It’s Friday night and we have people coming round for dinner
to celebrate my fiancée’s birthday. I
cook roast chicken legs with clementines and arak, roasted sweet potatoes with
fresh figs and caramelised balsamic vinegar, aubergine baked in spices and
served with bulgur wheat, yogurt and fresh mint, okra, pepper and tomatoes, a
salad, asparagus simply in lemon juice and spring greens in a yogurt and tahini
sauce with pine nuts. For dessert I make
a strawberry and mascarpone tart on an almond biscuit base, crushing the
biscuits between my fingers lest the food mixer leave them too fine. I get in from work at six and serve just
after eight. Everyone enjoys the food
and, despite the mountain on the table, there’s hardly anything left. I’m offered compliments which are gratefully
received, but there’s a bit of me which is surprised that anyone is
impressed. I don’t find cooking
difficult. To me, it’s straightforward: just following recipes in a book, a bit of
project management in ordering the tasks, being able to keep several processes
running in your head at the same time and the occasional moment of
inventiveness if something isn’t quite right.
Maybe it’s the complexity of the dishes and while it was a special
occasion, it’s been a long time since I served up anything as routine as
spaghetti bolognaise.
It never used to be like this.
Writing in the Guardian magazine a few weeks ago, the novelist Joshua Ferris lamented his wheat intolerance which meant he was prevented from
eating all the wonderful foods he’d discovered as an adult. Ferris wrote of his childhood meals
consisting of lumpen, mystery grey meat supposedly vaguely related to beef,
wilted salad and mounds of fried potatoes.
Plentiful food and perfectly fine in its way, but devoid of excitement. An ITV sitcom of a diet.
His story sounds familiar.
Growing up we always had nice, healthy food. Lots and lots of fresh vegetables, salads in
the summer, much of it grown from the garden.
The meat and fish were of a good quality; there were no chips to be had
in our house. But, like much of the
country’s food in the eighties, it was quite safe. It hadn’t been introduced to garlic or rapeseed
oil or paprika. Unlike Ferris I don’t
see this as a failing, but just what was available in the suburbs during Thatcher’s
decade.
As a teenager I started to experience more diverse cuisine
through curry houses and Chinese take-aways as occasional treats, but even by
the time I went to university in the mid-nineties, I was still a stranger to the
kitchen. The only cooking I’d done was
on a camping stove with scouts.
If there’s one thing which has changed in British society
drastically over the past twenty years, leaving it almost unrecognisable from
what was there before, it has been the rise of food. From my own first, incompetent attempts at
spaghetti carbonara (served with boiled vegetables on the side) to more recent
efforts the transformation has been outstanding. And it’s happened everywhere. Even penniless undergraduate students wax
lyrical out artesian pizza, artichokes and fresh avocados while sucking on tea,
the leaves for which have been gently, individually folded and the water sweated
to a pitch just shy of boiling by the strength of the sun alone. Broadsheet newspapers ooze food columns,
professional cooks and amateur contributors sallying forth with their solution
to the perfect croissant. Local markets,
farmer or otherwise, are increasingly more about the experience and the
purchasing of obscure products – unusual cuts of meat, veg last commercially
grown in the fifteenth century which were recently introduced to someone’s
Kentish orchard, coffee that’s harvested from raincloud refreshed hillsides and
then triple filtered. Taste, colour and
invention coming at you like a screaming express train. All so moreish, all so exciting, all so, too
much.
I find myself wondering whether enough’s enough. Yes, meat which hasn’t been inflated with
water and forced to survive by eating its cousin’s eyeballs is going to taste
better. Yes, vegetables which haven’t
been bred to meet supermarket aesthetic tests and still has the odd bit of dirt
clinging to it is vastly superior, but it’s all going too far, isn’t it?
Pizza, burgers, pulled frickin’ pork: the conversion of
rudimentary foodstuffs into something gourmet, turning the basics, even fast-food,
into a gastronomical experience sustaining an industry of bloggers, writers and
people with cute beards and no discernible profession.
We went for pizza not so long ago in Honor Oak Park, at the
newish place where the tired Italian Restaurant used to be. I say newish because getting in has been nigh
on impossible, with tables booked for weeks in advance so it’s been open for
months. It was nice. I mean, it was a really good pizza in a
charming environment, backed up with friendly staff (even with the beards,
skinny jeans and fake glasses) and a slick business model which meant
everything was fresh and quick. But at
the same time we were treated to an exposition on every product – from the
plate of olives comprising three varieties chosen from hundreds across Spain
and imported exclusively to the rocket grown on a city farm over towards
Hackney marshes and cycled daily down to the SE23 to keep the carbon footprint low. All very admirable, but at the end of the day
it was some olives, some salad and a circle of dough with melted cheese on it,
even if that cheese had been plucked from between an ancient Italian farmer’s
toes using a satanic ritual.
I started to teach myself to cook at university. Thanks to the advice of a couple of female
housemates, I began to understand how it all worked. By the time I moved to London I was vaguely
competent, if somewhat over-reliant on pasta, chilli, Angliacised curries and
bangers n mash. It wasn’t until around
2003, my disposable income fully established and the food fetish really kicking
off the capital that I took each meal so seriously.
When my fiancée was still my girlfriend and we first moved
in together, I pulled out all the stops on the cooking front. I’d made dinner for her several times over
the previous year and I knew that she liked my food, but I headed off down a
dead-end of trying to never make the same thing twice, of winding myself up in
an arsenal race of bigger, better, bolder, flashier food every weekday
night. Patties, soups, broths, cassoulets,
skillets, grills, baked, fried, raw, shaken and sweated.
I enjoy cooking for her and she, I think, enjoys eating, but
my point is this: by the exceptional
becoming the everyday what do we have to look forward to? Foodies are everywhere. It’s like a national religion whereby
declaring you just fancy a tuna and mayo sandwich is tantamount to heresy and
punishable by social crucifixion. Ignoring
for a moment the equal rising in diabetes and obesity which is surely just as
aligned with excessive cream, butter and cheese as it is fried chicken, coke
and a lack of exercise – food is not holy.
It’s a trend, and the problem with trends is that things tend to
whiplash back in the opposite direction.
Take cider. The
addition of cider to the trendsetter’s palate in recent years has seen quality
stuff, like Thatcher’s and Aspall’s amongst others, become readily available
over things like Woodpecker. There are
all sorts of lovely ciders, using different wood on the barrel to infuse
interesting flavours, creating a smokey hue, a sharp cutting tang, rescuing
poor old Perry from perpetual obscurity, but it’s also seen every commercial
brewer get on the act producing unending dross.
Craft beer will be next as even McEwans and Newcastle Brown Ale seek
start farting out overly flavoured piss to cash in on the market while proper
breweries who have been carefully producing amazing beer for centuries without
the need for hipster endorsement will be left by the wayside as the cool kids
flee back the safety of Carling and Castlemaine four-x. It’s ironic, obvs.
Food shouldn’t be a religious experience, it shouldn’t be a
sensation, it shouldn’t be cool and fashionable and people shouldn’t hang
around in the street on wet Peckham evenings waiting for a table at a place
serving, essentially, overpriced beef patties in a bun with some salad, heavily
fried potatoes and beer with an over-inflated sense of its own importance. Food just should be. Then it might escape the backlash.
Doesn’t mean you can get away with cooking it badly, mind.
That all sounds deelish. What a lucky fiancée you have!
ReplyDeleteWhen can I come to dinner??
ReplyDelete