An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
24 min listen
Gennaro Contaldo is an Italian chef, cookbook author and television presenter. He is also known as Jamie Oliver's mentor and Antonio Carluccio's travel partner on Two Greedy Italians. His latest cookbook Gennaro's Verdure – which celebrates seasonal vegetables – is out now. On the podcast he tells Liv and Lara about his upbringing on the Amalfi coast, what he's learnt from Jamie Oliver and how he came to love fish and chips.
I love certain sour flavours, such as the sprinkle of lemon on a piece of oily fish, or fatty meat. It is perfect with food that is naturally sweet, such as brown shrimp, scallops, or young, fresh peas. But spare me the heavy hand with the acid, which seems to be getting more and more frequent when it comes to pre-seasoned food in restaurants. Lemon juice should be a background note, helping the main flavours to stand out. It should not make you wince as though you are chewing a live wasp. We should resist drowning our food in lemon juice in the way that we would ketchup or salt I am just back from lunch at a lovely little Cypriot joint where every single thing is made from scratch.
Picture the scene; you’re Kate Middleton and it’s Saturday lunchtime. You’re out enjoying suburban Windsor. The Audi is safely stowed – along with hundreds of other cars mostly produced in Germany, the Czech Republic or the West Midlands – in a nearby car park the size of the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman and about as eco-friendly. The farm shop is a kind of Peppa Pig World for adults There’s a faux 1950s Citroen van-lookalike with corrugated panels from which a pair of stressed teens in brown aprons are selling overpriced macchiatos, almond lattes and stone-cold hot chocolates, to a lengthening queue of gilet-wearing mums and dads. Most of them are too busy pretending not to watch their children tormenting each other to notice they are being royally ripped off.
Earlier this week I read that, from the moment of pulling into the car park to exiting it, the average supermarket shopper reads just seven words. Seven words. My initial reaction was: who are these Neanderthals? So, for want of something to talk about over supper after nearly 20 years of shackles, I ran this random fact past my husband. He was amazed anyone read as many as seven. My reaction this time was more fulsome: who is this Neanderthal, and why am I having dinner with him? When I was home from boarding school, I was positively relieved when she reached for an M&S carbonara rather than Delia These seven words are all the more stark when you know the average length of time spent in a supermarket: 37 mins.
The snake oil salesman is back in town with an old favourite: apple cider vinegar – or ACV as it’s called by those in the know. The ‘wonder-juice’ has been around for centuries, peddled by Greeks and Romans alike. In recent years, it has become something of a panacea, a social media ‘superfood’. But just how good is this cloudy, acidic liquid? The purported benefits range from weight loss to curing cancer. I’m no oncologist, but the cancer claims seem a little dubious. That said, let’s not dismiss apple cider vinegar entirely. The likes of Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and Victoria Beckham swear by it – and if Brass Eye taught us anything, it’s that celebrities are always right.
Chicago residents bristle when you ask them whether they eat deep-dish pizza. ‘Yeah’, they sigh, ‘we might occasionally when someone visiting wants to try it out’. Sigh. ‘We have great thin crust though’. But lots of places have good thin crust. I came to Chicago to try the deep dish. But deep-dish pizza is stupid. It’s not a pizza, more a dense pie: the sauce sits at the top, and the filling beneath is quicksandy cheese. Sausage meat, jalapeños, chorizo, bacon, red onions and mushrooms are thrown into it and expected to learn how to swim. I got a deep dish on my last day in Chicago and found it wasn’t good. Not for any explicable reason – something like this can’t taste bad — but from my own somewhat pompous sense that God must be against it.
In 1909, London’s first Chinese restaurant was opened by Mr Chang Choy off Piccadilly Circus. Named simply ‘The Chinese Restaurant’ – so exotic! – Choy specialised in what was described as ‘imperial banquet’ style cuisine which required at least half a day’s notice to prepare. Customers were then required to pay a hefty deposit in advance to cover the purchase of ingredients for such imperial delights as ‘sturgeon bones’, ‘fish maws’, ‘gelatine’, ‘dried cabbage stalk peel’ and ‘chrysanthemum shoots’. A 1937 edition of Where to Dine in London declared that, ‘Englishmen who have spent their lives in the East will appreciate the traditional menu’. Hmm, I wonder.
It is said that asparagus was Emperor Augustus’s favourite food. And France is, despite its Gallic spasms, a fundamentally Roman civilisation. Ask nine out of ten Frenchmen if they will have asparagus on their Easter table and they will say ‘mais oui’. The crunchy, slightly bitter stalk has enthralled humans for millennia due to its strange flavour and supposed medicinal properties. Those proto-French Romans were huge fans of the plant. You may even learn an asparagus recipe or two from studying their methods. The French smother their asparagus spears in hollandaise or béarnaise sauce Most of the information on Roman cuisine comes from visual depictions found in frescoes and mosaics that depict what went on during banquets at the time.
My last piece began with a one-word sentence: ‘Gloom.’ A dear friend reproached me. ‘In a world already abundant with gloom, surely you can find a way of cheering us up. After all, you’re not writing about politics – or at least you’re not supposed to be.’ I promised to try harder to propagate good news. When it comes to wine, that is not impossible. Twenty years ago, in Lisbon, I was treated to a bottle of Barca Velha. I was told that the Portuguese regarded it as their Château Latour. Needless to say, it was not that good but I remember thinking that it was a jolly decent drop of stuff, and – in those days – excellent value. Only half of that judgment still holds true. I tried a 2012 the other day and it was excellent: as good as a Bordeaux second growth.
Sick of sriracha? Try Sambal Oelek, an Indonesian chilli sauce that’s easy to make in minutes, by blending red chillies, salt and either vinegar or lime juice together. Or buy a jar ready-made. If I were to be consigned to a desert island and could take only one spicy condiment it would be molho apimentado from Brazil Will 2024 be the year of hot sauce? The Guinness Book of Records recently certified the world’s hottest chilli, Pepper X. In case you’re wondering, hot peppers are rated for heat on the Scoville Scale, created by American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912. It measures the amount of capsaicin (the chemical compound that causes spicy heat) in a pepper and assigns it an SHU (Scoville Heat Unit) rating.
28 min listen
Alex Jackson is the founder of Sardine and currently head chef at Noble Rot, Soho. His cookbook Frontières: the food of France's borderlands is available now. On the podcast, he tells Lara and Liv why the smell of chip fat reminds him of home, how his interest in cooking was ignited during time spent at university France, and divulges his desert island meal.
One of the perks – a perilous one – of visiting the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s was the cheapness of the vodka. I was used to paying London prices for it but in Estonia (where I lived for two years) you could find bunker-bars where they’d serve you a generous tumbler – enough to blitz you for an evening – for about 40 pence. Most people wanted nothing more from alcohol than that it should anaesthetise them and help them forget, and vodka was ideal for this. Unlike whisky or brandy, you couldn’t crow over its ‘vanilla overtones’, its ‘hints of butterscotch’ or its ‘aged in the wood’ qualities. It simply got you drunk, no more, no less. And the bars served it that way: doled out, clinic style, in a measuring beaker.
Our national malaise arises in part from the poor state of many of Britain’s private services. No, not a misprint. I mean private services. Many on the political right berate public services, implying that were they only to be privatised everything would be sweetness and light. Yet modern technology now makes it all too easy for companies to treat their customers with just as much high-handed disdain and bureaucratic inflexibility as any state enterprise. Drive into a pub car park and forget to record your number plate and you’ll receive a fine of £100. Contesting this requires several hours of your time trying to find a receipt to prove you bought a drink.
Gloom. Relentless rain out of a sullen sky enhanced an already pessimistic mood. We were talking geopolitics and agreeing that the West ought to brace itself for a hard landing. Try as we might, we could find no good news, anywhere. Where is the self-belief of the Reagan/Thatcher years? Instead, a culture war is taking place Some of us were veterans, one or two of whom had spent time in Washington in 1980, the build-up to the Reagan era and the prelude to the most successful decade in modern peacetime history, in which Margaret Thatcher played a crucial role.
29 min listen
Thomas 'Hal' Robson-Kanu is former professional footballer who was part of the Welsh team that reached the semi finals of Euro 2016, thanks largely to a memorable goal he scored against tournament favourites Belgium. He is also the founder of The Turmeric Co. On the podcast, Thomas tells Lara and Liv how his Welsh and Nigerian heritage influenced the food he ate as a child, how turmeric was the miracle cure to an injury-ridden early career and how footballers prepare nutritionally for big games.
The Chelsea bun was first baked in the Bun House in Chelsea in the 18th century. It was a bakery which found particular favour with the Hanoverian royal family, as its pastries were reminiscent of those from whence they came. But these buns were for everyman: they were customarily bought by the poor on Good Friday along with hot cross buns. On these days, the demand was such that the buns were sold through an opening in the shutters, and a police presence was needed. The Bun House was headed up by Richard Hand who was known as ‘Captain Bun’; after his death, the shop passed on to one of his sons and then another. In 1839 there was no one left to take it on, and the shop closed.
The Newt is an idealised country house in Somerset which won the World’s Best Boutique Hotel award last year. It is small, beautiful and mind-meltingly expensive, even for the Bruton Triangle and its mooing art galleries. Poor Somerset! It never wanted to be monied enough to have a triangle, but the rich make their own mythology. Since they paint every-thing grey – and now green, I learn at the Newt – they need it. A triangle fills the day. The Newt is for people who think that Babington House is stupid (it is) and though the Newt has its own issues – like the King, its taste is almost too immaculate – you never feel that the chief executive of a media conglomerate will bounce past you on a space hopper eating a fishfinger sandwich and shouting into an iPhone.
I remember going to Westfield Shepherd’s Bush to visit my first food hall, still a relatively new concept for British diners. They’re big rooms filled with shared seating and different kitchen stalls, serving everything from Thai to burgers, wontons to bratwurst. You can have a burrito and your friend can have a pizza. Oh, how I loved it. I was instantly gratified, gloriously free from the convention of menus, courses or ‘cuisines’. I was excited. These places were born in a boardroom to the sound of marketing ‘insights’ I was also a teenager. And that’s the problem: food halls are childish places. Surely the more choice there is, the better? Nope, it’s not true.
‘Autonomous machine operating here,’ says the sign. ‘Stay away.’ And instead of the chatter of the vendangeuses, there’s the hum of a robot. Welcome to southern France, 2024, just down the lane from my house, where, walking the dogs among the vines, I stumble upon Ted, a compact, green and white, battery-powered cultivator, guided by GPS satellites. Ted is not dissimilar in principle to a robot lawnmower or vacuum, but is the size of a family car. The French ban on chemicals has created a vast amount of work for growers He is toiling away, straddling the vines and chopping up the mauvaise herbes. He is neither cute nor friendly or even that smart, though he will stop dead in his tracks if he encounters a human obstacle.
Paris is more than a city. It is a state of mind, an aspiration. Though it glorifies the military, it remains feminine and beguiling. Its heroes moved effortlessly from triumphs on the battlefield to triumphs in the boudoir. The very stones of Paris seem redolent of the dreams and ecstasies of past lovers, and of their frustrations, follies and pains. Heloise and Abelard loved and suffered here. We had come to perform two simple tasks: sitting in judgment over wine and food In many respects, alas, contemporary Paris has fallen a long way from romance. Everyone has stories of rubbish, dirt and rats. The days when bon chic, bon genre set the tone for the Grands Boulevards are long gone. Today, the scruffiness is enhanced by McDonald’s and Starbucks. The very crimes lack grandeur.
Every Thursday morning at Washington Dulles Airport, a French government Airbus disgorges a metal freight container under diplomatic seal. Bypassing US customs inspection, it is transported directly to the French Embassy compound in Georgetown. At midday, elite French diplomats gather to watch as the precious content is unsealed. Spain thrashed France at the 2023 World Cheese Awards Along with the diplomatic papers, direct from the Quai d’Orsay, cheese is delivered weekly for French officials in the United States capital, a country where unpasteurised cheese is cruelly banned. Embassy staff put in their orders a week in advance and get delivered individual baskets of Comte, Reblochon and the soft, smoky goat’s cheese of Sainte-Maure de Touraine.
You are in an Italian restaurant when a waiter appears brandishing a giant pepper grinder. The spaghetti carbonara is made with cream and garnished with a sprig of parsley. You suddenly realise that you are not, after all, in the Tuscan hills, but somewhere in the UK. An Italian restaurant in London will serve you a cappuccino after dinner Is it possible for Italian restaurants in the UK to be authentic? Some of the Greek restaurants in London I’ve eaten in are so much the real deal that I have managed to forget I’m not in Athens. Similarly, some of the Spanish restaurants – such as those on Portobello Road – are indistinguishable from those in Spain, except for the weather and the smoking.
‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,’ was an offhand comment made by Kate Moss 15 years ago, one that she is yet to live down and has had to repeatedly apologise for since. Ms Moss might not be Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s obvious role model, but the recent proclamation that he fasts for 36 consecutive hours is certainly more Vogue than Downing Street. Fasting is good for the waist line but it also makes people irritable, erratic, and error prone The Prime Minister has revealed that he doesn’t eat from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday morning. He is an intermittent faster, in other words, and intermittent fasting is a fad that has risen in popularity in recent years.
Consider the paradox of lemons. In Italy, one associates them with scented groves. A few years ago, Helena Attlee wrote the book The Land Where Lemons Grow, in which citrus fruits become a golden thread running through the history of Italian agriculture. Yet though the lemon is arguably the most beautiful of fruits, its tart taste is bracing. A spremuta di limone finds a swift route to any shaving nicks. Most limoncello is produced on the Amalfi coast but there is an outlier from Godalming But the lemon can be sweetened, in the form of limoncello, an after-dinner drink of no great subtlety, good for pouring over puddings but hardly a match for the fortified wines of the Iberian peninsula. That said, there is an exception.
25 min listen
Edward Stourton is a broadcaster who has worked as foreign correspondent for the BBC, Channel 4 and ITN. He is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Sunday Program, and presented the Today Program for ten years. He has authored eight books including his most recent, Sunday: A History of Religious Affairs through 50 Years of Conversations and Controversies which is available now. On the podcast, he recalls chocolate-stuffed baguettes on Swiss ski slopes, reveals the disappointing breakfast options in the Today Program green room, and explains why heaven is eating oysters to the sound of trumpets.
The Cinnamon Club appears on lists of MPs favourite restaurants: if they can still eat this late into a parliament. It lives in the old Westminster Library on Great Smith Street, a curiously bloodless part of London, and an irresistible metaphor wherever you are. When once you ate knowledge, you now eat flesh, but only if you can afford it. Now there is the Charing Cross Library, which lives next to the Garrick Theatre, and looks curiously oppressed. Perhaps soon it will be a falafel shack and knows it. There is also the Central Reference Library, which could be a KFC, and soon will be. Public spaces are shrinking. They will all be online soon, and we will see how that goes. (It will be bad.) The Cinnamon Club, which identifies as ‘fine dining’, seeks finesse. What for?
The haggis: Scotland’s most elusive wild animal, one that can jump six feet in the air and goes straight for the throat, according to the hunters that track the bat-faced, Peter Stringfellow-haired beasts ahead of Burns night. ‘Is that a haggis!?’ I screech at my guide. ‘No, that’s a dog,’ he says, adding that this is going to be a long walk. A year into my Scottish residency and having had an extremely unsuccessful Burns night in Glasgow during my first month here (a date with a Scot more interested in watching himself on YouTube than finding me any kind of haggis supper) I’ve decided to come straight to the source this year and catch my own. Or try to – because it’s no mean feat. ‘Is that a haggis!?’ I shout, seeing a black animal in the distance.
I’m just back from a week in Austria and feel on top of the world. Well, if not at the actual summit, maybe about two thirds up. After a lousy year made worse by a Covid Christmas, I was deep in Gloomstown, eating like a pig and drinking like a fish. At almost 64, I was a stone and half overweight and drowning in booze, clocking up an alarming 120 units during one festive week. I’ve never felt so sluggish nor so miserable. Something had to be done.
Wine stimulates the wits, emboldens debate, and inspires the mind. Judicious quantities, abetted by judicious quality, encourage the participants to attack the important questions. Thus it has been over the past few days, discussing God and the Universe. I was talking to an astronomer, whose day is spent contemplating the vastness of interstellar space. Consider one single light year, and how far that would take us from our own celestial neighbourhood. Then let your mind give way before the unimaginable distances. Already daunted, move onwards to the queen of the sciences, theology, and the question posed by that outstanding 20th-century theologian, Mr Prendergast in Decline and Fall. He could not explain why God had bothered to make the world.
