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!
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
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.