Food

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.

I'm in the tiny riverside town of Virpazar, in the little Balkan country of Montenegro; and under the white geisha face of a late summer moon I am warily ordering the celebrated local delicacy. It is carp — caught from the nearby, slivovitz-clear waters of Lake Skadar (biggest lake in the Balkans!). But what makes me wary is the preparation. The carp is apparently marinated, and served cold, with boiled potatoes and greens. Cold slimy fish with hot spuds and spinach? It sounds like some nightmare culinary “specialty” from the old communist bloc (of which Montenegro was once a part, within Yugoslavia). I’m veteran enough to remember a few of these. “Famous” flatbreads that came with rancid lard.

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.

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.

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.

Cool guests, hot food; cool music, warm hostess: the recipe for the perfect party, and the motto of Perle Mesta, one of the most successful postwar Washington hostesses. Good King Wenceslas, a model host of even greater status, lived out this motto in legendary style centuries earlier. His guests were cool, if not downright frozen; their host was warm of heart (and sole, as the page discovered on treading in his footprints). The food was hot, for the king ordered up pine logs along with the flesh and wine. As for the music, the rude wind’s wild lament must have been on the cool side — though jollier tunes would surely have prevailed once the king and his fellow diners made it back to the royal fireside.

Ikea has opened its first high-street restaurant in the UK. There's not a flat-pack in sight – but a hotdog is 85p and a children’s pasta dish with tomato sauce (plus soft drink and piece of fruit) is 95p. A nine-piece full English will set you back £3.75, while a serving of their famous meatballs (with mash, peas, cream sauce and lingonberry jam) is £5.50. Vegetarians are amply catered for. It’s open 12 hours a day (and that may be extended further to enable dinner). There’s free wifi and somewhere to charge your phone. Even better, there is no music. It’s not pretending to be anything it isn’t.

Marco Pierre White may have earned a reputation as the tousle-haired kitchen bad boy who once made Gordon Ramsay cry, but these days he spends his mornings rather more quietly, enjoying his kippers. Yet in his retirement, he can still cause controversy. He recently told a podcast how he cooks his kippers. ‘On a plate, paint it with butter, wrap in cling film, in the microwave, two to two and a half minutes.’ A microwave? Really, Marco?! Yes. As far as kippers go, his reasoning is spot on. ‘Most people put them under the grill, which intensifies the salt’. Meanwhile, boiling them – jugged kippers – washes away the flavour. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with a microwave. As Marco put it, the haters need to ‘take off the blinkers’.

I remember, vividly, when working at Raymond Blanc’s Michelin-starred Le Manoir, the moment the truffles were delivered. A frisson went round the kitchen staff as the napkin covering the precious morsels was dramatically whipped off. Physically inspecting the gnarled, knobbly nuggets was a right reserved for head chef alone. As a lowly pot-washer, I was confined to the back, neck craned for a glimpse. So I am not blind to the excitement and sheer theatre of the treasured truffle. I even like them. But why on earth have they taken over every restaurant menu, as plentiful as lashings of ‘EV’ olive oil and flaky sea salt? 2018-19 was when the truffle takeover first got going on the London restaurant scene. Then the rot quickly set in.