|
Writing
Extracts from Cucina Siciliana
Extract from an article on crisps (potato chips) in The Times
Extracts from article on flavoured cheese, The Times
Extract from feature on organic food & taste, The Times
Introduction to 'Taste of Britain' feature on The Cotswolds in Country Living Magazine
Extract from article on Asian sweet centres in Manchester for Food Illustrated Magazine
Extract from article on polenta for simplyfood.co.uk
Extract from feature on Bologna, Food & Travel Magazine
Extracts from article on Milan, Food & Travel Magazine
Extract from feature on Northern Thailand, Food & Travel Magazine
COFFEE IN PALERMO (from Cucina Siciliana)
Mid-summer morning, and the blinding heat of the day already dances around the edge of your senses. The sounds of daily life jangle through the blistered streets, palm-filled piazzas and labyrinthine markets. You need a coffee. The short, sharp shock that jolts the nerve endings into a state of red alert from the mainline combo of rich Arabica cut with astringent Robusta beans preferred by all Southern Italians. The cafés, already hazy with slate blue smoke, are filled with men, brooding, heavy-lidded and distantly flirtatious; they come for ristretto, a cornetto or brioscia, perhaps filled with ice-cream, topped with a snowdrift of whipped cream or dipped into a lemon granita.
Sicilian coffee is high-octane, dark as midnight and syrupy-sweet, topped with the essential swirl of crema and usually served in a miniscule cup. You could tell fortunes from the grounds. Coffee consumption and attendant rituals are etched deep into the Latin soul. It is an essential punctuation to the daily routine, and the Sicilians understand the complex interaction of bean, blend, roast, grind and brew essential for the perfect mouthful. They appreciate coffee making is a precise technique, its drinking an art, and that roasting is the science that underpins the whole rite.
The Torrefazione Termini in Palermo has been roasting coffee for over 70 years, supplying the Bar Alba, acclaimed by Gambero Rosso magazine as serving the best coffee in Italy.
The premises are unassuming: one one side, a marble service desk with grinding machine, hemmed in by bags of roasted, blended beans; on the other, for no apparent reason, a discount china counter.
The beans arrive raw, from all over the world, to be toasted in a drum roaster nearly as old as the shop, encrusted with pulleys and wheels and levers like the engine of a steam locomotive. As coffee roaster Giovanni Lo Verso explained, 'New roasters are shiny and impressive, but they don't give the same flavour. We roast the coffee the old way and it's still the best!'
All the time he talked, he was hovering around the roaster, adjusting the temperature, checking the colour of the beans and amount of oil on the surface. 'Each bean has its own roasting time. It looks simple', he said, 'but if you misjudge the length of roasting, even by seconds, then the coffee will taste like poison!'A convoluted Sicilian wave of the hand, then he continued, ' We can roast up to 250 kilos at a time, but we just make what we need in order to sell it as fresh as possible. We start at 7am and continue roasting till about 3pm.'
A cascade of steaming mahogany-going-on-ebony beans erupts onto a cooling table, like a coffee windmill. Giovanni pointed out that all the beans were highly roasted, 'Any lighter and they simply don't taste good. I know you English, you drink coffee from beans that might as well be raw!'
We started talking about brewing coffee. My friend Rosy said you have to pack the coffee tightly in with a spoon, dampen it down really well, then take a toothpick and make several holes. Why? 'I don't know, that's the way we always make it. The important thing is it always works. And you need an old coffee pot, it makes coffee better than a new one. You never feel like throwing your old pot away.'All this talk of espresso was giving everyone withdrawal symptoms. Giovanni organised thimbles of the black stuff an inch deep, promising strength without bitterness. 'Drink it, drink it'he urged. 'See - it explodes in your head like a bomb!'
*****
Extract from an article on crisps (potato chips) in The Times
Regional crisps play on devolved loyalties - Tayto Crisps, made in Northern Ireland, and Highlander from Scotland both have their loyal followings. One of the best is Seabrook, a good old-fashioned firm based in Bradford, who list a splendid roll-call of 18 varieties, including Worcester Sauce, an invention of the Chairman, Mr Brook, in the late 70s. Family-owned, the story of their business is a slice of English social history. It grew out of their fish and chip business which like many others during the war, turned a shortage of supply into an opportunity, frying crisps not chips.
As their Mr Jack Harrison proudly explains, the potatoes are still fried in sunflower oil and sprinkled with sea salt; the crinkle shape was a later but hugely popular addition, the greater surface area resulting in subtle variations of texture and taste (mind you, they still go for straight-cut in West Yorkshire, some things never change). Seabrooks don't advertise and haven't changed their logo and see-through packet design for 50 years - by all accounts, they should be crumbs in the bottom of the packet by now - but Seabrook fanciers are exceedingly loyal. And here's the good news, for all those poor souls in the South living in Seabrook-free zones or for expat Northerners undergoing a crisp-withdrawal crisis, there is now a mail order service.
*****
Extract from article on flavoured cheese, The Times
There's something inescapably naff about the thought of Cheddar cheese blended with pickled onion or smoked ham and mustard, like a Ploughman's without the hard work but, nonetheless, cheese with extra bits (technically known as cheese with additives, although the industry is sensitive to the term), has erupted over cheese counters like lava down Krakatowa. Walk past any supermarket cheese counter or market stall and there before you, like a larder gone hideously mad, there may be cheese with piccalilli, garlic and mushroom, black olives and sundried tomatoes, cherry and almond, asparagus and leek, Guinness, Worcester Sauce and pecan nuts, not to mention clashing varieties cemented together in weird layers. Phew, it's all as cheesey as a Barry White song - and sells equally well...
Much criticism of blended cheese comes from the suspicion that it's a way of adding 'extra value'to inferior, poorly textured, mass produced cheese without adding extra care - like, if you think it's bad enough tasting of ginger or provençal herbs, then you should taste it without. No manufacturer will ever plead guilty, but the fact is if the quality of the base cheese is poor, then whatever you add won't make it any better. In other words, hard cheese, folks.
*****
Extract from feature on organic food & taste, The Times
Organic has become a virtual brand name as the supermarkets vie to see who stocks the most lines, who's got the most worthy image and wins the major share of the market. It's a you-know-what street cred contest to see who's so organic they've got mud on their corporate boots.
This year's trade show for organic produce, Natural Products Europe, held in April at Olympia, was bigger than ever; 500 manufacturers and suppliers from around the world and 400 brand new products on show. We now even have the world's first organic chicken stock cube.
Somewhere along the way, however, taste has flown out the window - or rather, it is a measure of how much organics has come of age that flavour is a factor to be put back into the equation. The bottom line stays the same - the environmental and health reasons for eating organic are still in place - but we now have to discriminate between quality organic food and organic junk food. As the market has grown, with multiples accounting for over 60% of sales, so there has been a translation of popular, mass-produced lines into their organic equivalents. Just because something's organic doesn't mean it can't be made with hyrdrogenated fats or loaded with sugar, and bread baked by the Chorleywood Process will always taste like blotting paper whether its made with organic flour or not.
*****
Introduction to 'Taste of Britain' feature on The Cotswolds in Country Living Magazine
The Cotswolds are... labradors and Range Rovers, Pony Clubs and point-to-points, rumpy-pumpy Jilly Cooper-style and voices that can halloo across three counties. If Gloucestershire were an American state, it would have a green wellington boot as its symbol.
The Cotswolds are...Scottish woollen jumper shops, souvenir fudge boxes, teapots in the shape of railway engines and unwieldy tourist coaches inching through narrow lanes built for horse and cart. A tourist-trail handful of villages are noisy, till-ringing honeypots, but half a mile away an ancient hamlet lies silent and undisturbed, sheep scattered over the green sward like confetti.
The Cotswolds are...honey-gold manor houses, fairytale cottages, old orchards and lichen-covered walls. They are Vaughn Williams and Laurie Lee. Roman mosaics, Norman churches, medieval barns, Georgian town houses and weavers' cottages - all bear silent witness to the gentle passage of time that has shaped this quintessential part of England into every exile's dream of home.
Each part of the Cotswolds has its own character. In the West, around Painswick and Stroud, the heavily wooded hills are steep and mysterious, the centre of the limestone escarpment is high and rippling under the open sky, criss-crossed with with hidden hamlets and secret vales, whilst towards the South and East, the land falls gently, flatly away. It is hard to say just where the Cotswolds begins and ends, you only know when you are there, when you are not.
*****
Extract from article on Asian sweet centres in Manchester for Food Illustrated Magazine
Sugar and spice and all things nice - the Asian sweet centres of Rusholme dazzle with rainbow-hued towers and candy-coloured ziggurats layered one above the other. Sugary Lego-like confections are painstakingly arrayed in spokes, chevron wheels and concentric circles, each sweet fashioned in the shape of a Fabergé egg, diamond, oblong or tiny marble. The sweets reflect the colours of the sub-continent, the shalwas and saris in brilliant shades that fill the nearby shops, and the shiny magpie gold glittering from jewellers windows.
Manchester's self-styled 'curry mile', a lively bazaar-like stretch of neon-lit restaurants, halal butchers, kebab houses, bucket travel shops, cut-price gee-gaw outlets, Asian music shops and grocers and the rest, was not planned. It grew haphazardly from the needs of immigrant families, mostly from Pakistan, living in the surrounding blighted inner city areas. The first eating places were basic caffs serving first generation Pakistani bachelors and students. In the last decade, however, 'Little Pakistan'has exploded into vibrant, bustling prosperity, a dynamic Asiatown where the traffic is anarchic, parking creative and litter an on-going problem, but where the atmosphere and energy light up the sky at night.
*****
Extract from article on polenta for simplyfood.co.uk
MOZART ATE HERE
When the young teen superstar Mozart arrived in Trentino to play his first Italian gig, they had to call out the guards to protect him from being mobbed by fans. The Michael Jackson of his day, Mozart stayed in Rovereto, a charming small town that straddled the then Italian-Austrian border. We don't know what he played in the beautiful Baroque church, (a brattish show-off, he improvised as he went along), but it's a pretty sure bet that afterwards he dined on polenta, polenta and more polenta.
POOR FOOD
Polenta is to the far North of Italy what pasta is to the rest. It's basically a sort of thick porridge made from maize (corn) and water, and for centuries was a staple, belly-filling food for poor, rural people. Put that way, of course, it sounds less than glam, but tell the folks today they're getting porridge, not buying into a slice of dolce vita lifestyle along with the Balsamic and sun-dried tomatoes, and you're not going to shift many packets. It's no wonder the spoof People's Jury on a recent BBC Food and Drink programme gave polenta the big thumbs-down as being over-priced, over-hyped and over-here.*****
Extract from feature on Bologna, Food & Travel Magazine
The one thing you must never, never do in Bologna is ask for spaghetti Bolognaise. The people of Bologna will not be amused, they will frown, shake their heads, shrug baffled shoulders then carefully explain this is a corruption of their beloved tagliatelle al ragù. Spag Bog? Una parodia! An indication of the extent to which the Bolognaise take their food and its history seriously is hidden behind the ornate palazzi walls of the Chamber of Commerce, where a golden strand of tagliatella defines for all time the precise measurements of the pasta shape to the last millimetre. The calculations are based on the proportions of the sky-scraping 12th century Asinelli Tower, which stands alongside the smaller, leaning Garisenda Tower like a pair of Giacometti lovers.
*****
Extracts from article on Milan, Food & Travel Magazine
Every night there is a small miracle in Milan. High above the Duomo, the Madonnina appears to float in the inky sky, a vision of burnished gold as she looks down at her city spread out like a spider's web at her feet. In daylight, the pinnacle upon which she rests, halfway to heaven, is the tallest peak in the white marble forest of spires, turrets, buttresses and petrified saints that give the immense Duomo its fantastical appearance. Ascend to the roof, however, and it seems more Greenaway than Disney; a view that stretches, on a clear day, as far as the Alps, persectives that dissolve as you pick your way across a marble roof the shades of crema on a Biffi espresso and you listen, not to angels singing, but to Italian teens calling home on their mobiles. Ciao, mamma...
The first painting to have a still life as a subject, Caravaggio's 'Basket of Fruit', hangs in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, a few steps away from Peck, one of the greatest food shops, or rather, complex of food shops in the world. Peck is as Milanese as Armani suits, operatic divas and heroic footballers. Their sun-like logo is taken from the great rose window of the Duomo, and is testament to the fact that the Milanese are always prepared to pay for the best. The service, of course, is equally courteous whether you're purchasing a few slices of exquisitely wrapped prosciutto or spending squillions of lire on caviar, truffles and rare wines. Across the road, sparkling fresh fish are displayed as if in an aquarium, and in the rosticceria, a wall of flame engulfs spit-roasted poultry and suckling pigs. With its gelateria and tea shop, wine bar, restaurant and tavola calda, Peck is, simply, an institution.
*****
Extract from feature on Northern Thailand, Food & Travel Magazine
Mae Hong Son, the town on the River Pai, once the Middle of Nowhere, was virtually cut off from the outside world until the 1960s. It lies beyond an expanse of impenetrable mountains, but its ancient pagodas and mile-high Buddhas now look down on a modern airstrip and drug-smugglers jail. Engine-powered long tail boats provide inter-village transport, slashing through the shallow waters like food mixers. It still retails the feel of a small country town, however, where the big events of the year are the temple ceremonies and travelling fairs, religious feasts and festivals.
The daily market opens around 5.30am, busiest in the early morning and evening; readymade curry pastes are piled pyramid-high in the daily markets, along with yellow-flowered morning glory and long beans, bitter pea aubergines and squashes, chillies of varying size, colour and maturity, sweet purple shallots, spring onions and thin-skinned garlic to be pounded unpeeled or pickled in vinegar, salt and sugar. Krachai or lesser ginger are splayed like bunches of brown fingers.
*****
