Spectator Life

Last year a friend who lives in Lyon came to visit me in London. It was only her second trip to the UK and she was determined to venture deep into our indigenous food culture. ‘So, where can I get good fish and chips?’ she asked me. Now, if I was a citizen of Vienna and she was asking me where to find really good sachertorte, I suspect I wouldn’t struggle to reel off myriad cafes. If I lived in Athens and was questioned about where to get decent souvlaki, I would probably have a list as long as Hercules’s personal meat skewer. But fish and chips? In London? I could, in all good conscience, recommend only two places in which, during my quarter of a century in the capital, I’ve had a half decent chippie tea.

On a recent trip with my daughter to Trieste, the north Italian seaside city on the border with  Slovenia, I thought it would be nice to take her to Café Sacher for some sachertorte, which has been in culinary fashion since its creation in 1832. Trieste, once a thriving Austro-Hungarian port, is as reminiscent of Vienna as it is of Italy, and to eat this famous Austrian cake in the establishment of the same name would, I thought, be an experience my chocolate-loving daughter would remember. Sachertorte is nothing fancy compared to other Viennese cakes – merely a dark sponge with some apricot jam filling and coated in a layer of smooth chocolate, but that plainness is part of its charm.

A few months ago in Primrose Hill, I overheard a woman from the Camden New Journal, the local paper, asking in a café about rumours of a Gail’s opening in the famously anti-chain neighbourhood. Just a few weeks previously, there had been uproar in Walthamstow about a new branch – an unpleasant alliance of the anti-gentrification brigade, anti-business and anti-Brexit types who protested at investor Luke Johnson’s politics, and anti-Israel fanatics who objected to the fact that the bakery chain was founded by two Israelis. The latter element was what caught my attention, given the extent of anti-Zionist nastiness since 7 October. If Primrose Hill were to join in the anti-Gail’s protest, the sense of sinister anti-Israel sentiment would grow stronger.

On 2 October 1814, a grand feast was held at the Hofburg imperial palace during the Congress of Vienna. Famed French chef Marie-Antoine Carême was charged with cooking and didn’t disappoint. But when it came to the cheese course, a lively argument broke out among the assembled statesmen, each advocating for the superiority of their national cheese: the Italian for Stracchino, the Swiss for Gruyère, the Dutchman for Limburger, and so on and so forth. The UK foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, championed Stilton. French foreign minister Talleyrand snapped an order (‘Send the despatches to the chancellerie’) and a large piece of Brie de Meaux was duly brought out: ‘The Brie rendered its cream to the knife. It was a feast and no one further argued the point.

The 1990s comedy series the Royle Family includes a perfect scene in which Barbara says she won’t bother getting a turkey the following year, as nobody actually likes it. Everyone looks horrified. But she’s right. Advocaat, mince pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake (especially the marzipan) cranberry sauce, and balls of sausage meat made into stuffing – there is a very good reason why we tend only to eat and drink certain things at Christmas. Never buy a cheese selection, because among the mediocre bits and pieces, there is bound to be some abomination That said, I am aware that certain ingredients are staples in some households. Boiled carrots and sprouts, for example, which – for some unknown reason – appear on Sunday lunch menus week in, week out.

It is now not unusual to find ‘bone broth’ in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets or delis, on sale for more than £7. Who can afford this stuff? If you have the time to make your own stock then all credit to you. But if not, the concentrated stock in little cubes or tubs is perfectly acceptable. Knorr and fancy upstarts such as Kallo pose as the superior products. But Oxo has stood the test of time. In a flooded stock market, their cubes remain my choice. Beef is the classic (the name ‘Oxo’ is thought to come from the word ‘ox’). Retailers seem to have taken the lamb version off the shelves, though the brand says they’re working on getting it back. The company has moved with the times, a few years ago launching the first vegan cube.

‘It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.’ (A Christmas Carol.) And there is exactly the problem with festive fowl. In most cases, we get turkey. And usually we get it far too big, which leads to all the problems of using the thing up over the course of a week. It may have been fine for Bob Cratchit’s large family but for most people, the mammoth turkey isn’t the way to go. A turkey is a fine bird (one of the trinity of actually useful things, with potatoes and tomatoes, to come out of the European discovery of America) – but it’s not the only option.

December is when about 90 per cent of Baileys consumption takes place, and yet nobody really knows why. I used to work at an ad agency called Young & Rubicam, and we had the Baileys account. We’d spend all year writing ads to persuade people to drink it at some point – any point – between January and November, but to no avail. Baileys was never intended as a Christmas tipple Baileys introduced more summery variants: strawberries and cream flavour, apple strudel, even ‘Baileys colada’. For these, we wrote ads featuring happy drinkers in straw boaters, German lederhosen and loud Hawaiian shirts, but the British public gave a big thumbs-down to all of it. Come 1 December, however, they’d again start caning Baileys, overwhelmingly favouring its original flavour.

My first Negroni was in a bar called Turandot, in a piazza in Lucca, Tuscany. It was the summer of 1996, and I noticed the waiter bringing out an intriguing-looking red liquid, served in a rocks glass over a large ice cube, and garnished with an orange slice. I had agreed to split a bottle of prosecco with my three holiday companions, despite hating the stuff. But it was a warm, lazy evening, the fizz was nice and cold, and a drink is a drink, after all. I asked the waiter to bring me whatever it was he was serving the other customers, and soon I was taking my first sip of what has since been my favourite pre-dinner cocktail. I can’t understand why there are so many bastardised variations. Why mess with perfection?

Stir-up Sunday may be behind us, but it’s not too late to make your Christmas pudding – and do you know what that means? Yep, sourcing decent beef suet. Suet is the king of fats. It adds to the pudding’s keeping quality, texture and flavour. My recipe calls for half a pound of suet (see below for the recipe in full – it was my great-aunt’s) but the good stuff is hard to find. You can get pellets of suet in a packet from supermarkets, but the real thing, grated into light flakes, is another story: much nicer and lighter. Some inferior recipes suggest butter instead, but good as butter is, it just doesn’t cut it for a Christmas pudding. Suet is the hard creamy fat around the beef kidney.

You might think that, as a country, we have had our fair share of food security wobbles over the last few years: first with pre-Brexit panic, and the hoarding that went along with it, and then the empty supermarket shelves that few of us will forget during the height of the pandemic. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house: British farmers are threatening to stop supplying supermarkets in protest against the government’s plans to apply inheritance tax to family farms. What we might be able to cook in a few weeks is as expansive as ‘almost anything’ or as limited as ‘almost nothing’ What does that mean for the average person doing the weekly shop? Are we returning to the days of rationed eggs and powdered milk? Not quite.