My father loved to cook a little but gender roles made him the breadwinner and not the bread baker. My mother was a pre-feminist gal refusing to teach her son to cook unlike his sisters with someday husbands and families to feed I watched secretly – absorbed the gist anyway.
On going to university and facing the inevitability of student self-sufficiency they gave me a carbon steel Sabatier a knife that sharpens beautifully but must be cleaned immediately else it soon goes rusty I have worn it down every day of fifty-one years – two food businesses and cooking daily – now so thin it pares perfectly.
They also gave two books of recipes The Paupers Cookbook and Catherine Whitehorn’s classic Cooking in a Bedsit sectioned One Ring, Two Rings and slimly a Cooker for the very lucky… I read and dutifully cooked a few but though a lifelong love was born yet who with a world of food to explore would base their style on paucity
I added a book on Chinese cookery whole, diced, steamed and stir fried bought a wok and never looked back spiced it up with the Penguin Indian cookery And last but by no means least found Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David
Seduced by the sensual celebratory rather than precisely noted quantities Elizabeth David liberated me as well as, I later learned the married man she ran off with travelling Europe and living on a boat My mother would not have approved
To these three parents chosen Chinese, Indian and Mediterranean I must mention the American professor of studies West African she taught my roomie and I Palaver Sauce and Jollof Rice suffered our inept experiments with nicety so when I moved near Brixton Market I fell into a world of ingredients from bitter, Cypriot, taste-acquired lemon and coriander brined olives. to stinky, dried, West African fish in baskets – I never came up for air
My culinary philosophy – read recipes with a pinch of salt absorb, ferment, reuse, infuse resist encouragement to cull your larder treat every meal as an adventure feed strangers, friends and family and you will never lose.
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, sanaarizvi in Poetics invites us to explore the senses in Food Poetry. I should add, to contextualise the above poem, that my Mother’s maiden name was Cook and my partner’s Mother’s maiden name was Larder – go figure…
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…
If you eschew meat, that is, give up chewing meat (sorry – couldn’t resist that) – then you need to replace that source of protein with as wide a variety of other proteins as possible, beans are an obvious one, but nuts are a very important source too. You can certainly snack ’em on their own and there is nothing more addictive than shelling your way through a pile of pistachios. Walnuts are more trouble to deshell but fortunately, you can readily buy them in their brain resembling nakedness and be saved the trouble. Once you start to use nuts as an ingredient, there are so many possibilities, both savoury and in desserts – my own favourite way of using walnuts is nestled down into a crumble topping so they are half-buried and then they toast to perfection… In fact, toasting is often required to bring out the full flavour of nuts – especially if you do buy them already shelled – this is especially true of ground Almonds which feature in the following recipe from Elizabeth David’s “A Book of Mediterranean Food” which as I mentioned before, was one of my first cooking inspirations:-
Skordalia Ingredients – 2 egg yolks 2 oz ground almonds 2 oz fresh white breadcrumbs 6 cloves of new garlic 1/4 pint olive oil juice of 1/2 lemon parsley 1. Blitz the garlic and egg yolks together and then drip the olive oil in to form a garlic mayonnaise known in Greece as Aioli 2. Add the breadcrumbs and ground almonds (after warming the almonds for a minute or two in a medium oven – they shouldn’t be browned at all) 3. Stir in the lemon juice and parsley and you have Skordalia which you can use as a condiment to accompany other dishes or… 4. I like to prepare a load of vegetables and chickpeas and bring them all together, hot, and mix the Skordalia into it so that it melts into sauce binding them together. So Chickpeas boiled, onions and mushrooms fried, green beans, peppers, boiled – choose your own mix…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_David
One of my other foundational cookbook reads on Chinese Cooking, would have described this as an “assembled dish” and if you use that other great tool South-East Asian cooking, the Wok, then you can add nuts to your stir-fries – cashews, walnuts, peanuts – whatever you have to hand. Peanuts, incidentally are not so much a nut as a bean that grows underground – peanut butter (and other nut butters) are also a great ingredient in savoury dishes. In the days when I allowed myself to eat such things, this was my
Ultimate Comfort Food 1. Toast two slices of granary bread 2. Butter the toast and spread Ginger Marmalade on one and Peanut Butter on the other 3. Cut a thin slice of very hard Ice Cream and sandwich between the two slices of toast – eat whilst the toast is hot and the ice cream cold…
And so to “Nature” Naming… We all want to eat healthy and wholesome food, but when food is produced industrially, then, by it’s very nature, it needs to be sold to us as such and so marketing is employed to convince us that these offerings are as healthy and wholesome as food we might concoct ourselves rather than what it is – highly processed with all the concomitant issues – preservatives, flavour-stretching, bulking out. Marketing makes use of all sorts of buzzwords to achieve its ends so let us examine some of the words used to sell us food and see which are meaningful and which are not – in no particular order:-
Organic – means produced on an organic farm where only certain substances are allowed to be employed in growing the food – if true then this is a good and meaningful label, but Organic carries a high premium price so it can be open to food fraud…
100% Wholemeal – I discussed this in H – it sounds great but really means deconstructed grain reassembled – so white flour with bran and toasted wheatgerm – better than white flour but not as good as it sounds. Stoneground will give you a slow release of energy.
Free From – this covers a lot of things such as Gluten Free and I am sure some people think that “Ooh – gluten free – that must be better, right?” Wrong, unless you are allergic to gluten. Sugar Free and No added Sugar are two more confusingly similar terms – sugar free usually means that something has artificial sweeteners some of which are addictive, or cause diarrhoea when eaten in excess and who knows what effect all these chemicals will have in the long run. No added Sugar means what it says, but many foods are high in sugar so you still need to check the nutrition guide where it says Carbohydrate […] Of which Sugars […].
Halal and Kosher – these are religious food terms and generally relate to avoiding prohibited foods such as pork but they also mean that meat has been slaughtered in a particular way. An example is gelatine – it is not prohibited in Islamic eating , but it must have been made from animals slaughtered in a Halal manner… Interestingly Christianity which grew out of Judaism and was followed by Islam – all worshipping the same god, Christianity has no food prohibitions as the other two do.
I mentioned bulking out – food production has byproducts – you make cheese, you get left with Whey – what to do with it, because throwing stuff away has a cost. So whey, which is protein, is used to bulk out any suitable foods, goes into animal feeds and of course, is sold at a high price to body-builders – like I said – bulking out!
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…
Dang! Another difficult letter when it comes to food items. Cheating a little bit, I am going for the Idaho Potatoe because (apart from the fact there is an I in there) – the Idaho is a floury, or mealy potato and this is perhaps the most useful type as an ingredient. Waxy potatoes are great for salads and they will hold together in a stew, but floury means mash, roast potatoes with rough, crisp outsides, soups and purees.
Ice cream – well I manage an ice cream, or rather gelato factory so some room for disambiguation there…
This site, though American, is a pretty good guide to the main types of potato eaten in the US and Europe but let’s not forget that the potato originally came from South America. Here is an excellent book telling the history of the spud – and it is truly a fascinating one…
To understand why floury potatoes do what they do, I turn to my culinary bible “McGee on food and Cooking – an Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture“. He says “Mealy types […] concentrate more dry starch in their cells, so they’re denser than waxy types. When cooked , the cells tend to swell and separate from each other, producing a fine, dry, fluffy texture that works well in fried potatoes and in baked and mashed potatoes.”
I am tempted to give you the recipe for Greek Lemon Roast Potatoes which I discovered when we hid from Covid in Crete for the winter of 2020 – I had never imagined pairing lemon and potatoe but whilst amazing, it is hardly the potato as ingredient, but you can find it here. Instead I give you PatataFagusta – a Maltese dish which translates as “drowned potatoes”. I discovered this on holiday in Malta some 43 years ago and found it to be almost a whole new method of cooking…
Patata Fagusta 1. Fill a medium saucepan with 50% Potatoes and %0% Onions – both cut into one inch cubes 2. Add plenty of chopped garlic and mixed herbs fresh or dried – a Provencal mix is great 3. Por over 1/2 a pint of water and a good shot of olive oil 4. Bring to the boil slowly under a tight fitting lid, stir and reduce the heat to the lowest for some 25 minutes and stir once or twice. This is the basic recipe and produces a sort of stew, but much more quickly than normal and once you have the method down, you can embellish it with small amounts of Chorizo or prawns, or a tin of chopped tomatoes, orcurry paste instead of herbs – you get the picture…
Which leads me nicely on to Invention or should it be Improvisation? I rarely follow recipes exactly, except perhaps for baking, but even with baking, once you have done it for long enough, you can start to invent – otherwise, how would any new cakes emerge? No, what I do is to look for principles or methodologies in cooking which I can adapt to what ingredients I have in my part of the world, what equipment I have in my kitchen. Hence with the recipe above – it is definitely not a conventional stew where different things are added to the hot pot in sequence and then stock added and the whole cooked off. No, everything goes in cold and is brought up to temperature and then reduced to a slow cook with the water and oil at the bottom, preventing sticking. and the modifications you can make bring it into the realms of invention. I put my inventiveness down to my mother’s cooking, she was a classic English housewife cook of her time, but she read the cookery sections of Woman’s Weekly and would try out things like Sweetcorn Bake, or for the rare dinner parties, Beef Olives (thin slices of beef flattened further and wrapped around stuffing, tied up, browned and cooked in a casserole – nothing Mediterranean to be seen here!). I don’t remember ever having olives till after I left university and moved to Brixton in London. My mother’s cooking was sufficiently inventive to give permission to follow suit. At university, I caught the bug for cooking and devoured cookery books (not literally) Chinese cookery, the Penguin Indian Cookery and most inspiring of all Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Coookery. This reputedly racy woman is credited with changing the course of cookery in England and she certainly did it for me with her beautiful descriptions of the food she found as she travelled around Europe. She also wrote one of the definitive, scholarly works on English Bread and Yeast Cookery.
Oh! I promised to disambiguate Ice Cream v. Gelato… Well, Gelato is denser, more intensely flavoured than Ice Cream, the latter having more air whipped into it during the manufacture. The ingredients are much the same. Ice cream will melt more quickly in your cornet but who is to say that that lighter quality is not just as nice on a hot day. Gelato is to be enjoyed with a small spoon, summer or winter, day or night…
Have you invented a dish you are proud of and what influences have you absorbed into your cooking style?
