Food

A few years ago, I moved to Newlyn, a fishing village in west Cornwall. I didn’t understand why I moved to Newlyn until I returned to Venice. I take almost all my holidays in Venice, and it is a cliché that Venice only slowly reveals her mysteries. You must fight your way past a mass of Renaissance portraiture and mirrored palaces but the mystery it showed me this time is this: like Newlyn, Venice is a fishing village. Venice got rich in the thirteenth century, monopolized the trade routes to the east for two centuries and covered itself in Istrian stone, which Newlyn didn’t. But it’s still a fishing village, founded by people running away from barbarians, into the mud flats of a lagoon to fish for crabs. It is easy to forget that — unless you look for Venetian cuisine.

I don’t know when my father showed André Fleuridas, a friend, the chunk of jade he’d brought back from Burma, where my father was based as a war correspondent during World War Two. Nor do I know how my parents’ friendship with Bonnie and André Fleuridas began. I can only guess. It might have been through art, as both my father and André were artists, and in Weston, Connecticut, where I grew up, artists occasionally gathered in each other’s studios to draw or paint from live models. Or they might have met at the Weston firehouse where artists, writers, musicians, actors and TV news anchors made up, along with farmers, Weston’s all-volunteer fire brigade.

Marmite is one of very few manufactured foods to have become an idiom. British people think of the black stuff as a national idiosyncrasy, entirely unknown to horrified foreigners: there are many videos on YouTube in which outsiders have Marmite inflicted on them for the first time. In fact, there are a large number of pastes based on yeast extract in different countries, each with its passionate devotees. British Marmite may have been the first to go into production, but it did not stay unique for long. A German chemist, Justus von Liebig, influential in the propagation of meat essences, discovered that yeast could be concentrated.

Tennis — as the New England poet Robert Frost remarked in defense of formal verse — is more fun with a net. Creativity does indeed flourish within constraints. Soviet censorship brought about samizdat. Prohibition brought about bathtub gin and any number of fabulous cocktails designed to mask its unsubtle notes of paint thinner. The greatest human spirits would view the new era of show-your-papers dining not as a hardship, but as an opportunity. In our brave new world, some don’t mind handing over papers in exchange for a mess of restaurant-prepped pottage. And yet there are ancien régime sticklers for propriety who think that the use of QR codes to gain access to food indoors is not quite comme il faut (if you’ll pardon their French).

Cheese, potatoes, sausage and bacon for dinner? Let’s just throw in bread and heavy cream for the sake of it. Sounds like a recipe for a heart attack or stroke? Why do the Swiss and French then double up — or even triple up — on these carbs and calories when cold weather comes? The answer is easy and old; the combos are delicious, divine and de rigueur, filling the body’s need for cozy food and energy to shovel snow and ski. The French and Swiss still argue about which country invented raclette.

One of the more curious habits of the British is their tendency to publish opinion polls in national newspapers about their own food habits. Which way round, for example, are you meant to dress your scone? Is it clotted cream first, then jam — or jam first and cream second? Well, the Queen does it jam first, so that must be the way. Or that other national debate, tea and then milk, or the opposite? When I first arrived in the UK thirteen years ago, I was amused to see how worked up the British get about such questions. Try asking them sometime and see what happens. A new poll reveals that 58 percent of the British public admit to preferring roast potatoes over turkey. “How could you?” we’re supposed to gasp. “Everyone knows Christmas dinner is about the turkey!

Hannah Moore’s June Spectator piece on sandwiches made me hungry. Then it made me think. Ms Moore makes a sound distinction between modern Britain’s plastic-boxed, triangular ‘sandwich’ and the custom-made, piled-high, endlessly imitated, seldom-matched product of a good New York or Chicago delicatessen. Why, one wonders, do the Brits put up with it? Landing in countless foreign ports over the years, for business or pleasure, I’ve always wondered, pretty much before wondering about anything else, ‘What’s the food like?’ Almost always, I’ve liked what it was like. In the age of real borders and undiluted ethnicities, food was a powerful expression of locality.

Wise men say only fools rush in. But in this particular instance, I really couldn’t help falling in love on the spot. Like a zillion others, the story starts on a night out. When my party, dripping with rain, arrived at the restaurant, our table wasn’t ready, and they ushered us to wait at the bar The bar was a happening kind of place. Instead of looking up at shelves of bottles and bartenders mixing drinks, it looked down onto the kitchen area, which was built around a giant wood fire over which five or six cooks labored frenetically. The flames blazed openly, fed from the picturesque log stack that lined the back wall of the dining area.

I cannot claim the gift of prophecy, but early in 2020 — before lockdown panic-buying and the warnings of a dire wheat harvest causing bread-price rises — I became a bread-maker. I dug around on the internet for a good recipe for sourdough, and found one padded out with the usual bloggery and waffle. Absent the philosophy and the pious musings, it gives a clear, sensible route to bread self-sufficiency. Sourdough doesn’t need bought-in yeast, only a ‘starter’ of flour and water. This is often called a ‘mother’, and attracts wild yeasts as it develops; after five days in the jar it is a gently bubbling ferment of living yeasts, and you keep it going by adding flour and water to it day by day.

You can get goat in parts of New England. Consumers of Portuguese origin create a market unparalleled elsewhere in the US. In Boston, as I recall, Savenor’s used to sell camel and kangaroo. Few meats are too un-American for New York City. Ottomanelli, purveyors to whatever is left of the Four Hundred, still has venison of the quality they sold to the Upper East Side in the Gilded Age. Los Paisanos in Brooklyn stocks alligator, turtle and caribou. But the great days of the 1950s, when a club in New York served porcupine, caribou, muskrat and armadillo, are fled. With the closing of the American mind has come the narrowing of American appetites. Americans’ self-image is of enterprise, pioneering, innovation, adventure and the call of the wild.

Joy’s Toasted Parmesan Canapés: mix four tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese with half a cup of grated Swiss (or any other mild cheese that will melt), add mayonnaise enough to make a spread, season with salt and oregano or basil, spread on bite-sized rounds or squares of thin-sliced white bread, top with a slice of green olive (optional), broil until bubbly, serve immediately. Caveat, sophisticates: the ‘Parmesan’ likely as not was that pale yellow powder dispensed from the green Kraft cylinder, the Swiss was from Wisconsin, the mayonnaise was aka Miracle Whip Salad Dressing, the spices dried ones from the McCormick jar and the bread courtesy of Pepperidge Farm (if you were lucky). Not a whiff of anything cordon bleu or ‘artisanal’ here, the latter a term not yet dreamt-up c.

The most exciting arrival in years on the DC dining scene is coinciding with the end of the pandemic. Not since the launch of the DC Michelin guide has the buzz been as strong. Nestled adjacent to the Old Ebbitt Grill, it’s sure to be a welcome addition to the Power Lunch scene among the Jos A. Bank-clad downtown crowd. Yes, the Cheesecake Factory has opened their new location just a few blocks from the White House. Truth be told, DC being a city full of cynical people who think they live in a West Wing episode and that the height of dining is Cafe Milano, it’s not actually clear to me that DC deserves a Cheesecake Factory. But it brings a level of class, sophistication and culture to the nation’s capital that we haven’t had since Billy Carter.