Food

Saturday

Jonny Goodall

Streets ahead?

The citizens of Stockbridge in Hampshire must be surprised and delighted that their high street was voted Best Foodie Street in Britain in Google’s inaugural Street View Awards. Perhaps not overly surprised, however, judging by a sheepish comment from Google’s press office to the effect that local gastro-guerrillas ‘went to a lot of effort to get interest up and increase their numbers’. As if to dispel any doubts on the matter, the chairman of Stockbridge Parish Council, in her victory address in the Andover Advertiser offered, ‘congratulations to everyone involved in raising people’s awareness of this competition’.

Hattie Ellis

Keeping it real | 9 April 2011

Italian food is about simplicity and seasonality, and in Sicily spring brings the fragrant lemon harvest – eagerly awaited in one corner of Devon. Hattie Ellis takes a trip to the mother country with a pioneer of real lemonade Do you remember when lemonade used to be just that harshly fizzy clear stuff you bought in big plastic bottles? Now you can find a fragrant, sweetly-sharp drink that’s the soft yellow of a summer’s evening. Often called Sicilian lemonade, it is similar to what you’d make at home. Add a slosh of gin, vodka or rum and it’s something else again. One of the best Sicilian lemonades is made by Luscombe Drinks in Devon, the pioneer of the trend, starting back in 1997.

Adrian Tierney Jones

Blonde Bombshell

The Czech town of Plzeň is the birthplace of the world’s first golden lager, and both are elegant, spicy and hugely enjoyable. Adrian Tierney-Jones visits brewing Disneyland Lunchtime at Na Parkánu, a restaurant attached to the Museum of Brewing in Plzeň (or Pilsen). A glass of Pilsner Urquell, served unfiltered and unpasteurised from a tank beneath the bar: graceful and golden, elegant, spicy, toasty with a bitter finish. On my plate: a massive joint of pork knee, skin glistening with fat, wispy strands of steam carrying the mouth-watering aroma of the cooked meat upwards; the waitress then plonks down the accompanying bowl of horseradish, mustard and spicy cabbage. I also have a helping of ‘hairy’ dumplings (see recipe).

Peter Grogan

Sugar daddy

Rum is a relatively young drink – 15th century – and still under-appreciated, but at its best can match any whisky or brandy for complexity and sophistication. Peter Grogan enters the darkness A long time ago a knuckle-dragging ancestor of mine left a gourd-ful of palm sugar out in the rain. Trolling along, the right little speck of yeast eventually came to rest in it, causing the sugar to spontaneously ferment. The result probably didn’t taste too good but it had something that helped the day pass in a pleasant blur. Fast-forward 10,000 years — at a guess — and that same something can apparently be had from mixing some mashed-up tinned fruit with water, bread (for the yeast), sugar and a dollop of ketchup (to improve the taste) in a zip-loc bag.

Dave Broom

Time is of the essence

We move through silent streets walled by shuttered houses and closed stores. I know that the French leave en masse in August, but in Cognac the ritual seems also to extend to wintertime. Even the landscape seems somnambulant. Skeletal vines whose cordons point crabbed fingers towards where the sun should be line the roadsides. Yet there is life. Something is stirring in the region’s black, mould-covered, thick-walled chais. At the bottom of a set of worn stone steps in Remy-Martin’s Domaine de Grollet is a collection of large and clearly ancient casks. It is here where the blend of Cognacs which comprise the house’s iconic prestige blend Louis XIII spends the final four years of its life. A sample is drawn, glasses are filled.

Melanie McDonagh

Bookends: The last laugh

In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s also a blow for the eponymous young cooks of Lisa Abend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentices (Simon & Schuster, £18.99), the 45 stagiaires who labour in Ferran Adria’s kitchen for a season in the hope of sharing in the magic. Ferran, you see, is no mere cook. With him, ‘hot turns into cold, sweet into savoury, solid into liquid or air’. In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Labour’s inflation pitch

Curiouser and curiouser. We in Coffee House have been saying for some time now that – whatever Mervyn King thinks – Britain has the worst inflation in the Western World apart from Greece. An OECD report out today shows we’ve got it worse than most eastern countries too. Korea, Turkey and Estonia are the only eastern nations with higher inflation: But what strikes me most about today is that food prices are soaring here, to an extent far worse than the rest of the world. This is what voters notice most: putting food on the table is very expensive. As Micawber might put it: annual food price inflation 6.3 per cent, annual wage inflation 2.5 per cent, result: misery. And plenty of it.

Saturday

Ian Thomson

A war of nutrition

The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of the Nazi assault on Poland on 1 September and the ensuing Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of the Nazi assault on Poland on 1 September and the ensuing Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. As German troops engulfed Poland, however, the Nazi science of massacre was put to the test. Within two months of Hitler’s invasion, an estimated 5,000 Jews were murdered behind the Polish lines. Millions were subsequently starved to death. Food is the central focus of this grimly absorbing enquiry into the second world war.

Monday

Alex Massie

Yes, Virginia, the World Gets Better

The year before I was born fewer than one in three countries in the world could be considered properly free. Today, according to Freedom House, nearly one in two can be classified as free. Despite the grinding stupidity and tedious witlessness that so often dominates our domestic politics we should remember that this is a great time to be alive. In fact there have been few better eras in human history. This is a big claim but it's justified given the expansion of liberty and opportunity across the planet these past 30 years. Of course there are exceptions and there remain many black holes of misery but the overall trend is clear.

Saturday

Fay Maschler

Wonders of the world’s fare

It was a slender hope, a moment of lunacy really, but I picked up Reinventing Food – Ferran Adrià: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat by Colman Andrews (Phaidon, £19.95) thinking that the improbable claim in the subtitle might in future serve to stem, or anyway divert, the tide of cookery books published every year. So remorseless is it that we now expect — and get — Christmas ‘annuals’. (In 2010 the best by far of the adult cook’s version of Dandy or Oor Wullie is Nigel Slater’s Tender, Volume II: A Cook’s Guide to the Fruit Garden (HarperCollins, £30).

Saturday

William Leith

Brutal and brutalising

In this book, Jonathan Safran Foer, the American novelist, tries to make us think about eating meat. He ate meat, then became a vegetarian, then ate meat again, then got a dog, then started to worry about eating animals, and didn’t stop worrying. This book is the result of what happens if you start to worry about eating animals, which is what most of us do, but then carry on worrying, which is what most of us don’t do. It’s horrifying. He starts off by thinking about why we don’t eat dogs. Well, we’d hate to do that, wouldn’t we? They’re dogs, for God’s sake. They are ‘companion animals’. We love them, in the same way that the Indians love their cows. But the Indians eat dogs, don’t they? And Koreans eat dogs.

Friday

Alex Massie

A Pizza Strategy for Labour?

Hopi Sen argues that Gordon Brown needs to run a Harry Truman-like campaign. That's probably right. But Labour's problem is that Brown is in a position that's more like the Truman of 1951 than the surprisingly victorious Truman of 1948. The economy has done to Gordon waht the Korean War did to the great haberdasher and, like Truman, Brown's approval ratings have plummeted. (At one point Truman's slumped to 22%). Eventually, of course, defeat in the New Hampshire primary helped persuade Truman not to run at all and it was Adlai Stevenson who was defeated by Eisenhower. It's too late - surely! - for Labour to persuade Brown to step aside. Last week's botched coup attempt was the final chance. So what can Labour do?

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Mike Bloomberg Seems to be Inspiring Tory Health Policy. Which is a Problem.

If there's one thing Team* Spectator agrees upon it is, I think, that Tory health policy is utterly inadequate and desperately confused. One especially problematic promise, however, is the notion that what we need is a Department of Public Health. How will this work? Well, the inspiration would seem to be Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New York City. This is not Good News: First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt. On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products.

Friday

Alex Massie

Rum, Sodomy and a Radish

Proof that even well-intentioned and useful fads can go too far: the Grow Your Own Vegetables movement has reached a tragi-comic end with the news that Shane MacGowan, the hardest-living poet ever to emerge from the mean streets of Tunbridge Wells, is, well, this... Shane MacGowan is set to appear in a reality TV programme about growing vegetables. The Pogues' frontman and his girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke both take part in the RTÉ One programme, which is called 'Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own'. In the show, the pair attempt to emulate the plot of '70s sitcom 'The Good Life', which saw characters Tom and Barbara Good attempt to live a sustainable life by growing their own veg and rearing their own animals for food.

Saturday

Alex Massie

The 50 Best Foods in the World

As Ezra Klein says it would be remiss not to give this transparently link-whoring Observer list of The 50 Best Foods in the World and Where to Eat Them the attention it so desperately craves. And like Ezra I've only had two of them: the pastrami-on-rye at Katz's deli in New York and currywurst in Berlin's Prenzlauerberg. Each was good; each easily replicated elsewhere in their respective cities. Or at home, for that matter.  I don't eat fish, so I don't know about the Fish & Chips at the Wee Chippy in Anstruther. My favourite chips, however, are to be had at Leo Burdock's in Dublin.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Department of Fast Food

Andrew Stuttaford, exiled in New York, thinks the creation - and about time too - of the kebab-flavoured* Pot Noodle demonstrates that there's hope yet for the Old Country. He has a point. The Kebab Pot Noodle will be a particular boon to rural dwellers. City folk, however, should remember that this new product cannot hope to surpass the majestic sight - and taste! - of a kebab pizza which is then deep-fried. *"Flavoured" is used in the loosest possible sense of the term, obviously.

Monday

Alex Massie

Could You Go A Chicken Supper, Bobby Sands*?

Exciting fast food wars update: faithful reader MT alerts me to something I should have known myself. Not only is the British embassy in Tehran located on Bobby Sands Street, there is a Bobby Sands burger joint in hip and happening Tehran too. Andrew McKie has also considered the ideological implications - nay, temptations - of the chip shop wars. As he suggests: "Fish supper, chicken supper. A theological and geopolitical minefield. This calls for a book, really." Quite so. *Explanatory note: During Bobby Sands' hunger strike fans at Glasgow Rangers and Heart of Midlothian, among, I think, other clubs, would sing, to the tune of "She's Coming Round the Mountain", "Could you go a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?/Could you go a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Best Little Brisket in Texas

One thing I'd like to do next summer (if, that is, we have a summer) is devote some time to doing some proper BBQ. No surprise, then, that I was a sucker for Calvin Trillin's New Yorker piece on the small Lexington BBQ-joint hailed by Texas Monthly as the home of the Best BBQ in the Lone Star state. As a longtime editor, though, he knew a Cinderella story when he saw one. It wasn’t just that Snow’s had been unknown to a Texas barbecue fancy that is notably mobile. Snow’s proprietor, Kerry Bexley, was a former rodeo clown who worked as a blending-facility operator at a coal mine.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Elitist Greens

Matt Yglesias reconsiders his position on arugula. Of course, in Britain we call "arugula" "rocket" - a much more homely, substantial, salt-of-the-earth kind of name, you will agree. A ploughman might have rocket in his sandwich, he'd never have "arugula" would he? Names matter! I can't recall for certain, but I'm pretty sure arugula used to be called rocket in the United States too, but that the name was changed because someone - growers? Supermarkets? - wanted a poncier, more exotic, upscale name for the stuff. If Obama loses in Novemeber this shift will doubtless be seen by historians as a key moment in American political history...

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Cooking Bullwinkle

In the light of all the Sarah Palin entertainment, Matt Yglesias asks a good question: how should you cook moose anyway? He links to some recipes (Moose nose in jelly??) some of which confirm my suspicion that you should treat moose as though it were venison or, even, at a pinch, wild boar. Slow and low is almost certainly the way to go. So I'd hazard that this would be a pretty good moose feast: Marinade your hunk of moosemeat (leg? Loin? Does it matter?) for at least 24 hours in a bottle of country red wine, with plenty of garlic, juniper berries, salt, pepper, thyme, marjoram, bayleaves etc. Rosemary would work fine too. Basically any combination of strong herbs.