Tag: cooking skills

The good life myths that hide the reality

We want change but we want nothing altered – William Cobbett

Three Cornish pasties

I was shocked today to discover that I have a bit of an obsession with food. My shock was brought about by the sheer number of food photographs I’ve taken while I was looking for pictures to illustrate this post on the subject of what’s come to be known as Regional Food after reading a piece in the Guardian about a recently published book by the Italian academic Alberto Grandi called La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist). He argues that in reality there was no substantial Italian cuisine (the choice of the French term ‘cuisine’ rather gives the game away). What we know as the rather mythic pasta + nonna idea came into existence when so many utterly impoverished migrants left italy and arrived in America where they experienced an abundance of food for the first time. I’ve seen that happen myself. Back in the eighties I was on a course with students from all over the world and one of them was from Eastern Europe. He kept going missing but we could always find him gazing into the window of a local butcher – he’d never seen anything like it. He was so overwhelmed with the abundance of our food that we would take extra each meal and pass it to him. Grandi describes that cultural collision as you might describe an F1 hybrid. Two less productive strains interbreeding can bring about fantastically productive offspring. He’s not saying that there is no Italian food tradition, but that – real as it may be today – it’s not very old. It got me thinking about other so-called traditions that you would never have found in their alleged countries of origin – Balti and Korma owe more to Birmingham than to India; most French haute cuisine can be attributed to the unemployed chefs of the post revolutionary vanquished rich. Fusion cooking to the collision of Australia with Japan; Chinese cooking which came to be known and popularised by waves of immigrant chefs in chip shops but which barely scratched the surface of the diverse cultures of such a huge nation. And then there’s the great unwashed – the tradition of english cooking.

My mind travelled back almost immediately to William Cobbett, radical, grumpy and outrageously opinionated pamphleteer as well as hilariously funny writer. In Cottage Economy he tried to set out the proper diet for an Englishman and got very indignant about potatoes which he thought made farm labourers weak and lazy, and the drinking of tea which he said made women into gossips and made men become effeminate. For Cobbett, the only proper diet was based on bread, bacon and beer; grown, fattened and brewed by the happy labourer. The two books, “Cottage Economy” and “Rural Rides“; written in the shadow of poverty and starvation after years of war are still worth reading if only for a glimpse of his burning indignation. Bacon and eggs, Sunday Roast, good bread and plenty of meat became the iconic staples of the English diet, especially in the wake of wartime rationing. Meat and two veg was at least factually accurate even when it became a snide insult. It was the diet I grew up on.

Heaven forfend – chillies, borlotti, passata – what’s the world coming to?

Madame had more contact with an alternative tradition because one of her aunts had married into money, and she spent holidays as a companion for a cousin. It was whilst staying there (just the once) that I read Mrs Beeton and wondered at the extravagance of some of the recipes – “take a dozen eggs and three pints of best cream” – that kind of thing. I didn’t laugh at it – I wanted some of it for us too. After we got married and realized that neither of us could cook, a friend gave us some Elizabeth David and so now my list of inspirational writers extends to dozens, and they fill bookcases in the flat.

As for English cuisine; looking through the photos I’d say there is still a very diverse history of English cooking. After Mrs Beeton; Eliza Acton, Jane Grigson, Dorothy Hartley are among many more food writers who kept the tradition alive and many others have carried on to the present day. Even if there never was a properly understood traditional cuisine, there was always an uncollated mass of good recipes made excellent with fresh vegetables, meat and fish. As ever, cooking and eating what’s to hand and affordable – fish or lamb, pork or beef depends on a wealth of non-culinary variables and the lazy journalistic trick of listing the best of everything from trifles to testicles is just silly. Even a bucket of offal, like the one below, when respectfully and creatively prepared and cooked, can be a feast. (It can also be terrible – trust me).

Patés, cakes, puddings, toad in the hole, cheeses, faggots and bread with all manner of vegetables are still on the Potwell Inn menu. In the last three days we had Sunday roast; liver and onions and then – classical leftover food- cold chicken with bubble and squeak and home made chutney. Shopping and cooking, then sharing a meal with friends and family is one of the great creative joys of being alive. Slow food needs to be accompanied by slow eating.

But food – like every other aspect of culture in the UK – is deeply influenced by social class. Back in the 80’s we were living (as ever) in a block of flats and upstairs there was another tenant who came from a profoundly different and bourgeois background. We got on pretty well in general but one day she came down to see us about something just as we were making some food for my parents. Later her husband came down in fits of laughter and told us that she’d rushed upstairs and said “R – You have to go down and see Dave and his wife, they’re making a real working class tea! It was the tinned salmon sandwiches that did for us, I think. Major class signifier!

The problem today is not so much which recipes people cook, but that so many people don’t cook at all. The traditional meat and two veg diet was pretty boring, but properly cooked it’s still a nutritious meal, unlike the ultra processed foods that are slowly poisoning a whole generation and inexorably lowering the quality and life-expectancy of the life of the poor but also the well paid but chronically overworked people in the middle . The challenge is that when you’re struggling to pay the rent there just isn’t time to bone a breast of lamb, let alone grow an allotment and when you’re working 12 hours a day and six days a week like many professionals have to do; then time, not money is the limiting factor.

But eating out can be a far more dispiriting experience even than a takeaway – what with the virtual extinction of properly trained chefs. Two of our sons are chefs and they tell us that many young people looking for jobs have never eaten good food, and are unaware that kitchens are dangerous places in which hot fat, slippery floors and sharp knives can cause serious injury.

So I’m not saying that regional cuisines don’t exist, but that in the hands of skilled and well read cooks and chefs, a miracle can happen in which local English foods, like lamb, bacon, thyme, potatoes and carrots with the addition of a glass of wine and some garlic , can be inflected with the flavours of Provence and become carbonnade nimoise. Regional food is a dance performed by a skilled and knowledgeable cook, a selection of local fresh produce and a well equipped kitchen informed with wisdom and love.

Sherry trifle – one sponge, one bottle of sherry? The glacė angelica took a bit of finding!

Délicieux

Délicieux – “delicious” in English apart from its normal usage is also the title of a 2021 French/Belgian comedy-drama film directed by Éric Besnard, which charts the rise of the first restaurants in France just before the French revolution. We watched it a couple of nights ago and allowing for the odd historical inaccuracy, like moving the action from Paris to the Auvergne region, charts the fall of the aristocratic elite of the day and the subsequent redeployment of hundreds of highly trained chefs into parts of France that had no tradition of eating other than at home in the family setting. It’s a great film, up there with my other foodie favourites because sometimes when we’re sick to death of the murderous and cynical events on the news we need a couple of hours of relief. And it’s always good in any case to see the ruling classes humiliated and shamed even if it’s only in a film. Well worth watching and under a fiver.

Anyway, it made me sit up and remember how and why I started cooking in the first place. Mum was a decent cook with a small repertoire of favourites. By the time Madame and I got together I’d never tasted garlic, green peppers or any of what the supermarkets still describe as exotic vegetables. So when we moved into our first flat; I was 21 and Madame was 18, neither of us had considered how we were going to feed ourselves. I’d hovered in the kitchen and watched my mum cook; she showed me how to judge the thickness of Yorkshire pudding batter by the sound it makes, and I could make a passable bacon sandwich. My dad literally could not make a cup of instant coffee! Madame still can’t recall her mother ever cooking a meal and so confronted with starvation we agreed to take it in turns to cook and that’s never changed.

At the same time we were exposed for the first time to a different cuisine as soon as we went to college and started to meet new people from different social backgrounds who invited us to their homes and whose parents (who probably thought of us as amusing waifs and strays) invited us to eat with them. I fell in love with the whole thing but we could never have afforded to eat out, so the only way we could eat like our better off friends was to learn to cook. I bought books, slowly accumulated a few pans and after walking miles looking for ingredients, practiced. It never occurred to me to train as a chef; my whole ambition was to be a good cook. There was a shop around the corner that sold cookware and I would spend hours looking through the window at the Le Creuset pots. I bought my first ever carbon steel knife there and resolved never to make-do with inferior equipment – which meant that my skills and equipment were glacially slow to improve. It was decades before we could afford to travel and see continental food at first hand.

Our problem was that so many ingredients were simply unobtainable. We learned the location of bay trees, rosemary bushes and other herbs. Sage and thyme were only available in bunches as Christmas approached so we foraged for what we needed in the leafy streets and gardens and eventually got ourselves our first allotment. It’s a well rehearsed truth that olive oil could only be obtained in tiny bottles at the chemist. Luckily we had a deli nearby, run by a Hungarian refugee who imported foods we’d never seen or even dreamed of. We learned to grow some food and we were lucky enough to find neighbours who could show us how to dress the chickens, pheasants and rabbits that found their way to our door. The local butcher showed me how to humanely kill and pluck a chicken. When I was a community arts worker I learned to be careful about expressing any food preferences, because some of the young men I worked with would go poaching to order.

Today we were sitting at the table shelling the borlotti beans to store for the winter. At lunchtime we had a tasting of several varieties of apple that we grow and ate chunky bread. After a dreadfully tough summer we were on the point of giving up the allotment but Madame kept the faith and we’re back on track once again preparing the ground for next season. Against all expectations the fruit crop; sweet apples, pears, plums, damsons and cookers has been the best ever. The borlotti crop was the largest yet and even the potatoes held fast in the ground right through the drought. Chard, spinach and most of the herbs survived too, with minimal watering. The tomatoes and peppers suffered in the polytunnel but now at last the rain has come and the water butts are slowly filling. Storage is easy but harvesting water is a bit more tricky. The greenhouse roof faces east and west, taking most of the weather pretty well. The water butts there fill quickest, but the shed roof slopes to the north and its three barrels are much slower to fill. So the trick is to pump water from the full barrels to the empty ones so that every drop is captured. I can see that the dramatic climate change we’re experiencing is not going to reverse any time soon and so droughts, extreme weather and storms need to be factored into our planning.

So now we ache in places we didn’t know existed, but we grow closer each time we go to the allotment. The shared physical work renders the gym subscription redundant and the mental challenge of planning it all is rewarded at this time of year in the kitchen and at the table, and there really is some kind of spiritual dimension to it. The news is terribly unsettling, and the uncaring viciousness of so many people provokes paranoia and despair; but somehow the simple act of plunging your hands into the soil, or sowing and harvesting your own food have the strange capacity to heal those hurts. Our friendships among the other allotmenteers brings us together in a shared interest with a huge range of people and skills. Doctors; nurses; teachers and professors muck in with many others with quite different life experiences. The allotments are, in the truest sense, a university.

Clack click; clack click – let’s think, let’s think – sings the passata machine.

High season for tomatoes (and Wrens)

We grow our tomatoes in the polytunnel on grafted rootstocks and with blight resistant varieties. It’s by no means cheap, but we haven’t lost a crop to blight in years, and having grown both from seed and from grafted rootstocks, the commercial ones, bought from a local nursery (so we can see what we’re getting) have a much higher yield and more than pay for themselves as long as we water them consistently and feed them with an organic seaweed based fertilizer. They ripen over a period which gives us plentiful fresh tomatoes in the kitchen but any surplus is quickly preserved. Freezing is very energy intensive, so we rely on reusable glass preserving jars with new metal tops every year so they seal perfectly. Our collection of Italian jars and bottles has been in continuous use for nearly ten years now. After several years of pushing the pulp through a sieve – which is very slow – we bought a cheap hand cranked passata machine which will easily mill six pounds of tomatoes in ten minutes, neatly removing skins and seeds which we don’t put into the compost any more because then we land up with hundreds of tomato seedlings!

The passata machine and the pulp. The pale yellow lumps are butter.

Depending on which part of the cycle the little spring loaded paddles have been assembled in against the sieve, the first few turns of the handle yield hesitant and irregular clickings. But as soon as the hopper is filled with peeled and chopped tomatoes and the process speeds up, it sounds to me something like “Lets think! Let’s think!” Each hopper goes through the machine five times, recovering first the juice and later the thicker pulp. Finally the skins go through because there’s a surprising amount of pulp still on the skins. At the end I have a deep pan half filled with passata and a shallow enamel dish filled with almost dry seeds and skin. It’s high summer and one of those grounding kitchen rituals which mark the transition of the seasons, just as marmalade making marks the end of winter and Christmas pudding, the beginning of it.

This kind of sauce making reduces our almost unmanageable crop of tomatoes to around a quarter of their original weight and prepares them for storage so they last more than a year. We make several kinds of sauce, but this one – which we simply call Hazan number one comes from Marcella Hazan’s marvellous book “The Essentials of Classic Italian cooking”. We also make straight passata and roasted tomato sauce from Pam Corbin’s River Cottage Handbook “Preserves”. Then there’s tomato ketchup from a 1950’s HMSO book and, if there are any leftover green tomatoes we make chutney from my Mum’s old cookbook. Nothing gets wasted at the Potwell Inn apart from (very occasionally) the Landlord.

Meanwhile Madame has been continuing with her years-long search for a ratatouille recipe that I’ll actually like. I was put off ‘rat’ by over-exposure to it on camping trips in the past, when it always tasted of methylated spirits from the Trangia Stove. However, because we’ve got all the fresh ingredients coming off the allotment at the moment, she has been experimenting from a whole pile of recipes and yesterday’s came from Delia Smith, but shares its DNA with a much earlier one by Jane Grigson. The whole aim is to create a dish that doesn’t look like pavement vomit. Simply boiling up all the ingredients into a wet and slimy sludge should be enough to get you a stiff fine for vandalism. Anyway, Madame’s latest iteration last night looks and tastes like the best yet.

But there’s more to it than that. “Let’s think ….. let’s think” sings the passata machine as I crank the handle.

I love this kind of seasonal cooking (and eating), and I learned about kitchen thrift from my mother and grandmother who understood food shortages from the experience of two world wars. But there’s more to it than that. “Let’s think ….. let’s think” sings the passata machine as I crank the handle. These seasonal earthings are incredibly important to both of us and at these times we work as a team in the kitchen. I suppose – if you suffer from the burden of believing that there are better or more important things to do with your time than press tomatoes through a sieve or make your own Hollandaise sauce – then you’ll miss the meditative thoughtfulness that repetitive kitchen work brings. The meditation strengthens the link between growing the plant, preparing the food and eating together.

Growing food, cooking and eating together are fundamental to thriving; much more – dare I say – than commodified health and conspicuous consumption. Pouring damson jam into pots brings the trees and their fruits to the table in the depths of winter. Making a wish over the Christmas pudding mixture is – at its very least – a wish for a peaceful future. Beating a mayonnaise or mashing potatoes will give a few minutes respite from endless bad news about riots and hatred. Baking bread means committing 24 hours to something of more moment than gossip.

My thoughts – as I crank the handle of the passata machine – are the spiritual equivalent of Mother Julian’s prayer that – “all will be well and all manner of things will be well.” The seasons, the moon and the tides wax and wane without regard for our existential angst. Whilst anyone with a grain of common sense will understand that we really cannot be anything we want to be, because our lives are a continual negotiation with nature and circumstance; we can still thrive by immersing ourselves in the flow moments when we know what it means to be human rather than spend anxious lives doom scrolling on our mobiles. Maybe the wooden spoon should be promoted to first prize?

The bindweed in the background should remind any gardener that the devil is always lurking in the background, waiting for an opportune moment

Cull Yow – WTF??

Taken on Dartmoor in 2019

If you’re interested in food – especially in the slow food movement, you may well have read John Barlow’s excellent book “Everything but the squeal” – which is an account of a year in Spain during which he attempted to track down and eat the whole of the animal as expressed in the wide range of Spanish pork cooking. The title says it all; it’s a not for the faint hearted guide to not wasting a single scrap of a living creature after it has been slaughtered for our benefit.

Vegetarians and Vegans may, by this time, have decided to abandon this post but I’d argue that wastefulness afflicts us all. As a meat eater I entirely accept that I bear a moral profound responsibility for my choices and one of the ways I try to live that out is to eat meat less and then usually the cheapest cuts and make sure that they are sourced from farmers with high welfare standards. In fact, that point alone means that we could never afford the kind of daft offer that Waitrose came up with this weekend, inviting us to celebrate Coronation Weekend with a rib of beef joint costing £185.00.

Meat eating is a kind of in your face introduction to the earthiness of food and the biggest problem for our culture is that we are not (generally speaking) cooks and so prefer any engagement with meat to be as fast and painless as possible -which in turn obliges us to eat the leanest and most expensive cuts. Coupled with that is our fear and aesthetic loathing of raw meat because it shouts mortality at us and finally because we have no time left after our neo capitalist culture has eaten up any fragment of it there’s none left either for cooking or – tragically – for eating together.

So let’s take a look at sheep meat. These days we all know about sheep because of the glut of TV programmes in which we can easily see half a dozen lambs born before Sunday supper. Ah …. baby lambs we coo. In the spring we are bidden by the supermarkets to eat Spring lamb for Easter just as we are bidden to eat turkey for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Our culture demands that we eat meat as frequently as possible whilst not counting the cost in suffering and methane production in the industrial fattening units. Boning a piece of pork belly is a meticulous operation that brings us irrevocably to the moral issue of meat eating. We can’t face eating tripe these days, nor chitterlings nor any of the 80% of the animal that we are far too sophisticated and fastidious to eat. “Stuff a heart? – I’d rather starve!”

So the meat industry – and that includes the restaurants as well, needs to find a way around our aversions and we came across a particularly egregious example here in Cornwall this week. To begin at the beginning, sheep meat comes in various forms. Spring lamb is the youngest and possibly the least flavoursome of the trio, but almost anyone can chuck a piece on the BBQ and make something of it. The next stage is the one to two year old lamb which is called hogget and if you can find it, is lovely. The third stage is mutton which is meat from a sheep that has had lambs but is no longer productive. It could be almost any age depending on when successive pregnancies have worn it (or rather its teeth) out. The trouble is, mutton has a bad rep because it’s the quintessential slow food and so – unless the chef or cook knows what they’re doing it can be as tough as old boots and taste like cardboard. So how do we get around this insuperable obstacle? The answer, of course, is to promote mutton for its real strengths and train chefs and cooks to deal with it properly. Naturally that’s never going to happen because it costs money. So the PR poets barge in with a cunning plan. “Let’s” – they say – “call it Cull Yow! – nobody knows wtf it is but it sounds pretty ethnic “

Obviously they’ve been watching too much TV because ‘Yow’ – anywhere in the country except Cumbria which is entirely populated by warrior models who cut hay in miniskirts – means ‘yew’ – everywhere else. So it’s a slam dunk win for the industry. Distancing from the real name of the meat which is really ‘dead old sheep’ we now have the entirely virtuous name “Cull Yow” – local; slow food and entirely life enhancing.

I don’t mind a great mutton revival – for reasons I’ve already explained -but I do loathe the sheer dishonesty of putting mutton on the menu at an up and coming gastro pub as if it were some hitherto undiscovered delicacy. We’re actually booked in for lunch there next week as a holiday treat and I will report back on whether the mutton was any good!

Meanwhile, back on the farm ….

I rather enjoyed dating the damson vodka “April Fools’ Day”. As spring advances, we feel the urgent need to do something useful with the produce which we abandoned to the freezers last autumn because we were tired and wanted a break. That’s the biggest danger with freezers. We chronically overproduce on the allotment and then use the freezers to hold the surpluses until we can think what to do with them. Consequently the 5 kilos of damsons were removed from cryogenic storage last week and were turned into 2 litres of damson vodka and 11 lbs of damson jam. The last couple of kilos will become damson ketchup early next week. They were a gift from a friend on Severnside who didn’t know what to do with them either. His tree is old and marvellously productive and ours is just two years old and may take 15 years to bear any serious quantities of fruit – by which time I’ll be 91 and possibly too wobbly to climb ladders! I seemed to have inherited from my mother some kind of Jungian shared trauma which impels me/us to bottle, pickle and jam at the mere sniff of a plum, ‘because we might need them one day’ .

Of course there is an upside to this. I curl my lip at recipes for instant pickles in the glossy supplements because they just taste like raw veg with vinegar on them. If you enjoy the feeling of your taste buds doing a Mexican wave inside your mouth then be my guest. I prefer to make chutneys and pickles, label them and pack them away somewhere so hidden they come as a complete and marvellous surprise 2 years later when we find them just coming into their prime. Plums, green tomatoes, mixed vegetables and damsons all make lovely chutney but our absolute favourite is a Delia Smith plum chutney called “Dower House Chutney”. Immediately after it’s made it tastes like paintstripper with chilli sauce, but after a couple of years at the back of a cupboard it’s the go-to for anything with cheese – dark, rounded and perfectly blended. The same goes for the ketchups ( we make all our own).

Damson jam is my favourite breakfast treat after marmalade. I don’t think we made any last year – at least we haven’t found it if we did! – and so it was a joy to have some again. Unlike pickles and chutneys, jam is ready to eat as soon as it’s cool. The vodka is blissful after dinner. The books say to strain the fruit off the vodka and sugar after six months, but once again we’ve sometimes left it for well over a year and extracted some of the almond flavour of the stones – giving a much more nuanced and darker taste. Sloe Gin, which we also make, needs a couple or three years to reach its state of grace so the vodka is an easy standby. The other couple of photos are of some bread and a lemon meringue pie that I was practicing for a family meal on Easter Sunday – (I’ve never made it before).

I haven’t written much about the allotment recently simply because the wettest March since records began was a bit of a deterrent. But a few brighter days have made it possible to almost complete the spring preparations whilst we eat spinach from the polytunnel and parsnips, leeks and parsley out of the ground. The potatoes are chitted ready to go in on Good Friday – that’s tomorrow – as per long British tradition. It’s a bit of a daft tradition because Good Friday – as does Easter Day – wanders around all over the calendar simply because solar and lunar calendars can never quite sync; so for the church festival and for allotmenteers we revert to the lunar calendar for planting potatoes. Kind of Steiner lite, you might say.

The broad beans are in, the asparagus is just shooting and the damson (our damson) is in flower. Gratifyingly, the fruiting buds on the apples are looking hearty and – this is down to Madame – beautifully pruned. So it’s all looking good for another season. As I finished bottling the jam the other day, Madame was musing whether we might be that last generation to have learned these skills. On the other hand, our middle son and his partner are keen cooks and gardeners (well he’s a chef, like number three). And post lockdown there are far more young people on the site – which is marvellous too.

The first Cowslip this year, in Alveston Churchyard.

There’s nothing like a day on the allotment, with the sun on your back. It can lift the heaviest gloom. For some fine weather gardeners being tempted out for the first time this year, the plots may look a bit overgrown and neglected but that’s just nature doing what nature always does – healing its wounds. Although most of the time we don’t dig but just cultivate the surface; some infestations like Couch, Bindweed or Creeping Thistle really do need to be dug out carefully. That can be hard work, but the robins will come and keep you company and a host of birds will visit the turned earth and eat some pests (so long as it’s an occasional digging and not an annual religious ritual). We think too highly of ourselves if we come to believe that the Earth depends upon us for her vitality. Quite the reverse is, in fact, true. It’s we who depend absolutely on the incredible generosity and healing power of the Earth.

Eating beyond our means!

The Marie Antoinette moment
One of our own parsnips.

Two articles in the Guardian caught my attention this week. The first was tactfully entitled “Replace animal farms with micro-organism tanks, say campaigners“ – advocating the rewilding of 75% of the earth’s farming land with trees and then growing most of our food in microbial factory farms known as “precision” fermentation. “Precision” like “technical” is like sticking a plastic filigree on a rotten argument. A Range Rover is both technical and full of precision engineering but it ain’t helping climate change. Two counter arguments spring immediately to mind. Firstly, to achieve this technical miracle you’d have to destroy millions of livelihoods and absolutely crush local food cultures the world over. Secondly you’d have to turn over the feeding of the world to corporations whose present behaviour does not encourage any optimism that these behemoths would pick up the tab for supporting the ruined and the poor. Thanks, but no thanks. That’s a real food hater’s charter that could have been designed by Bayer/Monsanto. A fruitful third line of attack might investigate the real costs of so-called rewilding. Rewilded land still needs maintenance and a great deal of human intervention. And maybe a fourth line of investigation could discover whether the majority of us think that there’s a bit of a way-in being promoted for the intensive forestry industry to become the green fuel supplier of choice. Long live Drax – probably best not. Then there’s the impact on biodiversity of forestry monoculture. This kind of thinking is the reductio ad absurdum of reductionist thinking.

The failure to distinguish between the climate impact of intensive animal feedlots and small mixed farms undermines any climate solutions derived from these dodgy figures. Yes I do understand that de-intensifying farming will impact food production but the argument for eating less meat is now pretty well established for all except Cargills who profit handsomely from shipping feed grain around the world. Sadly for us the era of cheap food is over because the true costs are hidden by using both the earth’s atmosphere and her surface as a dump. We are subsidising our own ultimate destruction if we carry on as we are – but that’s no excuse for campaigners on either side sticking their fingers in their ears and saying la la la to shut out any opposing arguments.

So what about the cost of living?

Another Guardian article on the rising cost of popular foods gave a list of the ten foods whose price has inflated most over the past couple of years. They are:

  • Heinz tomato ketchup sauce – top down 460g 53%
  • Dolmio lasagne sauce 470g 47%
  • Heinz classic cream of chicken soup 400g 46%
  • Dolmio bolognese original pasta sauce 500g 46%
  • Anchor spreadable butter tub 500g 45%
  • Heinz cream of tomato soup 400g 44%
  • Colman’s classic mint sauce 165g 44%
  • Colman’s horseradish sauce 136g 44%
  • Batchelors super noodles BBQ beef flavour 90g 43%
  • Hovis granary wholemeal 800g 43%

So here’s the rather dangerous Marie Antoinette moment. IF we are to campaign effectively for change we can’t be telling people who are already living on the edge that they should be eating cake. So very hesitantly I’ll say that of the ten items on the list, we at the Potwell Inn are already making our own much cheaper versions of nine. Butter, sadly, is beyond our reach. OK so we grow 90% of the tomatoes we use but that’s in a 15′ X 10′ polytunnel on the allotment. But there are other sources of cheap tomatoes – you can often buy them by the box from veg markets clearing out their old stock. Lasagne sauce – come on .. really? Dolmio and Batchelors produce ultra processed foods and bread is so easy to bake you’d never want to go back to the supermarket version. What’s needed is a little investment in tools and equipment; some time; a few fairly simple to learn skills and a bit of forward planning.

Of course this is me with sixty years of practice, but believe me when we started we hadn’t a clue. We’ve always been relatively hard up, especially with three sons to raise – so buying the equipment was never easy, but here’s a lesson you’ll soon learn – always buy the best equipment you can afford. Don’t be seduced by Damascus steel knives and all that blather- I’ve tried most of them; all the top German brands, but my go-to knives for the past ten or fifteen years have come from IKEA! – and keep them sharp. Raw ingredients – except for meat and fish are relatively inexpensive so never be afraid to fail. Failures are your best teachers so don’t wimp out, figure out what went wrong and do it better next time. Meat is expensive if you insist on buying the most expensive cuts – but the cheap cuts are the ones that butchers take home. A piece of slow cooked brisket or pork belly is often far better flavoured. Always buy the best quality meat you can afford – but not too often. The lives of £4.00 chickens don’t bear thinking about, so buy free range and organic infrequently and then you’ll be able to spread the meat over several days and after that, make your own stock. The Potwell Inn fridge is never without a litre or so of stock. It’s the ultimate culinary pixie dust and it’s unbelievably easy to make – I’ll put the method up if anyone’s interested.

Eating is – as I was quoting the other day – an agricultural act. It’s also a sacramental act. To cook for someone you love is the greatest honour, and that’s a lesson we learned from Sid Harris our unorthodox Jewish tutor who was a witness at our wedding. I wish we could teach more people to cook – we taught the boys and two of them are now professional chefs; in fact our youngest came third in a National Pizza Competition only yesterday, and his older brother was once a finalist in the Young Chef of the Year awards.

So do the two halves of this post join up in any way? Well, I think they’re deeply related because the future of the earth relies on an enormous cultural change that affects our food culture, the way we travel, and the way the majority of people earn their living. Less could really be more in this unfamiliar vision, but trying to pile all the blame on the others is never going to work. Nothing suits the corporate giants better than watching their opponents exhaust themselves by fighting each other. The new world order needs to meet what are often portrayed as unreasonable demands. More time, better working conditions, better health and social care, better and broader education and training and an earth sustaining agriculture and horticulture. We’re not fighting for ourselves, we’re fighting for our grandchildren. The only certainty in all this is that we can’t go on as we are.

Gilding the lily – on a pie!

My Dad had a simple repertoire of basic food – it was grilled bacon. Aside from that he couldn’t cook at all. I went to see him one day and he said “Thank goodness you’ve come, I just offered to make my friend a coffee but I don’t know how to do it”. “Just add boiling water, Dad”. My Mum on the other hand was a plain cook, largely I think due to my Dad’s culinary conservatism; but – although I never realized this until recently – she broke all the stereotypes and not only taught my sister to cook but me too. I was only thinking about her the other day when I was coating a piece of fish with flour, egg and breadcrumbs. I have no idea how old I was but after she taught me how to do it, I clearly remember tipping the leftover flour back into the tin complete with the fishbones I’d removed from the fish. Why I did that I’ve no idea, but my Mum was a fierce complainer and so later, when she discovered the bones, she sent the bag back to Henry Jones on Stapleton Road and demanded a refund. I was too scared to tell her that I was the culprit but the flour mill sent three bags by way of compensation without questioning the likelihood of their product being contaminated by fishbones. The first home baked loaf of bread I ever encountered was made by her. In those days flour came in two sorts – plain and self raising both white and over refined, The plain was a soft flour, low in protein, and really only suited to cakes and so her bread never tasted as good as the loaves from the bakery at the top of the road. The process, though, was fascinating and has always stayed with me.

Today I was making a chicken and ham pie and as I rolled and cut out some decorative leaves I remembered that was another of the tricks she taught me. On another occasion I asked how she knew that the Yorkshire pudding batter was thick enough she didn’t say a word, but swished a spoon back and forth in the bowl making a distinctive plopping sound that I’ve never forgotten. I still use the same test today.

So I do realize that expecting young people to cook these days is a counsel of perfection however powerful the arguments in favour. I still think it’s worth a nag, though, because in these straitened times cooking is an act of resistance as well as a deeply satisfying and therapeutic (yes, that word again) way of spending some time. There’s a kind of alchemy to cooking; taking basic ingredients and by combining them creating something with depth and complexity. The combination of chicken, leeks and tarragon with good stock transcends its ingredients. All power, then, to the charities that are working so hard to teach young people how to do it. Two of our sons are professional chefs and the other is a more than competent cook too, but so many 18-30’s have grown up without any exposure to what I’d like to call real food which introduces the skill of making lovely meals from the cheapest raw ingredients and might even lead to a job eventually. Eating together creates powerful bonds too. Junk food makes us ill and in extreme cases even kills.

I’m profoundly grateful for my Mum’s departure from the 1950’s norm. Of course, at school, my sister learned dressmaking and home economics while I did some wood work and engineering – skills which should never have become gendered, but we both escaped with the cookery basics on which we could build and, in case you’re wondering, I could also sew a patch on my jeans or stitch on a button. At school one of our sons did at least get a chance to cook, but when he made a bechamel sauce properly his teacher said she’d never seen one that wasn’t lumpy before – oh dear! Just think – most of us can’t afford to eat out except for rare special occasions – but if you can cook you can eat like the rich; better in fact because they’re completely dependent on other people to feed them.

At the Potwell Inn we make five meals from a medium sized chicken with some lovely chicken stock, using up even the leftovers. A simple rolled breast of lamb or piece of pork belly makes the most fabulous and inexpensive meal, and ironically a piece of unpasteurised handmade Cheddar turns out to be far more economical than the cheaper industrial product because the flavour is so much better. Our waste is greatly diminished too, with all our paper, cardboard and peelings going straight to the compost heap.

Being hard up is tough going and our hearts go out to the young people who are struggling. This culture sucks the life out of us if we let it, but we don’t have to accept the King’s Shilling and become dependent. Being just that bit independent with the allotment and the kitchen lets us lift two fingers to the bailiff and the beadle.

Suddenly it’s nearly autumn and the kitchen is calling to me.

Bath, England, United Kingdom Thursday, 16 Aug 2018, 7:41 pm BST 16°C Mostly Sunny

b9974c3390f2d9db32521928a836e7c6Maybe it’s just the way of things, but here we are, halfway through August and yet there are hints of autumn lurking behind every hedge. When I think about it, I can recall easily that each season carries the remnants of the old and harbingers of the new. In deep winter the trees carry their buds even as some late and decaying leaves still cling to the twigs. In the spring, there are days of hope as the sun breaks through and then nights of frost that remind you that winter’s not done with yet, and in late summer my mind resonates with the shrinking hours of daylight and applies itself, like a squirrel, to preparing for the winter. It’s a favourite season and yet the harvest touches my melancholic soul every year by modulating from the major to the minor key. Jams, pickles and preserves become the centre of focus and I’m drawn to the kitchen. The fruits and vegetables that are coming off the allotment each day are almost overwhelming in their richness and numbers and finding ways of cooking or keeping them becomes an obsession. But there are only two of us and my deepest atavistic urges are to feed a family of five, or eight or ten. Today I thought of Christmas for the first time even though we’ve not finished sowing for autumn. It’s raining as I write this, and we’ve had plenty of rain in the last week. We longed for rain yet when it arrives like the Seventh Cavalry to rescue the besieged vegetables I think that somehow, if we could have just one more glorious day, I’d find the energy to go on watering. Never satisfied! I can hear my mother saying it.

In the Guardian this morning there was a piece about the way our culture is rapidly losing its cooking skills. The writer cited Jane Grigson’s “English Cooking” and wrote that it doesn’t contain any recipe or instruction for making pastry because she didn’t think it worthwhile wasting print on something so well understood it needed no explanation. The proofs of the article apparently came back with innumerable queries and questions from young subeditors who had no idea of the basic skills. Our three sons are all good cooks and two of them are professional chefs, but their various partners over the years have seemed suspicious of the very idea of cooking from scratch – as if it were a sign of domestic servitude.

In another piece yesterday George Monbiot explored the reasons behind the epidemic of obesity and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that in our overstretched, overstressed lives, the food culture that embodied so much more than food has been systematically eroded – quite deliberately – by the food processing industry, and the results are as depressing as the results of any other kind of addiction. We have simply moved from one form of servitude to another, and the much cited ever increasing life expectancy has turned out to be yet another fraud. We’re sadder and sicker and lonelier than ever.

 

On the radio yesterday there was a piece on a new computer game craze, discussing whether it was a good or a bad thing for children. By all accounts it’s borderline addictive with children forsaking almost anything else including face-to-face contact with other children in order to play for hours. As a retired parent I don’t have much trouble deciding that children spending hours slaughtering even virtual people is a bad idea. One young woman working in the billion pound industry even ventured that to deny your children access to these games would ruin their carer prospects. Well, in Mandy Rice Davis’ phrase, she would say that wouldn’t she.

Do all these things tie in together? Is it just the usual self indulgent longing for the past that always afflicts old people like me? I can’t help thinking that these disappearing cultural values and their associated skills are as important as they ever were, and somehow we need to hold on to them for the future when they will be needed by another generation.

 

Today we cleared half of the sweetcorn away and I prepped the second cold frame with SylvaGrow as planned. But I’m getting cold feet about sowing carrots there as we’re so far behind and I really can’t see them coming to anything. It would be more sensible to postpone the experiment and fill the frames with stuff we really know we can grow, some spring onions for instance and winter lettuce. We’ve grown so many lettuce and salad leaves this year but the supply we’ve created outstrips our appetite so much it feels wasteful. I’m not that keen on green salad leaves and frankly some of them taste bitter. So that’s a matter for further discussion. But we picked lovely beetroot grown in coir pellets and simply planted in. I think we can call that experiment a complete success, We also picked runner beans, radishes and cucumbers, and had an improvised tasting of the chillies. The apache chillies are very hot indeed, and the pearls quite tasty and mild. The Jalapeño I picked wasn’t really ripe enough to do justice to its eventual flavour and heat.

We’ve reached the tipping point in the year when at last we’re clearing ground faster than we can plant it. Charles Dowding’s book on winter veg arrived today and it’s clear we’ve missed the boat on quite a number of opportunities. Next season we’ll do it better. In the evening I cooked a flan with the calbrese we picked yesterday. The plants are doing well and will give us some good meals. We had shopped for wholemeal flour to make pastry and I made some tonight. It’s very hard going and I almost abandoned it while I was rolling it out as it splits so easily and has next to no plasticity, like working with porcelain or perhaps heavily grogged crank mixture. But with a bit of cursing, persistence and some running repairs glued in with egg white it all came together in the end and tasted delicious.

 

But the last word on the day belongs to the Sweet Cicily which Stella discovered growing once again. For such a frail plant with a history of abuse and neglect, not to mention being felled twice by slugs, it just keeps coming back. Like Robert Bruce’s spider it never gives up – an inspiring end to a slightly melancholic day.