Food

The Executive Order establishing President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again Commission presented some big, fat, sobering truths. “Six in ten Americans have at least one chronic disease,” the order says, “and four in ten have two or more chronic diseases.” It also notes that our people don’t live, on average, as long as those in other developed nations: 78.8 years in the US compared to 82.6 years in our cousin countries. How did this happen? How did the world’s most powerful nation ever get to the point where 77 percent of its youth can’t qualify for military service and we need a commission to stop us from spiraling faster and faster down the Doritos Loco Tacos-Ozempic highway? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Walking into this crowded and clattering restaurant for the first time in more than 30 years, two things strike me almost immediately: 1) it seems to be largely unchanged and 2) the prices have scarcely risen. I can’t claim to have tried every wine list in Soho, but I can tell you with certainty that this is the first time in a very long time that I have seen a glass of wine for under £5 in the West End. But, incredibly, here it starts at £4.50 – with cocktails from £8.The restaurant is Pollo, as it’s still popularly known, or La Porchetta Pollo Bar as the sign outside calls it. It crams 100 covers on to two floors at the eastern end of Old Compton Street, just behind the Cambridge Theatre, in Soho.

In a social media age, certain ingredients – long esteemed by those in the know – suddenly burst on to the scene. One morning we woke up to all the supermarkets stocking Mutti tinned tomatoes. Ortiz sardines and Perello Gordal olives are now in the limelight. I wonder – given the current zeitgeist for all things umami – whether Patum Peperium (Latin: ‘peppered paste’) could be next. Then again, the ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ – an anchovy paste made with butter and spices – isn’t for everyone. Much like Marmite, it has embraced this contentious reputation: ‘Dividing opinions since 1828’ it declares in its branding. After almost 200 years on the scene, it has started popping up in trendy spots, like a debonair rake sauntering into a party fashionably late.

In a world of bewildering uncertainty and breakneck change, where a pack of butter now costs about the same as a small family saloon in the 1950s, there is at last some good news to cheer the soul. It concerns the lobster, that culinarily appealing crustacean which has sustained us nutritionally since the Stone Age – albeit in recent times mainly for the wealthier sort. Suddenly, the lobster has got the wind in its sails. It’s thanks in no small part to Britain’s rather quixotic, headlong dash to become, seemingly, the only net-zero country in the world, and the enormous wind turbines that have been springing up off our shores to help this take place. Because – would you believe it?

It’s been almost 100 years since Arcady Fixon, a refugee from the Russian Revolution, opened the doors of Caviar Kaspia on Place de la Madeleine in Paris, and began beguiling his fellow exiles and the crème of Paris society with the exotic flavors of his homeland: shiny black caviar, served with blinis or potatoes, and ice-cold vodka. After being passed down through family hands, Caviar Kaspia is now owned by the charismatic entrepreneur Ramon Mac-Crohon, who has ensured that the place has lost nothing of its prerevolutionary charm: Nicolas II’s seal sits alongside antique porcelain in a display cabinet, and Nicolas Swertschkoff’s Troika, depicting a Russian horse-drawn sledge moving through snow, still hangs in the dining room.

My local gastropub, which is very popular, serves a hot, freshly made and runny-yolked scotch egg. It's billed as a ‘Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg with Maldonado Salt’ because part of hospitality is marketing. If you just chalk up ‘scotch egg’ on a board, it doesn’t entice the appetite in quite the same way. But call it ‘œuf écossais enrobés de chair à saucisse’ and serve it on a cracked slate tile – you’ve got yourself a stampede. A couple who live in the village visited the pub and ordered two of them. Shortly after being served, the husband of the couple returned the plates to the bar and asked the staff to reheat their partially eaten scotch eggs. The landlord explained that he could not reheat them once they had been partially eaten.

It’s somewhat risky to make the case for lard for a publication whose cookery columnist is the author of a book on butter. But so be it. Because lard has generally been at best overlooked and at worst openly maligned, and that is madness. The cost of cooking oils has rocketed in the past couple of years – sunflower oil has trebled in price, olive oil doubled. Butter is much dearer too. Yet inexplicably no one has suggested lard might step in to save the day. The cheapest pack of butter at Tesco will currently cost you £1.99. A block of lard is 50p. It has long been a slight object of ridicule. A ‘tub of lard’ is somehow crueller an insult than the Shakespearean ‘fat as butter’.

You could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into Oz: in the past couple of years, the whole world has gone green. Pale green, to be precise. Suddenly, pistachio is everywhere: it's in our pastries, our chocolate, our coffees, our puddings, and even showing up in perfumes, paint charts, scented candles and on our fashion runways. Where has this sudden lust for pistachio come from? In one way, pistachios are old news: they’re an ancient crop that has grown in the Middle East and been used as an ingredient in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cookery for as long as can be remembered.

I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV shows, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant, is probably best known for The Devil Wears Prada, a film I adore. His character in that film did wind me up, but it took a while before Tucci himself got on my nerves. I suppose it began with him coming over all chef, like he’s the new Anthony Bourdain. I kept being told to watch his TV series where he travels around Italy, but the sight of his smug face on my screen turned out to be more than I could bear.