Category: Food

Why cook anyway?

 

IMG_4510I’ve often written about the strange sense I occasionally get that when I’m doing something simple like using a builder’s trowel, building a wooden frame or most particularly when I’m gardening or cooking; I feel that I’m channelling something or someone. I absolutely don’t mean this in any supernatural sense – this isn’t about ‘ghosts’, but it is about the sheer complexity of our inner lives. I’m aware that when I ask the simple question “Why cook anyway?” there’s a way of answering it directly –

  • I cook because I really like eating good food’ but we’re too hard up to eat in restaurants.
  • I cook because I like to determine the meals I eat and the ingredients in them because it’s better for me (us) and the world if we do.
  • I cook because nothing draws people closer than eating together and cooking is a way of showing love for them.
  • I cook because we have the allotment and we grow most of our own vegetables.

But none of those simple answers account for the uncanny sense of channeling that sometimes comes with kneading dough, or taking something out of the oven. On the allotment it might come with the smell of the earth or the sound of a robin. I remember it clearly one day in winter when I was laying a hedge with Chubby Ball. _1080661

Sometimes when I cook it feels like a meditation, a wordless reflection whose content could never be expressed except in the act of cooking, and sometimes I even feel as if I’m reaching out towards a memory – especially a memory of my mother.

 

It would be easy to think of the Potwell Inn as a simple idea – a “two up two down” kind of conceptual building that houses a “happy place”. But what if I pushed at the boundaries a bit and revealed that the Potwell Inn is actually a very old, very large building with many rooms and such a long history that some parts have become derelict and some rooms have not been opened in decades?

Yesterday I was reading Christopher Bollas’ book “The Shadow of the Object”, and I came across this passage.

 

 

…. I have termed the early mother a ‘transformational object’ and the adult’s search for transformation constitutes in some respects a memory of this early relationship.  There are other memories of this period of our life, such as aesthetic experience when a person feels uncannily embraced by an object.

IMG_4763When I read those words I was seized by the memory of an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’ late work that we saw in Somerset that absolutely floored me because one of the glass display cabinets contained some objects deeply familiar from my childhood. I’m not adding a photo here because they all seem to be copyrighted but if you Google “Bourgeois the empty house” you’ll find them all.

My mother was a dressmaker and the only objects I have from her life are associated with her craft. What’s most powerful is the way in which these three objects, a pincushion with needles and pins, a thimble, and a rolling device for marking through a paper pattern into fabric bear within themselves an imprint of her whole being. They aren’t just tools, they embed her – prickly, spiky and absorbed in her work. The sound of the sewing machine was the sound of my childhood.

Stumbling on the Bourgeois sculpture was a shock, It was heavy with what Bollas calls “the unthought known”. And to get back to the original question “why cook anyway?” is it any surprise that cooking, gardening and sewing are all activities filled with the unthought knowns of my earliest infant years?  When I’m bearing experiences that pre-date any form of language and are inflected into actions, I am ‘uncannily embraced’.

 

When we first discovered that we were expecting our first child I went into a very strange state, having no vocabulary to express what I was feeling.  So I cooked.  I cooked meatballs in tomato sauce, I’ll never forget it, and I poured all my feelings of confusion into that one dish. As I brought it to the table, Madame who by this time had become quite concerned that I wouldn’t come out of the tiny galley-like kitchen to talk about it was giving me one of her looks. The whole dish – it was pyrex – slipped from my fingers and smashed into a thousand pieces on the floor – meatballs, sauce and glass. Looking back forty years we can laugh at the absurdity of it all, but it was cooking as I’ve never done it before or since.

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Too old to start smoking?

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The photo on the left started off way bigger than this, but I needed to edit it because frankly the state of the worksurface on the left of the hob was – well – pretty filthy, and while I don’t mind being a bit of a slob in the Potwell Inn kitchen, I’m not sure I want to share it with the customers! I’m assuming there are (at least) two distinct types of the readers, and the first – on seeing the unedited photo – would say “where’s the Dettox?” whereas the second would be saying “what kind of thermometer is that?” I tend to fall into the second category. Anyway I’ve spared anyone the trouble of worrying about my overflowing coffeee stains so we can concentrate on the topic in hand, which is smoking.

Madame and me tend to take a different line on the subject of preserving. She’s absolutely fine with jams preserves and pickles, but we are divided on the others – namely salting, fermenting and smoking.  With the exception of smoked haddock, where we stand as one in our enthusiasm for the real stuff, (not the pickled dayglo yellow stuff), smoking and fermenting are solitary pleasures which I share guiltily with my sons. I say guiltily because about 100 years ago, when I was a student, I got a summer job at Harris’s, the huge bacon factory in Calne, Wiltshire, when I worked in the stores and where I discovered that “smoked bacon” was not smoked at all in any accepted sense, but anointed with a kind of creosote so powerful that we only took occasional deliveries in jerry cans covered in hazard signs. So that probably means that most of the so-called smoked foods I’ve ever eaten are nothing of the kind.

Therefore, I say, why not have a go at the real thing? Some foods are simple to make but difficut to source –  sausages for instance – need casings and casings come in boxes of ten miles worth at a time, unless you can persuade a friendly butcher to sell you some. Black pudding is difficult to source for the same reason, but more so because you can’t just ship up to an enormous slaughterhouse with a 5 litre bottle and ask for a bit of pigs blood. And even if a friendly slaughterman did feel sorry for you and fill it up, you’d then be lumbered with a long drive home trying to agitate it with your left hand while driving with the right hand.  I’m really sorry for any vegetarian who’s offended by all this talk (Mags and Caroline especially) but I promise I’ll shut up right now.

However real smoking is easy and cheap to do and adds a real zing to the bland and the ordinary.  You don’t even have to buy a ‘proper’ smoker because a wok and a rack will do it just as well. Mine is a purpose built hot smoker which is the only type I can use in our flat with its built in smoke alarms. A cold smoker is generally a hefty looking thing the size of a filing cabinet, so that the smoke can cool down and do its work without heating up the food. For me that adds a whole “Russian roulette” frisson to the idea of smoking. I’m a belt and braces kind of man and killing the bugs with both heat and smoke works better for me than sitting down at the table and checking next week’s diary in case I get campylobacter (again).

I’ve always known that my fascination for procedures with their own special languages and arcane literatures probably marks me as an eccentric but so be it, that’s the way I am, and – oh joy – smoking is preceeded by brining, and that can involve a list of possible ingredients longer than the index of an Ottolenghi book. Today’s couldn’t have been simpler though – three hours in a brine flavoured with honey and crushed black pepper followed by overnight in the fridge to dry out and firm up, and then 30 minutes in the smoker with a thermometer to make sure it all gets over 75C. My chef sons laugh at my caution and say 65C is OK but I’d rather be safe than sorry. What you get (what I got) at the end is a couple of smoked chicken breasts that will be delicious in salads where a little goes a long way, or in a sandwich, and at a fraction of the cost.  However you use it, it’s economical and assists in our aim of eating less meat and more veg. If you’re looking for a steer [sorry – terrible pun -], Diana Henry’s book “Salt, Sugar, Smoke” is full of great ideas.

Rain has been keeping us away from the allotment so I’ve been choosing veg varieties for the seed order. Yesterday I spotted a hazel catkin in amongst the leaf waste that the council dumps at the site, and that combined with scanning the seed catalogues has brought an almost tangible sense of spring around the corner. Is it 17 only days until the solstice? Soon that great explosion of life and growth will begin again and we shall be celebrating the lengthening days at the Potwell Inn.

The Tao of sourdough?

IMG_4760I will never make any kind of claim for understanding sourdough because I don’t; and neither would I write any kind of definitive guide to it for two reasons”

  • I never seem to reach a point where I feel there’s nothing left to learn, and –
  • I hate the way books so often intimidate and make our efforts feel pointless.

On the other hand I well remember leaving art school with a degree in ceramics and remarking to one of the lecturers that it would have been helpful if they had taken the time to teach me some techniques and not left it all to me to find out. So in that spirit I feel it’s OK to share some of the facts I wish someone had told me about years ago. So herewith the Potwell Inn bakery shortcourse, completely free of charge.

  1. Bread flour  – For too long I thought that the stronger the flour (ie. the higher the  protein level) the better the bread would be. Not true! The loaf in the photo is made with a third soft wheat flour and only two thirds strong bread flour. Obviously there’s a crossover point where you get a cakey texure but 1/3 to 2/3 seems to work with the flours I use. Should I say what they are?  Well no, because anyone can bake beautiful bread using whatever ingredients are to hand, as long as they’re prepared to experiment a bit – which leads me to –
  2. Complete failure is very rare – Sometimes they’ll slump, and sometimes they’ll stick to the banneton and sometimes they just sulk.  But the resulting bread is almost always better than anything you could buy.
  3. Rice flour I wish I had a pound for every mixture I’ve tried to dust the dough and help it to release. Of all the things I’ve tried, rice flour works best.
  4. Getting a hot base –  feel free to buy a lump of granite or a hi-tech widget made from recycled space shuttle nose-cone tiles, but I use a cast iron griddle for Welsh Cakes that was incredibly cheap and holds a tremendous amount of heat. I never clean it.
  5. Kneading –You can use a machine but you’ll learn more about the quality of a dough in ten minutes of hand kneading than you will in a year of tiny changes to the recipe. Flour is a natural product and even branded flours can vary from batch to batch.  Wholemeal flour takes more water than white, but beyond that, the exact proportions can vary from week to week. It’s easy to add a bit more flour if a dough feels too sticky but it’s horrible trying to add water to a too-stiff dough, so start wet and stop as soon as you can.
  6. Sourdough takes up too much time –  first make the batter, say ten minutes maximum, and then go and do something else for the rest of the day or night – whichever suits you best. Second, add the final amount of flour, the salt and some olive oil bearing in mind point 5 above and knead it for ten minutes or until it just ‘feels’ right. Let’s say that takes you another 15 minutes. Then go away again for a another 12 hours or so. Third, fold the dough over on itself gently a few times and form it into a ball and put that in a banneton which you’ve copiously dusted with rice flour. That takes another 5 minutes. Leave it for another three or four or however many hours it takes to look perky.  Finally turn it out, slash the top and bake it as hot as you can get the oven for ten to fifteen minutes and with steam if you have it.  Then turn the oven down a bit and bake for another 30 – 35 minutes. Elizabeth David suggested in her book “Bread and Yeast Cookery” that you’re trying to imitate the falling temperature of a wood fired oven. You have to be there for some of that bit – so let’s say another twenty minutes of your undivided attention. So that adds up to not a lot more than an hour of actual work. If you’re away at work, bake at the weekend or maybe kick the batter off before work on Friday morning and finish baking before lunch on Saturday.
  7.  Have you got a posh steam oven? Yes but for the first 47 years I didn’t and I still made bread. I’ve got a very small and cheap car – priorities I suppose.
  8. You need to buy a starter – No you don’t.  If it smells nice it’s probably OK – no faff, just dark rye flour and water and lots of time.
  9. Is it a spiritual experience? Only in the sense that you have to be ‘in the moment’. In that respect it’s just like every other craft skill, you have to have a dialogue with the material.  It’s not MDF board!
  10. Why bother? Because £4.00 for a large loaf is ludicrous however big the baker’s beard is, and very soon your bread will taste better than theirs, I promise.

This rediscovered kitchen tool could change your life!

It was raining and blowing a hoolie all day yesterday – in fact it’s been like that since the weekend. The wind insinuates itself through every tiny gap in the windows, soughing away gently IMG_4757as if we were out at sea. What with the accompanying rain, this series of south westerly gales is bringing the sea to us I suppose, so there was no chance of getting up on the allotment to finish making the raised beds that would make it possible to get up on the alloment in the rain.  There’s a horrible circularity about that statement!

Anyway I’d been putting off making the Christmas cake for ages, preferring to be outside in the fresh air.  That was one reason, but there was another – the ancient Kenwood Major blew up last year while I was making Christmas puds, and the thought of all that arm ache was rather holding me back.

It didn’t exactly blow up in the conventional sense.  I noticed a peculiar smell, the sort of smell you might expect from burning ancient flour, fat and fluff deposits along with a couple of overwintering weevils – the normal kitchen kind of smells. Then there was smoke, but because I’m a man I pushed through the pain until flames appeared from one of the air inlets. Then I pulled the plug out before Madame called the fire brigade and I decoupled the cake mix from the deceased machine and carried on by hand.

It was something of a revelation, I recall, to discover that you could make a rich fruit cake without spending twenty minutes hunting through the cupboards looking for missing parts, or half an hour hand-washing all the dirty bits before losing them again for another year. My son rescued a dead Kitchen Aid from work and repaired it and I confess to a pang of cooks’ envy when I saw it; but yesterday I made the Christmas cake almost by hand. I did use the little electric whisk to beat the eggs and the sugar butter mix, but even that handy little gadget threw cake mix around like a terrier digging a hole on the beach, and in the end I went back to a balloon whisk and the wooden spoon. Obviously my wooden spoon is the mark 5 version with the invisible digital motor – I wouldn’t be seen dead with any other, but it seems that I’m walking backwards towards a new dawn of artisanal, hand crafted resistance cooking, and I expect the world will change any day soon.

Wouldn’t you just love it if I shared my ancient family recipe with you? Well, generally speaking I prefer Delia Smith whose recipes always seem to work. I realized years ago that most of my inherited recipes were forged in the bleak war years of food rationing and tasted filthy. It took a while – my electric scales are also broken and will only measure in pounds and ounces, briefly, before shutting down without warning and sulking for ten minutes. But eventually we got there and for four and a half hours the flat filled with Christmas smells, the shining hour redeemed. I won’t be icing it because these days everyone picks off the icing and leaves it on the side of the plate.  The only bit I really miss is the marzipan, and to be honest the cake never gets eaten at Christmas in any case.  But on a cold day on the allotment in January, a lump of cake and tea from the flask is ……. words fail me!

28th November 2018

On a mission??

A digression on the downside of being rather more opinionated than is good for me. I’ve always been something of a fundamentalist – in the traditional sense of needing always to go back to basics. So there’s an instinctive progression of thoughts and ideas with me that functions like a microclimate. Here’s an instance.

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I’ve been baking bread on and off since we were first married so that’s fifty two years give or take. My first port of call whenever I want to do something or learn a new skill is to read everything I can get my hands on. But not for me the exotic and elaborate confections that please the eye and get photographed in the Sunday supplements . I want to dig down to the simplest instance of my quarry. For years it was a cottage loaf like the ones my mother would occasionally buy at the bakery. It took me about ten years to learn that bread dough positively thrives on a bit of neglect. I was always fiddling, prodding, turning and looking for the trick that would yield the Ur Loaf, the Dead Sea Scroll of the living bread. Eventually I forgot to fiddle, got too busy to prod and neglected a loaf. It was the best I’d ever managed.

But somehow I’d slipped into a puritanical fundamentalism that forbade me even to glimpse at a different way of doing things, or using a new ingredient. I suppose if you’ve ever been forced to eat half-mouldy, wholemeal onion bread (“I’ve never tried this before”) and attempted to control your gag reflex while smiling weakly and saying “mm delicious” you might be suspicious of novelty. But that’s a cop-out, it was me really, clinging to the raft of certainty in a roaring sea of possibilities and ingredients. I wanted a monogamous relationship with the loaf I’d always longed for and only found after a perilous journey through hardship and loss.

Some time ago, because there was nothing else left on the shelf, I bought a sliced loaf (mea culpa) of Bertinet’s sourdough, malted, multi-seeded Notting Hill Carnival bread (I made some of that up!) It was delicious. So I bought a bag of the same sort of flour and baked a loaf in a bread machine. I felt like a complete culinary slapper , but it was good. As Robin (my psychotherapist) would often say to me “what on earth is wrong with that?”. “Never let the perfect drive out the best” – exceptionally good advice for me. My parents abandoned my sister and me to a Primitive Methodist Sunday School when we were young and impressionable, hence the psychoanalytic psychotherapy to help me out of the shackles I was dragging around, like Mendoza dragging his armour and weapons around in “The Mission”.

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Last year I was very much looking forward to the arrival of the Katz book since I became inflamed with the thought of fermenting things. When it arrived I read Michael Pollan’s foreword, and skimmed through the text. Suddenly I was back in the world of the Whole Earth Catalogue and it felt good that in the midst of the madness of Brexit and Trump there are other voices not yet surpassed and crushed by neoliberal orthodoxy. We shall push back with pickled gherkins and sauerkraut!

Thinking about chillies

Why think about chillies anyway? – after all it’s November.  But then we like to cheer ourselves up at the Potwell Inn by reading seed catalogues and planning next year, so chillies are among the earliest seeds to be sown, and it’s always best to order seeds early because the seed companies often run out of popular varieties quite quickly when the season gets going.  According to my notes we sowed our chilli seeds in the last week of January this year. We sowed a little round and mild chilli called ‘Pearls’, some Jalapenos, a mid-heat F1 Hybrid called Apache and finlly habaneros.  This is the first year we’ve ever tried to grow them, so I wasn’t expecting miracles, but we’ve now got a couple of heated propagators with LED lights, so it seemed the obvious time to give it a go. I think we underestimated the appetite of the young plants for heat and light, so initially we ran the propagator at about 22C which turned out to be at the very bottom end of the required temperature.  The milder chillies germinated anyway, but the habaneros didn’t show and by the time I realized my error and turned up the heat I think I’d lost them so we got 0% germination for those. Next year we’ll at least get the temperature right from the outset. The other mistake, I fancy, was using pure Sylva Grow instead of a soil based compost.  Like most allotmenteers these day we’re trying to avoid peat, but that leaves us in a bit of a quandary with finding the appropriate equivlent sowing compost – any ideas would be most gratefully accepted!  I think next season we’ll make up our own mixture of peat free compost and soil if no better advice comes along.

As ever we had masses more plants than we could use, so we gave loads away to family and fellow allotmenteers, and in the exceptionally hot weather they all grew very well. The Jalapenos did as well outside as they did in the greenhouse. The pearls had a wonderful flaIMG_4753vour but almost no heat at all, and the jalapenos too even milder than we expected.  The only one that gave us any heat was the Apache, but we missed the habaneros when it came to making chilli sauce this autumn. I was never that keen on chillies but as time’s gone on my taste for using them in the kitchen has increased, and we both seem to be adapting to the hotter flavours.

The sauce recipe was from James Wong’s “How to eat better” and it’s turned out beautifully fragrant as well as quite hot – we seem to be romping through it, and I’ve added it to all sorts of dishes to give a touch of background heat. Next season I think we’ll leave out the Pearls and possibly the Jalapenos as well, and go for the hotter ones again.  Our problem is that the greenhouse is terribly small at 6X4 and one of the standout successes this season were the greenhouse cherry tomatoes.  Apart from being delicious fresh, they’ve been brilliant dried and preserved in oil, and so we definitely need to make space for them. Then of course there were red peppers and aubergines as well.  Perhaps we need a bigger greenhouse …….

We certainly need more space.  We’ve been getting rude letters from the managing agents at the flat because we’ve occupied a little bit of the landing outside the flat for storing the odd barrel of wine and stored veg – life essentials as you might say. They claim it’s a fire hazard but really they’re just cross, because notwithstanding the fact that they make a good living from us tenants, they feel obliged to treat us as dangerous low lifes because we don’t own our own property. I’ve buried a few people in my time and I never saw anyone yet stuff a house into a coffin so they could take it with them.  “There are no pockets in a shroud” I say.  Anyway, below is a picture of our living room window in the spring.  We’ve got four south facing windows at he front of the flat and they all look pretty much like this by March.

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Black Friday at the Potwell Inn

IMG_4749Well, it was so unbelievably quiet at the Potwell inn today that after a lunchtime that was about as much fun as a funeral director’s waiting room I went up to the allotment in the kind of gloom that only November can offer. Being a fully paid up member of the age of the electric light bulb and the wireless set I find it just a bit difficult to understand why most of my customers spent the day glued to their computers in search of a bargain on the interweb, or whatever it’s called. For me there’s nothing to beat a couple of hours of declining afternoon light, digging a trench and setting the third side to a group of four raised beds.  I was even reasonably warm with my old tracksuit bottoms under my overalls. These four beds are for next year’s potatoes, but the side I was completing today also borders the grape vine as I work towards replacing all the posts and wires.

Back home I cooked the “feijao frade com chourico” I posted about yesterday and you’ll have to look at that posting to see the photo.  I know it’s shameless self-promotion but I get lonely leaning on the bar waiting for the door to open.  Actually I was rather proud of my efforts today, and now I’ve got the second LED propagator in my tiny study, I can even fight off  my ‘seasonal affective disorder’ while I write stuff that only a tiny number of people want to read. But I’m being positive because ‘the tough get going when the going gets tough’ as the bishop once explained to me when he gave me a couple of extra parishes to look after. A dear man and so gifted.

Feijoada -the perils of translating food

IMG_4476Isn’t that the prettiest railway station you ever saw? I took it on a trip to Lisbon in 2009, and it popped into my mind yesterday when madame was going through an old sketchbook in which she’d handwritten the recipe for feijoada from our friend Denis some time in the mid-1970’s. Here’s the first trick of the memory, because I’d always assumed it was his own take on the Brazilian Sunday lunch, but written alongside the recipe in pencil was the name Ursula Bourne, and the name of the dish was not feijoada at all but “feijao frade com chourico”.

Denis was young, Portuguese and a wonderful singer who could light up a party just by walking through the door.  He was an olympian drinker and smoker whose lifestyle finally killed him when he was absurdly young, and he could sing Fado so powerfully that ‘though you couldn’t understand a word, you knew it was dragged wailing out of a very dark place. We had some memorable times and parties – once, I recall, involving a huge quantity of alcohol liberated from the Venuzualan embassy by the son of the ambassador’s chauffeur.  We were all working together at an old-school mental hospital that was in the throes of  moving out of the eighteenth century Bedlam it had become. I still dream about some of the stuff I saw there.

But it was Denis that first cooked that meal for us and (I was quite certain) called it feijoada. I remember the discussion we had at the time about the impossibility of cooking it properly because so many of the ingredients were unavailable in this country and so he had ‘translated’ it into something close enough, using – as I discovered yesterday – Ursula Bourne’s recipe. I recalled then that I’d bought two of her books secondhand last year for next to nothing and so I grabbed them out of the bookshelf and double checked.

So the story I’d made my own was that you needed all sorts of meat, goose, bacon and sausage which you cooked with beans and a kind of chopped greens only grown in Portugal. The Denis/Ursula Bourne version was made using garlic sausage and celery with a bit of cream and lemon juice added at the last minute, and for years we enjoyed cooking and eating it.  It was cheap and cheerful but very filling for a growing family with no money.

IMG_4751Then, as funds permitted and the food culture changed, I was once able to try it in a real Brazilian restaurant in Bristol where my son was working as a chef. It was OK but absurdly expensive and sanitized from the description Denis had planted in my mind. Over the years I’d been cooking and learning about other cuisines and my collection of cookery books was growing and so I’d made a resolution to try to eat as many of these disppearing recipes as I could whenever I came across them; which was why when we arrived for a week in Lisbon we set about hunting a couple of them down. There were two in particular – one I called ‘stone soup’ which Denis had talked about but never cooked.  Its real name is Acorda Alentejana and it couldn’t be simpler – or harder to find. We trailed around the cafes and restaurants until eventually we found a cheerful waiter who spoke good English and knew what I was after.  Except he point blank refused to sell it to me – “it’s horrible and you won’t like it” he said. But I pressed on and promised that however disgusting it was I wouldn’t blame him or complain and that I’d pay in advance if that was what was needed. He went and talked to the chef and eventually he brought it to the table shaking his head and, not for the last time that week, he hung around waiting to see what I’d make of it.

Well, it was pretty basic. A couple of crushed cloves of garlic and a slice of bread covered with boiling water with a raw egg broken into it and a sprinkling of parsely on top. I finished it off and it was, as he’d said, pretty disgusting, but I thanked him, shook his hand and ticked it off my to-do list. The cafe did not, however, do feijoada and he didn’t know anywhere that did.

Later we wandered around what was then a market but has now turned into a foodie venue.  We found the required cabbage, called ‘couve’ heaped up in the market next to what looked like a victorian chaff cutter which they used to cut it into fine shreds.  But nowhere we visited had feijoada on the menu and no-one knew where we could buy it.  We were followed by many curious glances wherever we asked, until eventually ( as if he were confessing to a mortal sin) someone told us about a cafe down near the market that occasionally offered it. They were open.  It was on the menu. I almost had to beg for it but eventually they relented and we sat outside in the sunshine drinking beers and waiting for the final reveal. There was everything short of a miltary fanfare as a really huge cazuela was brought out, probably enough for four hungry peasants, followed by the entire waiting staff who came and surrounded me curiously as if I’d just landed by helicopter in the main square.

I cannot adequately describe the contents which included a big chunk of pig’s skin, a great number of bones from various animals, and – I swear – a tooth! But true to my resolution I ate about half of it and the crowd drifted away.  It wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked and – like the curate’s egg – was good in parts. Memories of Denis were swirling around me as I ate, and later in the day we visted the Fado museum to see if we could find a photo, but we didn’t.

But in answer to my own question about translating food there are two things to add. Isn’t it interesting that the more obsessive about “authenticity” we become, the more homogenous the food culture seems to be. Adding new ingredients doesn’t necessarily mean accessing another culture. What generations of poor people ate (still eat) out of necessity doesn’t translate at all when you’re wealthier beyond their wildest dreams.

At Bath Farmers Market

One of our Saturday morning treats is to go to the market –  http://www.bathfarmersmarket.co.uk –  and wander about spotting some favourites. Some of the stalls only show up fortnightly and some are occasionals so there’s always something to see. But the regulars are reliable – butchers, bakers, fishmongers and greengrocers plus some of the best cheeses and deli – all locally produced. There’s a really good atmosphere and organic produce is always available.  Just imagine, if every small sized town or large village could organise something like this it would support local small businesses – especially startups – reduce food miles, build new human networks and challenge the hegemony of the supermarkets. If you think that’s a romantic dream, ask yourself why the big supermarkets are chasing to keep up with traceability, little farmer biographies (are they real?) imitation sourdough breads and ‘artisan’ gins.  Why would we be satisfied with the phoney if we could get our hands on the real and actually talk to the producers?

In particular there’s a stall run by a local organic group where anyone can sell their surplus produce and share the proceeds. That could be a boon to allotmenteers like us who often have surpluses of extremely good but perishable crops. The essence of this is not to attract car drivers from 50 miles away but to encourage them to set up their own markets and exchanges. We’ve seen the way that microbreweries are being bought up and sucked into the corporate beast, and that can’t be the way to go.  Upscaling artisan industries merely repeats the mistakes of the past, and equates profit with value. We need a broader set of values and a different mindset for a new kind of entrepreneur to implement them.  Values like slow, local, inclusive and respectful of local community aren’t backwards looking romanticism but revolutionary and challenging. Local businesses that implement these values are often driven out by predatory supermarket practices and the result is unemployment, waste and pollution. I had a long converstaion with a struggling dairy farmer several years ago and he said that in order to enforce price cuts on farmers, one big supermarket was importing cheaper milk from Eastern Europe to drive down the price.  How can that be right?  In a market economy it’s buying decisions that can make the world a better place.

Pickled eggs and crisps

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“Provinder,” he whispered, drawing near to the Inn. “Cold sirlion for choice. And nut-brown brew and wheaten bread.”

Madame has pointed out that there is a major historical error at the Potwell Inn,  inasmuch as there are no pickled eggs lurking darkly at the back of the bar –  and therefore she is not able to indulge her favourite passion for consuming them, lurking like  reproachful sheep’s eyes, at the bottom of a packet of crisps.  I pointed out that the Inn is trying to move with the 20th century and may well introduce “Chicken in a Basket” at some point, and in any case Alfred Polly suffered terribly with indigestion and so pickled eggs were not his ‘thing’ as it were.  Furthermore I could find no reference to them anywhere in the novel.

However a happy landlady is a happy pub, and so I have bowed to her pressure and produced a jar for her exclusive use. We always treasure our customer feedback. I must clean behind the cooker at some point!