Spectator Life

Have you taken the pickle pill? Pickles and the liquid in which they often come are proliferating across western cuisine. They have been praised for their health qualities, with gut-pleasing, sodium-rich pickle juice becoming a post-workout favourite in Britain and America. It’s even being incorporated into cocktails and beer. ‘Putting a pickle in cheap beer makes it taste better’ claims one food website in what may or may not be a prank on its readership. If your friend is organised and generous, you may find a jar of pickled peppers or pickled mushrooms A fad? To some extent, I’m sure. But in Poland, where I live, the qualities of pickles will come as no surprise. They could hardly come into fashion in a country where they’ve never been out of style.

To my great disappointment, I was never (knowingly) fed qarta – a popular dish of boiled and pan-fried horse anus served without sauce or spices. I did, however, get to try the next best thing – kymyz, mares’ milk fermented in a goatskin. It was the second day of a horse trek in Kyrgyzstan and it had begun to hail. Not exactly golf ball-sized, but close enough to the golf ball sweets you bite into to find bubble gum. The horses coped, perhaps because getting pelted with hail is a fair trade for not being on a Kyrgyz menu. We stopped under a tree and our guide’s blank stares gave no indication of whether the weather was normal or not. The following two hailstorms suggested it was.

I’m in a car embarking on a road trip through one of the great foodie regions of the world, charged with the onerous task of scoffing and boozing my way through five days of epicurean heaven. But where am I? Trundling along the Rhone valley from Lyon to Provence? Barrelling down the autostrada to Bologna? No, I’m on the A458 just outside Shrewsbury. Because this is a tour of the Welsh Marches, England’s foodie frontier, from Shropshire through Herefordshire to Gloucestershire, where a food and drink revival over the last three decades has turned this lush, fertile, famously green corner of Britain into a gastro-destination as good as any in Europe. My first stop is the Haughmond, a hotel/gastropub with a cute attached bakery, in the village of Upton Magna.

I like the Art Deco apartment block where I live; the building is beautiful and the neighbours are nice. Just one thing; they keep having their old kitchens torn out and new ones installed – two of the three nearest flats to me have done this in the space of six months.  I don’t complain about the noise as I’ve been a very noisy neighbour in my time, but this architectural fetish has made me realise how out of step I am with the national psyche. For I would no sooner have a new kitchen installed than have a minaret erected atop of my building. My flat has its original tiny galley kitchen; like many of the swanky 1930s apartment buildings in Brighton & Hove, it once had a restaurant in the basement – Marine Gate along the seafront even had its own off-licence.

I always thought drinking cider was a bit lame. But then I did a Camino pilgrimage that took me through Spain’s northern Asturias region. I now think cider is cool.  Cider is a phenomenon in Asturias, where the art of imbibing sidra, as it is called, is elevated to a ceremonial form. We have the Trooping the Colour; they have sidra pouring.  When the barman pours the sidra bottle from above his head, the glass down at knee level, while looking dead ahead with the subsequent mini waterfall hitting the glass through dead reckoning: that’s not lame. The pourer even tilts the glass away from him, dramatically shrinking the ‘aperture’ available at the top of the glass.

If you work in politics, chances are you have drunk in the Westminster Arms. Located just off Parliament Square, every night it hosts the collection of hacks, wonks and mandarins that comprise the SW1 bubble. For 30 years, Gerry Dolan has run the pub with his mix of Irish humour and no-nonsense determination. When we meet, three days before his retirement, his roving eyes still flick up every time to scan each new patron that enters his beloved bar. ‘I have loved the Westminster Arms. It's been a great mistress’ he says. ‘My wife ran the wine bar downstairs, and she probably worked harder than I did. I was like a Redcoat, really.’ Dolan is one of a dying breed of lifelong landlords in the capital, tied to one establishment.

I did not plan to cook a loaf cake when I embarked on concocting a traditional honey cake recipe. The original plan was to explore the Russian honey cake, or medovik, which dates back to the 19th century, and has a rich history. It is the War and Peace of the cake world: thick and a real undertaking. A long, careful assembly process, with up to a dozen layers of thin sponge – flavoured with honey and baked ever so briefly – interleaved with honey-flavoured buttercream, followed by a long chill, and then covered in more buttercream and cake crumbs. It is what we cookery writers like to euphemistically call ‘a project bake’.

Balsamic vinegar, according to a recent poll, is now considered an essential store cupboard ingredient by a quarter of all Brits. I detest it. This dark, syrupy fermented grape juice is like Marmite – you love it or hate it. Partly because it is overused, and also the numerous versions produced, I find myself flinching when I see it on a kitchen or dining room table. The Italians still behave, at least on the culinary front, as though they are a series of different countries When I first started travelling to Italy in the 1980s, I was given invaluable lessons in food crime: one, never, ever, under any circumstances, order a cappuccino after 10 a.m.

From the outside, it appeared derelict – not an uncommon thing to find when visiting an unknown establishment based solely on a listing in an old copy of ‘The Good Pub Guide’. But a chap walking past with his labrador reassured us: ‘She usually opens at noon.’ When we returned an hour later it was immediately plain that the pub was still in use – you could hear music coming from inside. This turned out to be from a five-piece acoustic string band who were seated by the fire, playing ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’.

In autumn when apples cascade off the trees and bedeck the orchard’s floor with fields of red and gold, thoughts naturally turn to an ancient survival instinct: foraging – or, as we tend to call it in my part of the world, scrumping. Yet although scrumping seems as English as Shakespeare, conker fights and Bonfire nights, it is quite a recent word borrowed from the Middle Dutch schrimpen, meaning shrivelled (or perhaps a derivation of the verb ‘to scrimp’). Crab apples are a bit small and dry, high in tannins but very good sliced and fried up with smoked bacon When sugar was scarce in medieval times, fruit was an obsession and the autumn harvest closely guarded. Not just apples either.

The Flower Pot in Aston, near Henley, was one of my favourite pubs in the country, a charming, eccentric time capsule cluttered with esoteric decoration: dozens of cases of stuffed fish and animals, angling paraphernalia and Edwardian art; there was even a resident parrot.  It was always rammed, with everyone from vicars to Hell’s Angels The pub opened in 1890, at almost exactly the same time as the publication of Three Men in a Boat, and in a certain light, after a few drinks, it could feel as though one was actually inhabiting the quirky, late-Victorian England described by Jerome K. Jerome.

One of my favourite restaurants of all time serves mediocre food, has a limited menu, and occasionally brings a dish containing none of the advertised ingredients.  Why do I love it so? Because the service and the ambience are both a delight. The warm greeting from the proprietor who always remembers his customers’ names; the attentive (but not fawning) waiter who immediately produces menus and water without being asked; and the sommelier who recommends a perfect aperitif before talking us through the wines in a matter-of-fact way that belies the usual ‘You can really taste the terroir,’ and ‘This one is like a summer’s day in Provence.

In 2030 I will turn 30. I hope to be in the pub, but maybe a little less often than I am now. Judging by the way things are going, that might be easier than we’d like to admit. And not just because we lost 383 pubs between the start of the year and the end of June.  I’ll set the scene: it’s seven years from now. Off I go, to one of the last four pubs in London, and park my e-bike next to three thousand others. I walk through the entrance, the etched Victorian glass door replaced by government-mandated energy-efficient double glazing, and there they are: eight 0 per cent beers on draught.  Human beings like pork scratchings and a fag and a pint, and will do forever ‘Do you have anything alcoholic?’  ‘What?

I was invited to speak at a conference in Barcelona in the late 1990s. At the end of a very long, hard day, my genial Spanish feminist hosts invited me to dinner, telling me they would meet me in the hotel lobby at 10.30 p.m. I almost went into some sort of traumatic shock. I was aware of the Catalonian reputation for eating late – sometimes as late as midnight, at weekends – but I was having none of it. I have been told by waiters that a bottle of wine is ‘too much for a lady on her own’ I bade my colleagues farewell and found myself a gorgeous little tapas bar that was open at 7.30 p.m. I ate bread with deep green olive oil, deep red tomato and roasted garlic, octopus salad with waxy potatoes, jamon croquettes, and a plate of marinated anchovies.

It didn’t matter that it was 33˚C. Starbucks staff across Britain spent the beginning of September putting out pumpkin-themed menus, selling customers pumpkin spice lattes in pumpkin-shaped mugs, to be drunk alongside a slice of pumpkin-flavoured loaf cakes, a pumpkin seed cookie, or a brownie cut into pumpkin shapes and frosted in hazardously orange icing. Happy fall, y’all.   The minor humiliations don’t stop me – I'm a creature of nostalgia and these drinks don’t taste bad, either The hot early autumn didn’t stop us obsessives: there is, inevitably, an iced pumpkin spice latte. The spice mix in question, of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove and sulphur-based preservatives doesn’t necessarily have to include any pumpkin.

There are certain things that are so shocking they can only be said by close friends. And as the British have been in a close friendship – an entente cordiale – with the French since 1904, I am here to say it to our neighbours across the Channel: I’m sorry, mes amis, but your food is the worst in the world. There are more McDonalds in France, per head, than anywhere in Europe Such a claim needs evidence. So let’s start with that essential emblem of aspirational French cooking: the menu degustation. Over the years, as a travel hack, I have learned to shudder when I see this phrase – ‘tasting menu’ – on le carte of any restaurant, but particularly a striving restaurant in the French regions. Why?