Going off the offal
Chomping on some fried lamb’s sweetbreads the other day at a restaurant in Notting Hill, I suddenly hiccupped. An extraordinary thought had surfaced: I was bored of offal. After ten years of evangelical consumption of animals’ trotters, ears, brains, noses, entrails and so on, I was full up. Not only that, but I had had enough of restaurants that promise (as does Hereford Road, the one I was in) “whole-hearted, robust, simple British cooking.” How about a return to complex, effete and tricksy foreign cooking? My wife, who never abandoned her foie gras habit for ham hocks and calves’ brains, said it was about time.
It is in fact 16 years since chef Fergus Henderson opened St John in Smithfield and reintroduced the world to rampant carnivorism coupled with what he called “nose-to-tail eating.” Henderson, the unlikely high priest of the movement, combined a back-to-basics message with a plea to use animals properly again: “If you’re going to kill an animal, it seems only polite to eat it all.”
This struck a chord among foodies with a conscience, in a country cursed with cheap meat and in which up to half of every slaughtered animal is thrown away. Chefs, celebrities (and combos of the two) made pilgrimages to St John, where they discovered marrow bones and jugged hare. And Henderson sparked what we in food writing call—without shame—a revolution. Go-ahead chefs explored old cookbooks and the body cavities of animals for forgotten treasure. Soon pubs with gastro-pretensions were offering devilled kidneys, lamb shanks and even tripe.
But a decade is long enough for any food craze—and, after all, the “forgotten cuts” fashion was a revival of the thrift-driven cuisine of our grandparents, rather than a genuine novelty. It’s time to move on, and further away. However, as restaurateur Alan Yau of Wagamama and Hakkasan tells me, the plunging pound and tougher labour migration laws make it close to impossible to bring in staff from beyond the EU now. So we may be stuck with revising our native cooking for a lot longer. But I, for one, will not brook another oxtail (though there will always be room for a nicely-cooked kidney or Bath chap).
For a change, I am going to eat lavishly and exotically, taking my cue from the fashion world, which always marks recession with excess. From the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi comes a recipe for Parrot’s Eye, a suitable way to start dinner or, in this new era, the day. Take a piece of crustless toast, cut it into a saucer-shaped disc and lather it with cream cheese. Then make a circle of caviar, or avruga, the excellent substitute made from smoked herring roe. Into this caldera drop the raw yolk of an egg. You’ll see where the name comes from. Eaten with buck’s fizz, it is indulgent, unsustainable and garish—the watchwords of my new cuisine.
Haiti’s other disaster
In March I was in Haiti, briefly, where there isn’t much of a choice on how to eat for anyone. Most restaurants in Port-au-Prince’s middle-class suburb Pétionville remained closed or inaccessible because of the mounds of earthquake rubble: I was recommended La Coquille, in Rue Rebecca, for a good pork gumbo, but I never got there. In the half-stocked supermarkets American food filled the shelves—not just the Oreos, Cheez-Its and sweet breakfast cereals that dominate any satellite country of the US, but basics like cooking oil, flour, rice and chicken. The exception were the dairy products—they were from the EU.
This is the effect of an earlier disaster, in its way just as devastating as the earthquake of 12th January. Trade liberalisation was forced on Haiti in the 1980s, and it is hard to see what it has gained beyond a few low-value exports, mainly of garments. The price has been the near-total collapse of its agricultural sector, which employed 75 per cent of the workforce. Twenty years ago Haiti was self-sufficient in rice—now it imports 80 per cent of it, almost all the produce of subsidised American farmers.
There are similar stories in chicken and pork, because food import tariffs are lower in Haiti than in the rest of the Caricom economic grouping. More US food comes in for free, as food aid. This is crucial in an emergency, but last year America gave Haiti $34m (£22m) of non-emergency food aid under its Food for Peace aid programme—another hidden subsidy for US farmers.
As a result, poorer Haitians have changed their diet. I was told they now prefer the cheaper, less nutritious, US polished rice, and chicken cuisine revolves around wings and legs (the breasts stay in America). In March in Port-au-Prince a 55lb sack of US rice cost $36 (£23), while Haitian rice was $53 (£34).
As agriculture collapsed, Port-au-Prince’s population was swelled by migrants from the countryside. Many of them ended up in the city’s overcrowded slums, where a great deal of the 220,000 victims of the earthquake lived. Now hundreds of thousands of the survivors are being helped by the American military—indeed the US has given more since the earthquake, in manpower and dollars, than the rest of the world put together.
Barack Obama has promised to help Haiti rebuild “better than before.” So why doesn’t the US stop dumping its produce there? Instead, it might invest in Haitian agriculture, to help people make a living from growing their own food, as they used to.
