Curnonsky’s) in that there’s no marinading. Another thing that caught my eye is the inclusion of some tomato puree in the mixture, something that hardly anyone else uses. Curnonsky is a rare exception in this respect; and, rather appropriately, his made-up surname is based on cur non?, the Latin for “why not?”

  The first step in Julia’s recipe involves a 6oz piece of streaky bacon; she tells you to remove the rind, slice the meat into lardons and to simmer these in water for 10 minutes.

  Well, I’m afraid I fell at the first hurdle. Life, I concluded, is too short, so I substituted a 125g packet of bacon pieces from Lidl. And yes, I can hear the shrieks of disapproval as I write this but wait, wait…

  As JC advises, I sauteed the bacon bits in a tablespoon of olive oil in a heavy old Doufeu casserole (bright orange and probably the same age as the book) for two to three minutes, removed it with a slotted spoon and set aside. I then ensured that the bacon fat and olive oil mixture was “almost smoking” before browning the meat.

  Now, JC calls for 3lb of lean stewing steak cut into 2 inch cubes and that’s what I did when I got my rump steak home. But about a quarter of a pound was lost in trimming. “Dry the beef; it will not brown if it is damp”, says JC and this was to become something of a mantra with her (like “don’t crowd the mushrooms”. Bu it’s absolutely true. The kind of supermarket beef that erupts from its plastic bag with a splash of bloody fluid will be hopeless in this respect. Just don’t bother with it. Go to a good butcher. My rump steak was dry already (and aged a few weeks too) and it browned right away, especially as I did it in small batches. Then I put it with the bacon.

  JC then gets you to brown 1 sliced onion and 1 sliced carrot in the same fat/oil - and I did just that. The she says to pour away the fat/oil but there was only a trickle left at this stage.

  You now, according to JC, put your browned beef, the bacon and the vegetables back into the casserole and you season them with 1 teaspoon of salt and a quarter of a teaspoon of pepper. I put in exactly that amount of salt (level, not heaped) and ground in enough black pepper to approximate to a quarter of a teaspoon. Then, as directed, I sprinkled over an ounce of flour and tossed everything about before putting in the oven (which is meant to be hot - 230ºC/gas mark 8; our Aga was cooler than that on the day). You’re meant to take it out and toss again after 4 minutes but I gave it 6 to be on the safe side. “This browns the flour and covers the meat with a light crust,” according to Julia. I’m not sure it really did. Maybe I should have used the electric oven. Anyway, I gave it another 6 minutes rather than another 4 and proceeded.

  At this point you take the casserole out of the oven and turn the heat down to 150ºC/gas mark 2. Now comes the wine and I’m afraid I departed from the recipe once again at this point. JC calls for 1 1/4 pints of “a full-bodied, young red wine such as…a Chianti”. (They used to say that you needed a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin for the pot and another for the table, but that would be a very, very expensive beef stew). I used a Nero d’Avola from Sicily and I didn’t measure the quantity; I used all but a small glassful.

  In it went, followed by “enough stock or bouillon so that the meat is barely covered…” Here was another departure. The stock was, understandably, supposed to be beef stock. The only stock that we had, in the freezer, was duck stock. And in it went. Followed by a tablespoon of tomato paste (puree), 3 rather than the indicated 2 crushed cloves of garlic, a big sprig of fresh thyme in place of the 1/2 teaspoon (presumably dried?) in the recipe and, “a crumbled bay leaf”. My advice is to avoid crumbling bay leaves. If you crumble them you get little hard pieces of leaf that will stick like glue to your palate. And I read, years ago, in the British Medical Journal of all places, that swallowing bay leaves is not a good idea… No, next time I’m going to put in the whole bay leaf and fish it out at the end.

  Anyway, all was stirred together and at this stage you are told “bring to simmering point on the top of the stove. Then cover the casserole and place in lower part of the preheated oven.” Actually, I brought it to boiling point because the casserole was going into the bottom oven of the Aga which is cooler than 150ºC, so I wanted to give it a bit of a boost.

  As advised by JC, I left it there for between 3 and 4 hours (nearer 4, actually). “The meat is done,” she says, “when a fork pierces it easily.” The button mushrooms (browned in butter but a bit less of them than advised) and the baby onions, softened in stock, went in at the last minute.

  Well, it turned out to be the best version of this dish that I ever cooked and the tomato puree, which worried me a little, simply vanished into the dark, intense sauce and worked some kind of magic, albeit not in a tomatoey way. Overall, it was way better than my usual…er…”instinctive” version of this great old French classic.

  Julia advises, in that scatter-gun approach to wine that was so common in cookbooks from the ’60s and ’70s, to eat it with “Beaujolais, Cotes du Rhone, Saint-Emillion claret, or Burgundy.” I don’t think the Beaujolais would be up to the job and it would need to be a pretty serious Cotes du Rhone. In the end, we had it with a chunky, nicely oaked Corbieres - not a wine region that would have been on JC’s radar when she was writing her magnum opus because it was widely known then, along with Minervois, for producing oceans of rather nasty, cheap reds. How times change.

  This is a terrific recipe. So good, in fact, that I’m now planning to cook Julia Child’s Coq au Vin. It looks like the same procedure, just with chicken instead of beef, which suits me fine. And I might even do as Julia says about the bacon. I’m off to find a 6oz piece which I shall then lovingly de-rind… But I have to say that the Lidl bacon pieces are very tempting.

  Comments (3)

• Wise Child

  October 18, 2009 @ 11:57 pm | by Tom

  If you have not yet seen JULIE AND JULIA, which deals with the doyenne of American food writers and a young New Yorker who set herself the task of cooking every recipe in Child’s monumental Mastering the Art of French Cooking, there is probably not much time left unless you want to settle for the DVD in due course.

  I would have enjoyed more Julia (a literally towering performance by Meryl Streep) and less Julie (the gamine Amy Adams) and none at all of her rather loutish husband but that’s just me. It’s a fun film and Julia Child comes across as wildly enthusiastic, intelligent, irreverent, eccentric and loveable. If this is to be believed - and I gather it is - she must have been a mighty contrast to Elizabeth David whose sole TV interview, with Jancis Robinson, made Dr Hastings Banda seem loquacious.

  Julia had a somewhat whooping voice and her cookery demonstrations had a gloriously unscripted character; watching an excerpt from her 1960s TV series, The French Chef, you can tell that she often finds herself not entirely sure of what she is going to say next. Jamie Oliver did not model his television persona on her. Meryl Streep’s take on the distinctive Child voice occasionally makes her sound a little squiffy but, then again, a lot of Martinis appear to be consumed.

  Here she gives some good advice on making omelettes.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWmvfUKwBrg&rel=0

  I had a craving for poached eggs this afternoon, encouraged, no doubt, by the presence in the kitchen of a dozen very fresh, very mucky local free-range eggs, each devoid of an official stamp and therefore sold strictly under-the-counter. Julia Child has this to say about eggs for poaching:

  The most important requirement for poaching is that the eggs be very fresh; the yolk stands high, the white clings to it in a cohesive mass… A stale egg with a relaxed and watery white is unpoachable because the white trails off in wisps in the water, leaving the yolk exposed…

  I followed her advice and put my two eggs into barely simmering water (with a couple of teaspoons of vinegar to help the cohesion) for about three minutes and took them out with a slotted spoon. Then placed them on generously buttered toast. As Julia Child says, you can never have too much butter. This is not entirely true, of course, but you can certainly have too little.

  One of the more dramatic interludes in the Julie strand of the film concerns the making of what she calls boof Bourguignon and it inspired me to do something I rarely manage: to follow a particular recipe, in this instance Julia Child’s for boeuf Bourguignon, to the very letter. And I came pretty close to doing so. Of which more anon…

  Comments (1)

• Awkward customers

  October 16, 2009 @ 12:47 am | by Tom

  

  It’s not that customers rarely have genuine complaints in restaurants, it’s just that too many people don’t know how to complain. And even fewer restaurateurs know how to respond. We, in Ireland, are a polite people by and large. By the time we actually decide to complain we tend to have built up a head of steam and the first salvo in the ensuing exchange ends up looking like a blast from a flame-thrower.

  Many readers of The Irish Times seem to decide that discretion is the better part of valour; they register a mild complaint and then email the restaurant in the cold light of dawn. Good policy, I would say. And good restaurants respond in a similarly measured fashion. In the end, both sides are happy. Occasionally, of course, the restaurant goes silent and the displeased customer tells all their friends what happened and customers, actual and potential, are lost. And they often copy me their complaint, for which I am most grateful.

  I have a huge file of emails containing correspondence between angry eaters and restaurateurs and I have developed what I think is a bit of a nose for people who go out looking for trouble and who are never happier than when they are complaining. They are a very small minority but they are pretty painful.

  I see that Neil Perry, one of Australia’s most celebrated chefs, has had his email correspondence with a disgruntled customer, placed in the public domain. This could be quite embarassing but, given that great chefs tend to be a touch temperamental and are not known for their PR skills, I think Perry acquitted himself pretty well. He’s a busy man and unlike a lot of celebrity chefs, e.g. Gordon Ramsay, he actually cooks.

  I can’t judge the rights and wrongs of this dispute, of course. But the secret of effective complaining is brevity and the avoidance of any suggestion that you might, just possibly, be considered a bit of a pain. On this occasion - and this is just my opinion - Perry’s email adversary seems to have erred in this respect.

  I’ve eaten Perry’s food on several occasions and it has varied between the near sublime and the overpriced and ordinary. But there’s no doubt that when he’s on song he’s brilliant. Mind you - and it’s been a couple of years since I’ve eaten in Sydney - I prefer to head out to Jared Ingersoll’s Dank Street Depot. Very different stuff, right enough, but more my bag. Food is fashion in Sydney, to a greater extent than in many cities, and you sometimes get a side order of “attitude”. Much of what Neil Perry has to say in his email correspondence is measured, witty and polite - especially when you consider that Australians are inclined to say what they think. Without a whole lot of subtlety.

  Comments (5)

• Mea culpa…The Greens are still green

  October 13, 2009 @ 12:11 pm | by Tom

  Yesterday’s ruminations on news from the world of food included a rather shocking error. Because I missed any reports, I assumed that the Green Party had not made the GM issue a bargaining point with their coalition partner. But they did. And they seem to have secured some important policy changes. Had I read Deaglan’s piece in yesterday’s newspaper properly, I would not have been in the dark.

  Read the details here

  Comments (2)

• In and out of the news

  October 12, 2009 @ 9:55 pm | by Tom

  There was a story in yesterday’s Sunday Times about the felicitously named Jorg Zipprick and his attack on Ferran Adria, arguably the most famous chef in the world, who cooks extraordinary dishes at his El Bulli restaurant in Spain (which featured recently in The Irish Times magazine). Adria’s customers, according to Herr Zipprick, a German food writer, are ingesting chemicals that are commonly used in the “molecular gastronomy” of which Adria is the leading exponent but which can, he argues, have unfortunate effects. These range, he claims, from a laxative effect (cf licquorice and artichokes) to more serious health implications.

  Herr Zipprick is reported as claiming that you will get 15% of your annual dose of food additives in one sitting at El Bulli. This, however, rather begs the question of how much processed food you eat on a regular basis but doubtless he has worked out some method of calculation over which he can stand. The book, which was quoted by The Sunday Times, is yet to appear on amazon.com, as far as I can gather, and I know next to nothing about Herr Zipprick. However, I can confirm that he is not a character in ‘Allo ‘Allo.

  Meanwhile The Daily Telegraph has reported that 17,000 doughnut-hamburgers were sold at a fair in Massachusets. As the name implies, this is a hamburger (with all the trimmings) served in a ring doughnut rather than the usual bread bun. This bizarre creation is estimated to weigh in at a mere 1500 calories and has been named the Luther Burger, after the late Luther Vandross and not Martin, the late divine who favoured the Diet of Worms. Given a choice, to be frank, I’d prefer to take my chances with Ferran Adria’s additives.

  And, as they say, in other news, here is the story that never happened. The Green Party, due to some curious oversight, did not make a GM-free Ireland a condition of continuing in government with Fianna Fail. I don’t want to go into the pros and cons of GM food here just at the moment (this is a debate that, in the old cliche, tends to generate more heat than light) but I’m just puzzled as to how green the Greens really are if they have joined the agnostic tendency on GMOs. Perhaps they think that the horse has bolted at this stage and that, as Herr Frick might have put it, resistance is useless.

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• Seeds of hope…and a right pear

  @ 1:33 am | by Tom

  

  I don’t know what the going rate for an allotment is these days but a friend of mine has been offered 100 square metres of Wicklow hillside for €300 per annum and 45 square metres a bit closer to Dublin for the same. Both are rotovated and ready for planting (not that you would put in much at this time of the year - garlic and heat-treated onion sets, I suppose). This certainly beats farming in terms of income per square metre. We make less than that on five or six acres of hay or silage each year.

  However, it’s good to know that people are so keen to grow their own. I was ruminating on this as we sat outside in the sun for lunch today (it felt like a pleasant, if breezy, July afternoon), concluding that gardening is all about optimism. Perhaps some newly converted tillers of the soil will have been put off for life by the terrible summer we had this year but I’d be willing to bet that most of them are just hoping for better in 2010. Anything that encourages such a sense of hope, especially in these straitened times, has to be a good thing.

  Of course, there’s a fine line between hope and crazy optimism. At least in the sphere of growing stuff. This is the time of year that gardeners turn their minds to the new crop of seed catalogues and few of us manage to order enough packets to see us through the coming year and no more. Every gardener that I know has a backlog of seed packets and mine has come to the stage where it is developing an historical interest. I still have parsnip seeds from the last century, which is quite hopeless. Parsnip seed needs to be a fresh as a daisy to have any hope of germinating. And then there’s the kohl rabi from 2003 and the 2/3 full packet of swede seed from…oh…years ago when I grew a row of these charmless brassicas for a friend who has a weakness of the things. And why, oh why, do I still have an unopened packet of field beans (or possibly some other form of green manure) that has been past its sow-by date for at least five years?

  The one category of seed that accumulates in the inventory of thrifty gardeners is lettuce. This is because you get an awful lot of seed in a packet and anyone who is smart enough to sow them in modules or little pots will have enough to keep them going for decades. The trouble is that lettuce seed can suddenly stop working and much of it is thrown away. This is a terrible waste because lettuce seeds remains viable for many years. But if they go dormant they will stay that way, refusing to come up, until they get a good chilling. All you need to do is to put them in the fridge for a few days and they will spring, once again, into life. I made the mistake of sowing about 60 little modules with the over-wintering lettuce Montel only to find that nothing was budging. Putting them in the freezer overnight was probably not a great idea - but there was no room in the fridge. And, yes, I did enclose the lot in a big plastic bag for reasons of hygiene!

  Perhaps it was the lack of sun throughout much of the year but some plants have been reaching for the sky. The Jerusalem artichokes (which went in rather late) have now hit 3 or 4 metres and this week burst into flower, which is unusual. You can see from the yellow blossoms that they are closely related to the sunflower. And the pears, particularly the Doyenné du Comice, is shooting upwards like mad and will need to be topped during the Winter. This is a truly lovely pear if you handle it right. You need to pick the fruit when they are still hard but willing to part company with the tree without much tugging. Bring the pears inside and let them finish ripening for two or three days and you will be rewarded with luscious, juicy flesh of incomparable flavour. And, on a pedantic note, it’s Doyenné, not Doyenne. Seemingly it’s named after the Deanery not the Dean. Not a lot of people know that. And I certainly didn’t until the other day.

  It has been a poor season for eating apples in our part of the world. But the good old Bramley Seedling, the traditional Irish cooking apple, has done well. We stewed some last night with a few blackberries and that tart acidity made a pleasantly clean end to the meal. Soon it will be time to pick the medlars. Now, unless you like “bletted” medlars (you pick them and let them ferment inside until they bloat or “blett” and then eat them as you would a Kiwi fruit - a somewhat acquired taste) the only thing to do with this ancient fruit (known as cul de chien in French; look at them closely and you will see why) is to make medlar jelly. In the past, ours has been too runny. This year, we’ll use jam sugar and hope for the best.

  The Fruit Project for next year will be persuading the quinces to set fruit. They produce lovely flowers in the Spring and then nothing at all. We will try feeding and mulching and TLC. We may even talk to them, giving them an occasional pep talk, perhaps even a veiled threat…

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• Advice to a newly appointed Ceann Comhairle

  October 6, 2009 @ 11:33 pm | by Tom

  

  I’ve been slow in catching up with my radio listening and it was only today that I listened to Pat Kenny on the issue of John O’Donoghue’s expenses. Pat seemed to be rather exercised that the CC, who is to resign shortly, had clocked up a bill of €293 at Shanahan’s, the celebrated steak restaurant on St Stephen’s Green, while entertaining his deputy, the Leas Ceann Comhairle, some time ago.

  Now, I’m a little handicapped in commenting on this as I believe that I am barred from entering Shanahan’s, or so I’m told. I am certainly barred, as I know from personal experience, from Les Freres Jacques in Dame Street but I have never tested my putative exclusion from Shanahan’s. I’m not sure that I will get around to doing so any time soon.

  Shanahan’s does a fine steak, at a price, and it offers a great opporunity for anyone who likes to worship at the altar of Irish Americanism (you can genuflect in the direction of JFK’s rocking chair, which is in the bar, if you are so inclined). And in the boom times, Shanahan’s afforded an opportunity for the newly wealthy to relieve some of the pressure that built up incessantly within their wallets, to lance this financial boil and splurge on the kind of food which, well, which they actually liked. Rather than having to pretend to like foie gras and truffles at Guilbaud’s and Thornton’s. Shanahan’s found itself perfectly placed for the conspicuous consumption which marked the more excessive years of the late Celtic Tiger.

  What surprises me about a man like John O’Donoghue, who is such a delicate creature that he requires a limousine to take him between terminals at Heathrow, is that he managed to run up a bill of only €293 at Shanahan’s. As Pat Kenny seemed to imply, as he elucidated the menu, the Ceann Comhairle was not even trying. I reckon I could rack up €400 at Shanahan’s wihout breaking a sweat, provided, of course, that it’s the tax-payer’s treat.

  Now, given that Mr O’Donoghue is about to retire as gracefully as he can, might I just suggest a few places where his successor could dine in fine style and save a lot of money? We don’t know what the CC and the LCC ate and drank at Shanahan’s for €293 but his successor could eat very well, and drink very adequately, for €150 for two at the following restaurants which are adjacent to Dail Eireann: Town Bar & Grill, Bentley’s, Bang, One Pico, La Maison, La Mere Zou, Pichet, L’Gueuleton… The list goes on… But Shanahan’s and John O’Donoghue do seem to be made for each other.

  Shanhan’s does a generous steak for one for €52. La Maison does a vast one for two for €58. Shanahan’s does something called “Death By Chocolate” (for €12.50). The other restaurants, mentioned above, don’t.

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• Food intelligence

  @ 12:57 pm | by Tom

  

  Well, there goes Gourmet magazine. Publishers Conde-Nast have decided to close this landmark US periodical (along with Modern Bride, not a title with which I’m familiar). This is sad news because, despite the twee and old-fashioned title, Gourmet is an intelligent publication that deals with food in the round - not just as a form of entertainment. This is largely thanks to Ruth Reichl, formerly of The New York Times, who transformed the magazine from a rather stodgy, dated menu of predictable stuff to the smart (as in fashionable) and clever (as in intelligent) publication it is today. That is, until November, when it folds for good.

  Gourmet sells almost a million copies but it seems that its advertising has slid further than that of its stablemate, Bon Appetit (yes, they do rather go in for toe-curling titles) which has been spared the executioner’s axe - at least for the time being. Bon Appetit is a considerably shallower publication, perhaps rather more old-fashioned and the kind where you suspect they have a battery of harassed cooks desperately trying to think up new recipes that are…er…new.

  So, nothing new there. The smart and clever publication gets the chop while the…well, let’s just say bland…one offers better prospects to the publishers while the global economic situation remains depressed.

  Watching Professional Masterchef last night and getting irritated at the exaggerated facial expressions and overplayed cold severity of the judges I was rather hoping that at least one of the competitors would greet the judicial questions with a snarling “**** off! Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  Of course, Masterchef, just like our own The Restaurant, is all about entertainment, pure and simple. Such programmes are not meant to be particularly instructive, they are supposed to amuse and keep you watching. Which is what they do. The fact is that virtually all food television (and I think The Restaurant is bloody marvellous) operates at the Bon Appetit end of the spectrum. It will always be a small minority (outside of France, Italy and Spain, on the one hand, and famine-stricken places on the other) who regard food as a matter of life and death.

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• Tum tax

  October 5, 2009 @ 12:04 am | by Tom

  

  It has been suggested that if those States in the USA which do not already levy a tax on sugary drinks were to do so they would raise $10 billion annually, enough to wipe out their budget deficits. This would be on the basis of charging 7 cents on the typical can of soda as they call fizzy drinks over there. However, the reasoning is not fiscal, but rather health-based.

  The proponents of the soda tax argue that it could curb the obesity epidemic and the rise in related diseases such as diabetes. And, of course, the manufacturers are disputing that there is anything but the weakest of links between the consumption of soda sweetened with corn syrup and people getting fat.

  I’ve long believed that we should have a sugar tax. I’m not against sugar. Far from it. But I believe that we would be better off consuming a lot less of it. Here’s an opportunity to discourage people from consuming vast numbers of empty calories and making a few bob for the Exchequer at the same time. Surely, it could be done?

  Now, personally, I would tax lots of things that I don’t like but I’m not sure how I’d argue the case. Take instant coffee, for example. The world would be a moderately better place without it. I’d slap a whopping tax on the stuff.

  And bags of mixed salad drenched with chlorine. And ready-grated cheese. And things, with the exception of olive oil, that aim to replace butter. None of these would be missed, except by the very lazy in the case of the former two, and by people with an odd sense of taste in the latter.

  Even though I prefer bottled water to the chlorinated stuff that comes out of the average tap, I think I’d slap a few cents on there too because moving H20 from the mountains of France or, worse still, Fiji, to Ireland is environmentally Not A Good Thing.

  As for boring restaurant menus (slow-roasted belly pork, anyone?; duck confit?; more creme brulee? even more sweet chilli sauce?), I’d just impose a heavy fine…

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