Alex Renton
Another dirty Martini please
The film of Richard Yates’s novel of 1950s commuter-belt ennui, Revolutionary Road, got me thinking about dry Martinis. Like so many American middle-class dramas of the period, the story is powered by gin and vermouth just as Hogarth’s London ran on gin straight up. Under Sam Mendes’s direction, the Wheelers, a young couple going sour in suburbia, and their binge-drinking friends and colleagues drank dry Martinis in eye-opening quantities, before lunch, before supper and before adultery. You have to wonder if the emptiness at the heart of the American dream would have seemed quite so awful if they’d drunk Scotch instead.
A vodka drinker myself—Stolichnaya ideally—I never much liked true dry Martinis. And the stuffed olive, rolling there in its pseudo-sophistication, is part of what’s wrong with them. What was it—a decoration or a snack? Olives don’t even feature in the classic recipe—which would be the gin/dry vermouth mix at five or six to one, super-chilled (pouring the vermouth over ice works well) with a twist of lemon peel in a very cold glass.
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Alex Renton
Do hard times make for better food? The British, we’re told, ended the second world war healthier than they started it, not least because the government directed the food industry to provide maximum nourishment from raw materials. Refining flour until it was white was forbidden. But in eastern Europe, cooking has yet to recover from the 1940s—one of communism’s terrible flaws was, of course, its lack of a cuisine. There’s still only one Michelin star in the former Soviet bloc, in Prague (it’s for Allegro, an Italian joint).
So far Britain’s new recession has been good for food, if not foodies. Prices are down in the supermarkets. In 2007, nearly a quarter of all the money we spent on food went on eating-out and there’s evidence that some of the uglier effects of that boom may be swept away. The mega-chains, responsible for so much bad, over-priced food in the high street, may well be the first to close.
That, at any rate, is Caroline Bennett’s view. She is managing director of Moshi-Moshi, a very small chain of Japanese restaurants. She bought me lunch in her newest venture, Soseki, which has just opened in the gloom of the City, under the Gherkin. Food is served in the omakase fashion, where you get what the chef deems worthy that day, depending on how much you want to spend. This is a good strategy for eating in a recession.
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Alex Renton
A treat during this year’s dull Edinburgh festival was hearing Steven Berkoff ramble on Jewishness and food. Drawing on his memoir My Life in Food (ACDC Publishing), Berkoff made a case for Jews being closer to their food than most races, and more influenced by what they eat than any other. Interesting stuff, although we weren’t entirely convinced by Berkoff’s claim that the design of the Large Hadron Collider was deliberately modelled by the Jewish physicists at Cern on the shape of the bagel.
Berkoff told the audience about his east London childhood: the tastes, the smells, the people and the chickens. “The Jewish people dropped the lion as a symbol of their race, and the chicken became a Jewish god. And so, just as people who love cats become feline and the British upper class look and talk like their dogs, the Jews became more chicken-like: look at the nose, the cluck-cluck-cluck of their talk, slightly neurotic, slightly shrieking. The east end was full of people who had taken on the characteristics of chickens.”
Berkoff—who has the characteristics of a well-fed but menacing bear—delivered this with a brio that made his claims hard to argue with. He then rhapsodised about the apotheosis of the Jewish relationship with chickens: chicken soup, “Jewish penicillin,” the Proustian biscuit of any European Jewish childhood. “Unctous, golden, life-enhancing, reaffirming,” said Berkoff. And so, goy though I am, I had to make some.
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Wendell Steavenson
Drive over the bridge from the green Cairene island of Zamalek, from its tree-lined streets, grand embassy mansions and air-conditioned cappuccino cafés with wi-fi access, across the Nile into the grimy neighbourhood of Boulaq: 15 minutes of battered honking traffic to travel from rich to poor. During the pre-war British rule years of cosmopolitan Cairo, Boulaq was a grand quarter. Now its French-oriental wrought-iron balconies are strung with washing, its elegant green shutters are broken and sag over crumbling art nouveau balustrades, and its sandy alleys ring with the clang of metal workers hammering battered hubcaps into resellable shape.
In a side street, one 38-degree morning this summer, a small crowd jostles around a window with a metal grille, wrapping their fingers around the iron bars. This is the local bakery. The crowd—mostly women, conservatively dressed in gallabaya and headscarf—are waiting for the next batch of subsidised bread. Known as baladi, which means “country” with an affectionately derogatory overtone, a loaf costs five piastres, less than 1p. Turist bread from private bakeries, made with finer flour and a bit larger, costs five or ten times as much.
After a few moments the chief baker, Hajj Hussein, appears, weary and with furrowed brow. Through the iron grille, he begins to dispense the flat rounds of baladi, each the size of an outstretched palm, brown and roughly speckled with bran. Coins and mulchy Egyptian pound notes are passed over.
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Alex Renton
Pho and the price of rice
Breakfast in Hanoi is best eaten on the pavement. Around five o’clock every morning, the sellers of pho (to pronounce it, say “fur” gently), Vietnam’s noodle soup, trundle their stalls by bicycle or moped through the waking streets. Usually middle-aged women, they set up on corners or in front of office doors. There they unload their fresh rice noodles, bundles of garlic greens, mint and bean sprouts, mounds of finely sliced beef or chicken, and the vat of stock—the secret of a great pho—straw gold, delicate, flavoured perhaps with star anise and cinnamon and who knows what else. The stallholders’ individual recipes are jealously guarded, and their customers loyal.
The Hanoiese gather round in the steam from the pho pots on tiny plastic stools, like those you’d find in a nursery. They drink a green tea only a shade paler than the soup itself. By 9am, or when the noodles are finished, most of the pho ladies pack up and bicycle away, leaving the streets clear for the day’s business.
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Robert Paarlberg
As everyone knows, the price of many basic foodstuffs has surged in the past half year. Rice tripled in price over just the first four months of 2008, wheat doubled and corn rose 46 per cent. The New York Times has dubbed this a “world food crisis” and the Economist called it a “silent tsunami.” High grain import prices, on top of high fuel prices, place an acute economic squeeze on urban consumers in developing countries that depend heavily on the world market. In Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia, the urban poor have been taking to the streets.
Yet it is a mistake to see high prices as a proxy for actual hunger. Most of the world’s hungry citizens do not get their food from the world market, and most who rely on the world market are not poor or vulnerable to hunger.
In south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, hunger levels are twice as high as in the developing countries of east Asia and four times as high as in Latin America. Yet these two hungry regions import very little food from the world market. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa take only 16 per cent of their total grain consumption from the world market, and less than 10 per cent of total calorie consumption. The developing countries of south Asia satisfy only 4 per cent of their grain consumption through imports. So fluctuations in international prices will have little impact within these hungry regions—far less than fluctuations in rainfall, job loss, government subsidies or civil conflict.
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Alex Renton
Is your fish sustainable?
I’ve been asking every restaurant that I’ve visited recently where they get their fish. It’s a bore for whoever I’m eating with, but the results are interesting. Even at the restaurants that boast their devotion to “sustainable” sourcing, the waiters usually have little idea what the provenance of the fish is. At one Edinburgh restaurant I was told, with some pride, that the scallops were from the west coast and definitely not diver-caught—though this is in fact the only environmentally friendly option.
Monkfish is a particular problem. Chefs love this gloriously ugly bottom-feeder for the texture of the flesh of its long tail. Indeed, it’s said that in the days when monkfish were dredged up by the scallop-boats as by-catch, the skippers would sell it on to the fish processors who would chop up the tails and pass the bits off as scampi. But now monkfish is endangered in the North sea and Scotland. If you care, it should not be eaten without positive assurance that it was line-caught, not trawled. Yet at two very right-on restaurants I visited recently, a Conran outlet and one of the Loch Fyne chain, the waiters had no idea where the monkfish had come from.
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Bruce Palling
Wines for the super-rich
Coutts—bankers to the royals—recently released an alarming report on how the super-rich are feeling the effects of hyperinflation. According to Stephen Blackman, senior economic adviser at the bank, in the past year a case of Chateau Pétrus 1990 has zoomed up from £3,250 to £5,250. Before anyone voices outrage at this, I should add that no sensible person should entrust their funds to Blackman: Pétrus ‘90 has been selling for over £20,000 a case for some time and may pass the £30,000 mark before the year’s end. In fact, the soon-to-be-released Pétrus ‘05 is now around £26,000 a case and it hasn’t even been bottled.
What has happened to the world of fine wine, which puts a handful of top Bordeaux outside the range of all but the truly loaded? And does anyone actually drink them? Well, I am afraid to say quite a few of them are consumed regularly, either by those who purchased them at less than a tenth of their current prices or by several hundred collectors in Europe, North America and, increasingly, east of Suez. I was invited to dine at London’s exclusive restaurant The Square last year by an Indonesian banker who gleefully ordered Domaine Leflaive’s Chevalier Montrachet ‘96 and then La Tâche ‘93. He then asked me to choose something amusing. I was buoyed by the fairly strong conviction that he would be picking up the tab, but it was still an anxious moment—do you insult him by selecting something not as grand as the previous wines or by greedily saying “I hear Latour ‘61 is showing brilliantly right now”? Fortunately they had Montrose ‘90 on the list—a St Estèphe that wine guru Robert Parker awards 100 points—and it was less than half the price of the others. Reader, he liked it so much he ordered a second bottle.
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Alex Renton
Beef Wellington in the bush
Could African cuisine really be the next big thing in Britain? The London chef-proprietor Mourad Mazouz says so, but he made his reputation at Momo, a restaurant specialising in Moroccan cuisine, which is about as representative of Africa as New York deli food is of the Americas.
There are many theories as to why complex cookery did not take off in sub-Saharan Africa, away from the Arab-influenced coasts. None are entirely satisfactory. It used to be said that in pre-colonial African societies there was never a leisured class that could devote time, money or servants to the development of fine dining. But it seems unlikely that a civilisation that could build the slave trade-wealthy kingdoms of the Bight of Benin did not have the wherewithal to put together a fancy dinner.
A more plausible theory is based on the fact that cuisines seem to migrate along latitudes, or climatic belts. You can find, for example, some form of glutinous flour dried into strings or shapes—pasta or noodles—in most countries from the Mediterranean to the sea of Japan. But couscous, north Africa’s “pasta,” never made it even 200 miles south. It does seem that the food cultures of the more “vertical” continents are less complex: there are not many thrills in the native cuisines of the Americas, either.
In India and the far east, European colonists adapted and assimilated many local dishes. But not in Africa. Most Europeans never even sampled them: those who did generally said “yuk.” The African porridges based on maize, millet, yam, cassava and plantain were particularly scorned: a character in an Isak Dinesen novel describes the east African millet meal ugali as “fit only for Africans and pigs.” These carbohydrate stodges—fufu in west Africa; posho, nshima or mealie meal elsewhere—are the African staple. Their window-putty consistency makes them hard to take at first, but with a good stew and some piri-piri sauce, ugali goes down pretty well. And there are comparable staples in Europe—the Scots adventurers and missionaries who thrived in central Africa cannot have thought ugali so very alien.
I’ve only ever found one 19th-century explorer with anything positive to say about African porridges, and that was Richard Burton. In his Wanderings in West Africa (1863), he writes: “Fufu is composed of yam, plantain or cassava; it is peeled, boiled, pounded and made into balls, which act the part of European potatoes, only it is far more savoury than the vile tuber, which has already potatofied at least one nation, and which no man of taste ever looks [at]…” But Burton’s enthusiasm failed to globalise the African stodges. In the 1930s, Selfridges published the best-selling Recipes of All Nations. Its 800 pages contain 120 recipes from France, but only ten from sub-Saharan Africa, none of them for a porridge.
This January, while in Kenya, I met Hezron Ayodi, who in 1952 qualified as a chef from a cookery school run by a British lady, Miss Peaches, in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru. He went on to cook for British district commissioners in Dar-es-Salaam and Uganda. He told me that his employers would never have eaten ugali or any food prepared in an African style. As we talked, Hezron made mango crumble with cinnamon, ginger and sugar in the topping, his adaptation of a Miss Peaches original. On the radio came the ugly news of the first post-election riots. The crumble was delicious. Hezron, who is 74, now works for the British safari company Abercrombie and Kent, and specialises in putting on three-course meals for parties of 145 campers in the middle of the bush. He let me leaf through his cookbooks: bread and butter pudding, toad in the hole and beef Wellington are the staples of today’s African adventurers. Hezron has been tipped by Bill Gates (about £90) for his fillet of chicken in white sauce wrapped in spinach. He has twice cooked for Prince Charles. Always the same traditional English food? Hezron smiled—that’s what the tourists like. But what he’d really like to cook, though he’s never left east Africa, is leg of lamb Moroccan style.
Lunch on Lord Rothermere
Restaurants are opening in London as if there was no gloom. I’m particularly curious about two new places. The latest venture of Michelin-starred chef Tom Aikens is a fish and chip shop in Chelsea. Tom’s Place sells only wild fish that’s “sustainably caught” (there’s a phrase we can argue about). It means the price of a fillet of beer-battered cod is over £12. But—and this is very important—he will fry your chips in beef dripping if you choose. I haven’t yet been to Le Café Anglais, Rowley Leigh’s new restaurant in the Whiteley’s building in Bayswater. Leigh, an adaptor and resurrector of traditional English dishes, is perhaps the best of the London chefs from the 1990s boom who has not been shanghaied for television. I feel I spent a lot of that decade having lunch at his Kensington Place, in Notting Hill. Lunch was usually with colleagues from the Evening Standard and Daily Mail; the newspapers paid the bill. And as it was the 1990s; lunch often went on till dinner. If we kept Rowley, who is notoriously profligate on his ingredients, in business, I reckon it was a better use of Rothermere money than most.
Alex Renton
We were gathered in a cold upstairs room, 20 of us, making a respectful circle around the corpse as it lay on a steel table. The Italian butchers were sharpening their knives—cleavers, choppers, long thin blades with upward curves for separating fat from skin, flesh from bone. What we were about to watch was an ancient winter rite, once universal, now half-forgotten and barely legal. As the knife was raised over the hairless flesh, I found myself looking over my shoulder, half-expecting some breathless enforcers of decency to burst through the door—the inquisition, the police, the Edinburgh health and safety inspectorate.
Europeans have always slaughtered pigs in early winter. Saints days, from St Andrew’s to St Stephen’s, are marked for the job; the tradition of combining religion, the winter solstice and a feast of freshly killed pork goes back to the Roman Saturnalia, and probably beyond. Pigs have been domesticated for 9,000 years. It’s a wholly practical ritual: by December, forage has run out, but the nine or ten-month-old pigs of the year’s farrowing are fat on the nuts, berries, mushrooms and other debris of autumn. As the temperatures drop, the best time to preserve their meat arrives. The new wine pressing should be ready for sampling—in any case, it’s a good moment for a party.
The Europeans who do still slaughter their own pigs are mainly in the east, where subsistence agriculture is still alive. But the embrace of the EU brings with it the cold hand of regulation. In Romania, some 1.5m pigs are usually slaughtered in backyards in the week before Christmas. They are drained of their blood and then rolled into a bonfire, to singe and clean the skin. But Brussels rules don’t permit amateurs to slaughter pigs: a vet must be present and a stunning device used. According to the Economist, the Romanians asked for a derogation to kill animals according to their traditions, just as Muslims and Jews can. It is Christmas, after all. The commission said no, but, as I write, the Romanian smallholders’s pig slaughter will go ahead as planned.
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