Jamie’s America
Jamie Oliver is important. I’ll admit that’s not the first word that pops into my head when he comes up in conversation but upon some recent reflection, I think that he is. He defines an era of sorts and at the turn of a decade, it seems a better time than most to cast a brief retrospective glance over his work, before diving into his latest book.
He has been at the vanguard of commercialising our nation’s increasing interest in the food we eat for the last ten years or so, and to a certain extent even spurring this interest on. Along with Ramsay, he has lead this charge with resounding success; demolishing the fourth wall in TV cooking (”ere camera-man, whatdyoufinka vis lamb? Laavly!”), simplifying in home cooking what had been made prissy and overly-complicated by the likes of Gary Rhodes, his now formidable and accessible publishing repertoire, his restaurants and his slightly baffling but very profitable tie-up with Sainsburys. Most vitally though, there have been his very public projects.
I think we can already look back on his work on school dinners, getting jobless youth to work in his restaurant 15 and most recently his home-spun initiative The Ministry of Food as typifying a dichotomy of modern times: on the one hand we know more about food, we understand more about the relationship between diet and lifestyle yet on the other obesity has become a serious health concern of modern times. While we are increasingly conscious of fair trade, freedom farming and free-range eggs, we also ‘Go-large’ and consume more instant meals than ever before. Throughout this, Jamie has captured the zeitgeist of this uncomfortable relationship by trying to give some of this knowledge to the have-nots. In this his newest book on American cuisine, he continues this pattern by following the gaze of one nation which already rests upon another; that of the Brits on the new nation of hope across the pond. In so doing, while not meddling so directly in the social side of educating the UK in the ways of food, he does show us a new side to himself.
So what does Jamie’s America offer us? In short, it’s a recipe book and travelogue based on his recent TV series. I must admit I didn’t warm to the TV series much, mostly due to his attempts to empathise inauthentically with a gang who had been dragged-up in some serious hardship on the streets of LA, but I was pleasantly surprised by the book. It is an inviting, warm and genuinely enjoyable collection of recipes punctuated with commentary about his travels (with maybe the odd posed picture of himself too many). It owes some presentational elements to the likes of Nigel Slater’s Kitchen diaries a few years ago with its daylight lit reportage-style photography (done in this case by David Loftus) with a similar ‘wax-paper from the larder’ style of reproduction. Its mixture of recipes strikes a nice balance between tributes to those who he met along the way and ones which he has added his own distinctive accent too.
His enthusiasm and interest for ‘real’ American food can be quite entertaining and even inspiring - whether that’s to make your own BBQ rub or a Fresh Broccoli salad.
The book can feel a little over-produced at points; photography, collage, montage, punchy copy-writing, pithy little tales and lots of self-reference. It may be cookbook-making by numbers, but it is done well and it has lots for the casual reader to dip in and out for. The good news is that whatever your style of cookery, area of interst or personal taste, there’s plenty for everyone. He visits six culinarily distinct areas of the USA from NYC to the Navajo reserves of Arizona resulting in a bright and colourful spread that ranges from a Chilli Con Carne made with coffee to Beer-Butt Chicken (which is exactly as it sounds) via Breakfast Tortillas, with a few more subtle re-tellings of traditional American dishes like Pumpkin Pie.
The Navajo section of the book is for me the most interesting as its the closest thing he finds to indigenous, as opposed to European-settler influenced cookery. He clearly has a passion for discovering ‘authentic’ food, and does so impressively here, albeit with his inimitable interpretations, additions and ‘twists’; Chicken mole with chocolate, Peach Cobbler, and Hot Churros (small dipping donuts). It’s a great book for anglicising some classic American recipes like Pumpkin pie where Jamie roasts the pumpkin to keep in the flavour (rather than boil them) and reduces the added sugar content to levels we might feel less guilty about.
The point of any cookery book should be to get the author’s take on food, for their methods, approach to life and personality to shine through and ideally to infect the reader with a little of that passion too. I’m glad to say Jamie does that here - for me at least. Not since his early books have I felt the need to attack one of his recipes but I’ll be giving the quirky, frugal and efficient-looking Beer-Butt Chicken a bash come summer BBQ time and Chocolate Bread Pudding with Beer Sauce as soon as I get the chance.
It feels like after a number of years as something of a food missionary in this country, Jamie has gone back to what he enjoys most by bringing us an entertaining, interesting and fun book showcasing a diverse selection of food from the country which continues to hold fascination for us. It’s easy reading and importantly is likely to help you out of a tight spot when you’re bored of knocking up another roast chicken or spag-bol for your friends and family. So long as you do it without the assistance of a Jamie Oliver patented Flavour Shaker, you can even do it with your head held high.
Pukka!
Hungry City: How Food Shapes our Lives by Carolyn Steel
Filed under: Food History, Food Industry, Food Science
This is not a gastro-book. Neither is it an escapist holiday page-turner about the joys of food. It’s much better than that. It is a thorough, well-researched, broad-reaching and entertaining essay about how we in Britain have come to have our current relationship with food. This relationship is carefully characterised with a wide range of sources as disconnected, lazy and at times purely nonsensical.
In order to get there, the author takes us through the history books drawing relationships between how we eat (and have eaten) and a myriad of factors such as our predominant mode of production, the architecture of our kitchens, fashion and even our attitude to waste.
It is clear from this well-constructed argument that the author feels not only that there is something fundamentally sick at the heart of our current relationship with food but that just as the Thames Embankment was built under Victoria’s reign to rid the capital of ’the great stench’ via enormous sewer pipes, so we can do something to remedy our current predicament.
She talks of ‘vertical food cultures’ such as in Italy where, although with influences across history and world cultures has a core food tradition which makes home cookery and professional cheffing bind together into one self-perpetuating whole. We have mostly lost this according to the sats in the book and having followed the American model of dining out and getting our the food to ‘perform’ and seemingly ‘offer the world in every mouthful’, we have become an obese, bite-sized, MTV-attention-spanned society who widely admit we cannot recognise basic ingredients - let alone cook.
In among the thorough study is peppered numerous food facts including that the French invented the restaurant (not really a surprise and does explain a lot about Parisians) and that the now ubiquitous tomato didn’t make an appearance in Italian cookery at all until the 17th century when it was imported from Peru as an ornamental fruit
This is more than an academic manifesto for foodies who will no doubt when reading it sagely nod their heads in agreement about obesity statistics and feel quietly smug about the fact that they know exactly where their meat is sourced from - most of the time; it is well-informed, well-thought out and well written. I challenge anyone to read it and not learn something surprising about how we got to where we are through numerous wars and industrialisation. If not just food facts then maybe something of how disconnected we have all become as a culture, not just from our food but from each other.
Carolyn Steel is not the first to say it but change does start with us. If Jamie Oliver was even half as informed on the subjects covered here - I reckon he’d be dangerous enough to initiate some real change.
Doing without Delia: Tales of Triumph and Disaster in a French Kitchen by Michael Booth
You have to give Michael Booth some serious credit for this escapade. Rather than just refusing to use recipe books, he ritualistically burns all those he owns (except one) and moves along with his young family to Paris, a notoriously difficult and inhospitable place in itself to live or even get a flat in, and enrol in the world’s most highly acclaimed, difficult and expensive cookery courses in the world run by some of Europe’s grumpiest men; Le Cordon Bleu.
It’s quite the adventure as you see his progress, his daily stresses, his myths being busted and some of his dreams dismissed, although, as with many books in the travelogue/adventure genre one never knows as a reader how much of the background is kept from you - like just how poor are they really if they can afford to move to an apartment which sounds like it would make Carrie Bradshaw swoon in a heartbeat?
Michael Booth describes in great detail not only his personal motivation for the course itself and place he may go beyond it but also how it unfolds at every step in some detail. From being taught how to wash his hands properly to what it is like working for free, but on very public display in a Three Michelin Starred Paris restaurant. One of the most telling comments for me comes from a chef at this establishment whose view of the production-line nature of such cooking - all beit prepared by highly trained professionals and presented in pristine surroundings - is ‘like McDonalds but with better ingredients’.
Fans of Masterchef - which personally I don’t count myself among due to the overly clinical way that food is judged out of any
Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture
This is not about coffee. Nor is it about its tastes, its modern gourmet guise or its effects on us. It is about big business, and how one came to dominate high streets throughout the world, driven by the design and determination of one man. It is about how one man can take a product which is undergoing a race for the bottom and with the right marketing turn it into the planet’s largest franchise. If you’re looking for a gap in the market to fill with your next business idea, this book is for you.
Starbucks’ ubiquity in The States is not something I was really cogniscent of before I read this. While they are market leaders in the UK, Costa Coffee are not far behind - with Caffe Nero not far behind them. Yet in the great US of A, if you added-up the number of coffee shop branches owned by all the other chains, they do not come to more than half of Starbucks’ outlets. This book was an education for me in the current state of play on the other side of the pond – it really is a different world over there. McDonalds bears the brunt of our anti-capitalist and anti-American protestation in this country, with an interlude several years ago of anti-anti-competitive practices which Starbucks were involved in passing once we realised how much we appreciated a convenient latte on our way to work (that excludes most of the chavs and reflective-jacket clad workers).
The story of Starbucks presented here is quite an interesting one, which in this book is given just enough room to breathe among the business stats and talking heads from those involved. The now famous (in business circles at least) Howard Shultz was a travelling salesman who noticed an upturn in espresso machine sales and so latched onto this trend, doing some research along the way over in Italy, where they actually know how to make strong coffee well, and opened up his first coffee chain Il Giornale. As you may have gathered from the fact that you’ve never heard of it, this failed to have the desired effect. His role in the growth of an existing coffee house named Starbucks (named after a character in Moby Dick) began soon after with a fair share of false starts. This was then followed by the kind of growth plan which would make Hitler’s annexing of the Rhineland look like a family day-out to Margate.
He comes across as an ambitious, slick and probably quite unpleasant man. While his shareholders love him – no surprises there then, “Go Starbucks – whoo yeah!” - he appears to achieve this by pumping out the kind of fanciful rhetoric that would not go down so well over this side of the Atlantic. As the author points out, Schultz’s retrospective description of the first time he tried a Starbucks coffee – ‘wowing him, causing him to convulse, his head tipping back in involuntary shock and awe etc’- just smacks of high-fiving corporate American nonsense. But he is clearly not in love with Starbucks or coffee so much as he is with the heady aroma of freshly-ground success. He is a businessman who seems unlikely to me to break the first rule of marketing; to never fall in love with your brand as it will blind your judgement.
The Americanly named author Taylor Clark strikes a readable tone of objective cynicism. He gets as far an conducting an interview with the great man - which neither party seem that impressed with. The most fascinating part for me was about the state of the coffee market in the USA before Starbucks hit their stride. It was so terrible, that it makes their success seem almost inevitable. For me, it made sense of all those movie references to pots of diesel-like black, treacly coffee in truck-stops and offices. The bottomless coffee pot offered by so many US establishments since the consumer boom of the 50s is incidentally one of the suggested causes of the plummeting of coffee quality, and it’s not hard to see why.
Fascinating marketing, but then when post-rationalised, almost all successfully marketed companies look like they had a genius at the helm. Clearly fallable, Howard Schultz has created a world-wide monster which, after reading this, I cannot help respect – in the same way I respect someone like King Midas. It is interesting to read from a UK perspective as it highlights some clear differences; that while the US market was enduring some awful, instant, steamed, dyed, flavour-injected, freeze-dried, robusta-filled blends, we really weren’t doing that badly. McDonalds brought us the hamburger in the 70’s, which was never that widespread before. But being closer to Europe than our colonial cousins, we had access to decent coffee if we so desired, though mostly after dinner of course.
So a story of the modern giant with some good interviews, and well-researched to boot. But if you want to know your Mocha from your Java, Arabica from Robusta and how the Croissant made it to France (trust me, that one’s interesting), then I recommend you read The Devil’s Cup. It is a travelogue history book by a young American writer who ventures around Europe, the Middle East and Africa in search of the bown bean’s origin. He entertains various theories about its link to civil unrest and which countries have done better in through the ages as a result of their tipples; the ones drinking tea, coffee or cheap ale for breakfast (place your bets now.!).
There is a section in Starbucked which gives you a potted history of coffee, with both authors pretty-much agreeing – at least on the most popular myths and explanations - but to really broaden out the picture on where coffee sits in western society, this second (though much older book) makes for excellent reading. The fact that the ballot box, the notice board and Lloyds shipping insurance were all born in London coffee houses was enough to get my attention alone, but there is much more where that came from. It not only expands upon some important points, it does so with personal interest and a little adventure tossed in. Our author finds himself on a boat full of refugees entering Yemen in a less that legal fashion at one point. When he encounters border police who arrest and interview him, he is very happy about it on the grounds that he will at least have a comfy bed. Has he never seen an Amnesty International advert? This volume was in all fairness written before 9/11 when I think the US traveller could enjoy more of a feeling of international protection.
This history of coffee is woven with his travelogue-style exploits which you would expect of a writer trying to make his book more interesting. And he succeeds in this, but only to an extent. There is no romantic involvement, no real aim to journey (other than to write the book itself) and no real opinions given on anything. As a fact-based venture, it is interesting and quite fun, but Around Ireland with a Fridge, it is not.
Right, I’m popping out for a fredo-fresca triple-shot cinnamon-whip no-foam venti latte with a hazlenut twist. Except that I’m not really. Because I’m British and it’s a Sunday, I’m going to dig the cafetiere out of the cupboard to enjoy with the Sunday papers.
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David
I don’t think there’s anything I can say about Elizabeth David that has not already been said; by contemporary food writers, by reviewers, by columnists, by documentary makers or by the dramatists who depicted her as a sex-obsessed high society maverick who was careering around the restaurants of the continent while our mothers all ate powdered egg.
What I can say is that as an introduction to the works of someone so widely influential - in fact often cited as the most influential food writer of the 20th century - expressive and historically important to the culinary heritage of Britain, I can heartily recommend this book. It is charming, amusing and fascinating. It transports the reader through her life and offers a flavour of British society at the time. Michelin starred restaurants feature along with smaller family-run cafes. Her tone may seem imperious at times but Elizabeth David was no food snob.
This is a collection of articles from publications which had an upper-middle class, affluent and right of centre following - The Spectator and Vogue mostly - and as such, the writing would not jarr so much with her original following as they do today. At once, David is honest and occasionally disparaging but always entertaining. My favourite passage comes early on in the book when she describes numerous trips to a French restaurant in a well-to-do neighbourhood of London. It makes you realise how bad eating out must have been in England at the time if this hotch-potchof factory-made pate and salad garnish with flashing moments of sincerity (peppered with moody service) is a place she liked revisiting over and over;
“Investigation of other local resources has produced the Beau Geste, an establishment situated on ther Kensington-Fulham-Chelsea borders. In France, you would not go into this restaurant, but in London SW3, you do. The pate is of M.Pigeon’s own confection. It is not discreditable. The red wine sauce with escalope is. It is a thick brown paste. A fork would stand upright in it. The escalopes could be veal. They could just as esily be the bedroom slippers I threw away last week. ” Through all this our author manages to see charm, civility and honesty. Her Francophilia does border on blind madness at points, but as a counterpoint to any prevailing anti-continentalism there might have been at the time, it must have been quite refreshing to her enlightened readers.
Just as Mrs Beeton was not the pinny-wearing straight-lacer that many of us have at some point imagined her to be, David was something of a loose-cannon herself. Her seemingly perpetual tours of Europe were with a married man under the funding of her irritated family - and all this before WWII. I read this book to see if I could understand something of the influence behind our modern attitudes to food. I feel now as if I have struck gold. Ever since my local butcher told me to “ignore your Jamie and Nigella- they all nicked it off of Elizabeth David” a couple of years ago, I have been intrigued. As soon as you start reading, you can see where contemporaries like Nigel Slater might have found inspiration. The similarity in terms of mixture is uncanny - one part recipe, three parts subjective description with a liberal dusting of strongly-held opinion about the purpose and value of food.
“It does seem to me that with so much talk about art vs fine ingredients somebody might mention that there is also the art, or the discipline, call it what you like, of leaving well alone”. This compares very closely to the opening sentence of one of Slater’s recent bestsellers. Simplicity is a golden thread which both these sumptuous food writers relish in and try to impart on their readers.
It now all seems so very innocent. Descriptions of French hotels, cafes, portly ladies cooking and the superiority of the boulangerie over the sliced white loaf which we favoured so heavily in this country for so long - just all seems so obvious today. You only have to take a turn around any supermarket to see the flourishing stock-lines of Taste the difference pain rustique to realise that we are much further away from le sliced white than we were twenty years ago. But when you begin to imagine what eating in Britain must have been like then, this book takes on a life beyond mere travel writing - it is historicaly important.
A large part of why she was so influential must lie in the backdrop of rationing at the time - that and the emergence of the middle classes for whom the kitchen was a visible part of the home. She came up with ways of glorifying the mechanics of cookery to our guests, rather than hide them away. Again, while this may seem obvious to us t0day (have a french farmhouse table in your kitchen for earthy, intimate soirees which hint at your honest aproach to food), she was suggesting we be more continental in post-war Britain. When the continent was war-ravaged and being viewed with suspicion.
In a short article called Waiting for lunch, written in 1984 but never published, she extolls the virtues of a bruschetta-style dish of warm bread rubbed with garlic and served with salt and tomatoes. David is sure this will never catch on over here. Her disappointment in the British public’s uptake of frozen and convenience foods is tangeable too as she remarks after this that if this dish were translated by the English, “there would be a curry version and a cheese variation and a super-gigantic one with bacon, lettuce, onion rings and radishes”. I’m not sure about the radishes (maybe in 1984), but you can certainly see her point.
The book also has its practical virtues, despite not existing as an instructonal book. The ‘Ommelette’ of the title was in fact one of the things that attracted me - as I hold the cooking of a good omelette to be core to enjoying cookery. If you can take your favourite pan and whip-one-up without more than a few minutes fuss and produce something wholesome and tasty, then maybe you can see the same joy in life that David saw in life.
This is a lovely book with real moments of character and seems to represent the tip of the iceberg where David is concerned. The next time I’m asked that question about who I’d invite to my perfect dinner party, there would be no contest. The only question would be whether she’d be happier at the table or in the kitchen.
Recipe Roadtest: The Proof of the Pudding. . .
If you have read Part One, you’ll know that I have been troubled recently; suffering from cake envy. After my last poor attempts to make one, every time I eat someone else’s sponge creation, I slather and chomp but with an underlying niggle that I wish I could do the same for others. Nigel Slater’s guidance failed to see me cross the finish line so I turned to Delia to add some lift in my mixture.
The result? A Victoria sponge made up of two separate halves with a layer of whipped cream and raspberries in between where the main purpose of the mixture was to level-up the tessellating wonkiness of the sponge discs. The good news was that is looked okay, and didn’t taste too bad either. It had the texture a nd appearance of an actual cake. The making of it was a different story, in fact a scene of semi-carnage, lacking the sense of control I normally enjoy in my cooking. It was a good advert for the reintroduction of a more rigorous home-economics programme in our schools.
Having turned to Delia’s How to Cook Book One, I sifted flower, holding the sieve high above the mixing bowl to bring as much air into the mixture as possible - creating a snowy beauty that your average downhill skiier would have been honoured to carve-up. All good so far. Introducing the other ingredients, things were looking all too easy. Then I ‘mixed them together with an electric hand whisk’. At this point, it started flying up the walls, over the hob, onto my apron, and generally everywhere except where I had hoped it would be. Enough remained in the bowl to make a cake. Such excellent news. It was at this point that I wanted to raise my hand. Food instruction in writing is all very well but it does rely on a certain amount of trial and error. A teacher would definitely have been useful, there to give me that sour-faced look of disapproval mixed with the same useful tip she’d just given all the other egg-covered pupils. I styled-my way through the whirling dervish of cream-coloured ooze I found myself in, using the classic wooden for an old-school rescue.
I placed the spring-form tin containing half the mixture firmly to one side of our unevenly heated fan oven. At thirty minutes, it had risen. Not prettily or as evenly as I had distributed my mixture but it had risen but this was marked improvement from Nigel’s all-butter lead-cake.
I improvised the construction phase, spreading a layer of jam on the two halves, adding whipped cream and fresh, halved raspberries. The result was a slightly uneven but moist and fluffy cake which looked solidly cake-like. Delia’s instructions had been clear, precise and even gave tips on how to improvise with the mixture’s consistencies. I forewent the passion fruit and mascarpone filling because I have a belief about making a sponge cake - hence my obsession with making one. That it should be simple and that it should not cost the earth. There is nothing more homely than cleverly making a thrifty cake for friends with your own hands, then sitting around enjoying it with some chat.
In this case, it is with a cup of Sunday morning coffee and a musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Well, each to their own.
My next ambition in this pursuit is to follow a recipe in Eliza Acton’s recipe book of 1854 entitled Modern Cookery for Private Families.The language may be slightly impenatrable and they are referred to as “sweet poisons” but if there’s one area of British cookery which hasn’t shifted much in the last century and a half, it’s a nice cake.
Levi Roots’ Reggae Reggae Cook Book
I’m not a huge fan of celebrity chefs. In fact I’m not a huge fan of celebrity. To me, the recognition that the bloke in that film we’re watching was also in that other thing we saw at the cinema, (and I think he’s married to that other girl who was a child actress and was maybe in a couple of episodes of The Bill once - yes, really!) registers pretty low on my radar of stuff that really matters.
But Levi Roots, I have time for. He is not a grasper of the limelight. He does not love the sound of his own voice (except of course when he’s singing in one of his many musical incarnations). No, this man has lived - I mean really lived. He’s crossed the world, been inside, been nominated for a MOBO, brought up a family, been a fixture of the Notting Hill Carnival and of course he’s been on BBC2’s Dragon’s Den with his guitar and subsequently launched his own range of cooking sauces which are now supermarket bestsellers.
So given the similarity between the cover of this book and a bottle of his famous Reggae Reggae sauce, isn’t this book just another cynically executed phase in the commercial plan masterminded by Dragon’s Den Dragon Peter Jones? Well yes and no. Yes - in that it is a paint-by-numbers exercise in which Levi’s child-like style of writing is invoked to bring us his brief autobiography which is then woven quite clumsily throughout the book with sections of Caribbean recipes with bright photographs on colourful pages. Be warned though that the prose themselves are reminiscent of Roger Red Hat, and when recipes don’t fill up a page, a jaunty creole saying - with much-needed English translation - is slapped on in there to keep you going. If you understand them all on first reading, you’re a better man than I, as in ”When yuh neighbour beard catch fire, tek water wet fe yuh - Learn from others’ mistakes”.
And no - in that despite its obvious commercial motivation, I really like this book. It is bright, colourful, inspiring and unyieldingly happy. It gives a simple introduction to Caribbean cookery, which as Levi (real name Keith in case you’ve always wondered) highlights has not really permeated wholesale into British culture. I live in South East London near to Brixton (where he lived with his parents and was caught in the crossfire of the Brixton race riots) and Peckham where every day of the week, shop-fronts are opened-up and piled-high with yams, okra and sweet potato. And yet I have bought more bottles of RR sauce from Sainsbury’s than I have bought rice n’ peas or Jerk chicken from one of those stalls. So in my eyes, he has already made it more accessible by his sauce to us supermarket-shopping whiteys than previous generations were exposed to. It may only be a sauce but it’s a start.
I don’t think Caribbean cooking has really made its way into the culinary heart of our nation. When wondering exactly why, I am brought to mind of an episode of the 90s sit-com Chef with Lenny Henry in which he, for one episode, turned his talents as Head Chef away from the French-influenced modern European cuisine in which he specialised to the dishes of his motherland. In particular, when he produced a spread which included Caribbean favourite ‘cow-foot and bean’. Needless to say it didn’t go down all that well with is wife. Indeed in this book are recipes for cornmeal porridge, Rasta pasta and special coleslaw which don’t feel that inviting to me - but the majority of it looks good. Warming, gentle spices which originated mostly from India are blended with goat, beef, lots of chicken and preserved fish (including the intriguing blocks of saltfish which came about through the necessity of having to preserve food in the hot climes of the Carib). I am looking forward to trying a cook-up of rice n peas with curried goat when the weather warms a little more into BBQ season.
If you want a fun cookbook that will walk you through the basics of rasta-style cookery, I cannot think of one which could do it with more zest for life, enthusiasm or simplicity. It brings a lot more than that though - this is more inspiring in terms of the life story it tells, allbeit demolishable to the average reader in about twenty minutes. Levi’s unsquashable, entrepreneurial spirit should be inspiration to us all and it permeates through to every page. Cheesy at times and occasionally repetitious (with the phrase ‘dragon-slayer’ making a few appearances too many for my liking - we get the pun Keith and it was clearly Peter Jones’s idea to say that anyway), you cannot help but feel encouraged in your daily life by the fact that he used his last tenner to get a cab to the filming of an episode of Dragon’s Den which was to change his life so dramatically. After what had gone before, it sounds like he deserved a break.
If all celebrities were as interesting, full of life, happy and downright hungry for it all as Levi, I might even start reading OK magazine.
Fighting the Banana Wars and other Fairtrade Battles, by Harriet Lamb
Fair Trade has been around for a few years now and for most of us has had to share voice in the public domain with the competing virtues of organic, carbon-neutral, free-range and non-GM amongst others. If you want to know what it stands for, where it started, how it’s doing and what you can do to help, this is a book for you.
In it, Harriet Lamb - director of the Fair Trade Foundation - talks us first-hand through the journey of the movement from the banana fields of Central America to meetings with M&S via the successful launch of the first bar of Green and Blacks’ Maya Gold. It is a detailed diary of what she and the movement have had to face to get as far as they have done. There are some heart-rending accounts in here, of farmers who have either been made infertile by the pesticides they have been forced to use or have seen hideous deformation of their newly-born children. It s truly upsetting to read that something as simple as buying your bananas from Sainsbury’s instead of ASDA can have such a direct impact on the livelihood of others. And we’re talking about aspects of their lives which we would take for granted like basic health and water supply. One can’t help but feel that if we in the Western world knew of a group of countries who could dramatically improve on our welfare and levels of poverty with such simple acts as changing which brand they supported, wars would be waged without a second’s hesitation.
So, what can we do as consumers? Well Harriet has devoted a section at the back of the book to this - a concise ten step guide. I suspect that for those who choose to buy this book, those will be the most well-thumbed leaves. It’s simple, practical and empowering. Within a day of picking up this book (and not being a follower or dedicated supporter of the FT label), I had put to my company the idea of stocking FT coffee and tea in our kitchens and meeting rooms. After all, why not?
But should we change our habits? After all, doesn’t the market naturally find a happy medium where the consumer and the producer are both happy? And besides, we often want to put the best on our tables, in our mixing bowls and into our children’s packed lunches. It used to be that fair trade coffee was only drunk by the brave and those first bars of FT chocolate were as granular as the soil they came from (though I must confess I only know this by reputation as rumour was enough to put me off) but now this excuse is less valid. The supply and consumption of FT products have risen dramatically over the last decade so they must be doing something right.
A final question then; should you read this book? If you want to hear about fair trade, international relations or what the supermarkets are up to with farmers in developing nations from someone who has been at the heart of the action for over a decade, yes. It is quite detailed and at times either sad, stressful or a little dry - so for the rest of us doesn’t really represent holiday reading.
I think Harriet would much rather that you actively looked for the Fair Trade logo the next time you’re in the supermarket and gave it a go. You never know, you might even like it. And if you still feel that this isn’t enough to help struggling farmers in the developing world, I’ll leave you with a pearl of wisdom from Victor Perezgrovas, a Mexican farmer who when explaining fair trade to his own brethren simply replied “Many little raindrops in the mountains make the mighty rivers flow”.
To hear a podcast of the full lecture which Harriet held at the LSE in Feb ‘09, please follow the link below. It’s 1:30 and features Fairtrade Businessman Adam Brett and his Father Dr Teddy Brett who is a well known figure at the university.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm#generated-subheading1
Recipe Roadtest: My First Cake, Nigel vs Delia
We all love a bit of cake, don’t we? And it’s pretty cheap to buy: even a posh, moist, rich chocolate cake from a stall or bakery would set you back less than a tenner. So why would we want to make one? Well if you enjoy your cooking, the feeling that you couldn’t make a Victoria sponge if you want to can be somewhat frustrating. It’s like being a good tennis player with the backhand of an old man swatting a fly.
I don’t mind sharing that I already have some notches in the wooden spoon of failure. Trusting Nigel Slater, as have done for so long, to help teach me in all ways culinary, I thought he’d be the man to help locate my very own baker within. I was a little disappointed however, when a year ago I selected from his book Appetite, a recipe for ‘a simple cake to be served with summer berries’. I invested in the requisite equipment - springform tin, greaseproof paper, spatula - and of course the basic ingredients. I followed the recipe word-for-word, pre-heated the oven and slammed it in, bristling with pride and anticipation following my (by this stage, many hours of) planning, toil and well-floured sleeves. It came out smelling great and looking like someone had run it over. I simply couldn’t understand.
The answer was simple - I had estimated my quantities, which as any baker will tell you is pure suicide. Neither did I own an electric mixer at the time so resorted to the old-fashioned bowl and spoon approach. (There was just something about all those arty pictures in his books of wooden-handled vegetable knives handed down through the family and chopping blocks which have been in use since the Crimean War that lulled me into thinking this would be a charming, yet still workable option.)
So then - a year, a set of electronic scales and a Kenwood mixer later, and it was time for my second attempt. Miraculously, the cake came out exactly the same. Heavy a lead, it was a fat disc of rather buttery, sweet dough. It tasted ok but as I’d baked it for some visiting friends, i felt slightly embarrassed but worse than that - I was mystified.
Taking a moment to reflect and regroup as I ate a wedge of the dense cake with my tea, I considered my options (incidentally - what it lacked in texture, it more than made up for in terms of buttery-goodness!). I would crack this baking malarky, and being relatively self-sufficient in these matters, I wanted to find guidance in the printed page. So who could help me in the endevour? Scanning my cook-book shelf, I spotted the almost unreadably pale spines of Delia’s How to Cook Book One. My mother had bought this for me around the time I went to University. It struck a chord as I mooched this time around because I remember the effectiveness with which she had taght me to make a decent omelette. Could the woman with such an excellent grasp of simplicity, mastering the basics and of explaining things to her readers in plain language be the one to help my mixture rise?
Well as I was guided through the process by the section of the book entitled Cakes and Biscuits for Beginners (sounded promising!) and roadtested her Classic Sponge Cake (with passion fruit filling), I certainly hoped so.
Click back soon to check out the thrilling conclusion. There will be icing sugar up the walls, there will be emotions - but above all there will be pictures. . .
The 10 Best Food Books of All Time
1: An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David
This is simply the most evocative collection of food writing of the 20th Century. The inimitable pioneer of food-writing may have taken her influence from the author of the first modern recipe book, the Victorian Eliza Acton, but she brought up to date a fine heritage which has continued with the likes of Nigel Slater. Discovering Elizabeth David even existed for me was a bit like finding out that your favourite bands had influences of their own.
2: Appetite: So what do you want to eat today? by Nigel Slater
I want to eat NOW Nigel - thanks to all your juice-filled, crust-peppered and goo-laden descriptions of food and the act of cooking it, I’m salivating at the chops! Just reading the line about how he refuses to teach anyone how to cook a steak well done was enough to keep my interest for another 50 pages.
3: Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson
Whimsical and delightful - written in handy bite-sized segments. Perfect if you’re a busy person who wants to read a little of foodie wonder before drifting off.
4: The River Cottage Fish Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
The darling of middle class eco-foodies from Surbiton to Glastonbury. So much love, devotion, time, energy and fun has clearly gone into compiling this tome. No wonder it won a Food Writers Guild Award, it is a detailed pleasure to read without either being too detailed or too preachy.
5: Planet Chicken: The Shameful Story of the Bird on your Plate by Hattie Ellis
Modern food comes with a hidden cost. Hattie, with a little nudge from HFW in the foreword gives us the grisly detail. Reading this is akin to cleaning out the hamster’s cage - when it died in there months ago - it has to be done but you’ll feel genuinely relived you did. For a full review of the book cluck here. (sorry)
6: Delia’s How to cook book one by Delia Smith
Much as I loved Rory Bremner’s charachter send-ups of these books (showing Delia demonstrating to the nation how to make a cuppa-soup for example), I can’t help but have some quiet respect for the lady. I’m not a fan of her corner-cutting, vac-pack using ways especially in more recent publications but she recognised the same trend which lead to Jamie’s ministry of food a decade earlier. Come on Delia - let’s be ‘avin you!
7: The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen by Nigel Slater
I know it’s Nigel again but this is the man who taught me to throw caution to the wind, roll-up my sleeves and know how and when to put in ‘just enough’.
8:Grub on a Grant by Cas Clark
Its recipes read somewhat simply (and sometimes evn a little bit skankily) to me now but at the time, having something so compact and discreet to tell me how to knock-together those early sauces in a sparsely-equipped Lancaster student kitchen was a godsend. Thanks mum!
9: The Silver Spoon by Italy?
It’s not often you read a book which was actually written by an entire country. In this, Italy have what is equivalent to a bible of some ind in this vast collection of inventive but simple classic recipes. It may be short on imagery and description but its size, weight and sheet breadth of recipes which have clearly kept the Italians going for years will hopefully keep me going just as long. Trust me, the next time you don’t want to make soup out of your kale glut (again), you’ll curse that you don’t have this on your shelf. Although you may have to keep it on a bottom shelf as it’s heavy enough to collapse most varieties of modern Ikea shelving.
10: Further Adventures in search of Perfection by Heston Blumenthal
The man’s come in for a lot of criticism over his newest and by all accounts totally unuseable cookbook costing over £200 and requiring equipment which would not be out of place in a boutique oil refineary. Despite the fact that his recipe for a hamburger in this book runs to about seven pages, it’s how he gets to his conclusions which are both fascinating and fun. It also gives handy tips for when you’re in NY, go to “the burger joint”, it’s amazing!