A Delicious Way to Earn a Living: A Collection of His Best and Tastiest Food Writing
320
A Delicious Way to Earn a Living: A Collection of His Best and Tastiest Food Writing
320eBook
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Overview
Michael Bateman was the father of modern food journalism. He began writing about food in England during the 1960s, when the average British culinary experience was limited to fish and chips. At the time, it was a subject national newspapers scarcely bothered with.
Among other accomplishments, he was the first journalist to write detailed exposés on issues such as food additives. His wit, humor, erudition, and passion for his subject poured off the pages week after week as he researched his articles, often disappearing for days if not weeks to cover every possible angle and talk to every expert. Eventually he became a prominent editor—and nurtured food writers of the next generation, such as Sophie Grigson and Oz Clarke.
This collection includes some of his best work, spanning several decades—on topics as wide-ranging as Australian cuisine; veganism; food marketing; French wine; and Coca-Cola.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781909166943 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grub Street |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Hack's Lament
They come into my office, bronzed and sleek: the fashion correspondent from Barbados, the motoring man who has been testing a Ferrari in North Africa, the travel writer who has been comparing sunbathing facilities in Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. 'Where have you been?' you ask. 'Oh,' they reply,'the South of France – working.' Or occasionally, 'Oh Bali – working.'
Then there are the wine correspondents, who not only visit the world's vineyards, but many of the local wine bars. They sway in, wreathed in bucolic smiles. 'Huh, where have you been?' 'Ah – working, old boy.'
My turn came recently. Would I join a party visiting the Armagnac area in Southern France? Why not. 'Is it a working party?' I asked.
We were five at Heathrow. We all had such responsible jobs, editing this and that, doubling as motoring correspondent and diary editor, writing reviews and administrating, it was surprising any of us could find time for this three day trip. But find it we did.
Our plane was so late to leave London that when we got on board, Margaret, from Food and Wine from France, counselled us to eat from the plastic trays which had been filled by the Trust House Forte staff. Tucked in our seats like babies in high chairs, we ate every scrap, even those of us who had not long finished breakfast.
In France our host was M Ledun, an archetypal Frenchman whose ample frame testified to the goodness of the French way of life. 'Now we will have a little light lunch,' he said, as we came off the tarmac. We explained that we had just eaten. 'Psssh,' he said. 'We will have just a little lunch.'
This is the part of France where they produce fine foie gras, by giving geese more to eat than they actually want. He sat us down and fed us, and a few hours later fed us again. And each day, again and again and again, with all the fine delicacies that Gascony has to offer, ragouts of pigeon, and salads of foie gras, and croustade Gasconne (a rich apple tart with puff pastry); civet de lièvre and boeuf en daube and gâteau gersois. In between meals we were shipped from one distillery to another, tasting the light, aromatic eau-de-vie, which for me is more delicate and flavoursome than its cousin cognac. Kindly distillers thrust bottles into our hands and wished us good drinking.
On the last night M Ledun took us to a fine two-star restaurant in a converted mediaeval chapel in Condom, and treated us to nouvelle cuisine. A sea-food soup under a pastry hat; a gamey mousse of hare in pastry; a plate of grilled thrushes ...this was too much for the senior wine writer, a lady of seventy. 'How can you do this to your little songbirds', she implored, and aside to me, hissing: 'The French, if it moves they will eat it.' I'd already eaten mine.
On the last day M Ledun took us round the local stores to buy garlic, shallots, wine, sausages and pâtés, and sent us off with a farewell lunch at Toulouse Airport (he recommended the rich and heavy cassoulet); then he waved us into the sky, where immediately French air hostesses tucked us into place and slid a tray of food in front of us.
At Heathrow I declared my three bottles of Armagnac and paid the excess. The excess round my middle took some weeks to disperse.
No sympathy at the office, of course. 'France – I bet you had some wonderful meals.' 'Yes,' I said, 'but I was working.'
Poor Old Potato!
Which of the following are the most fattening? Cheddar cheese, lamb chop, fried onions, bread, grilled steak, mashed potatoes, cream crackers, baked potatoes, new potatoes, chips?
It's a fair bet you've placed the three kinds of potatoes high among the fatteners. But you're wrong: the chips, the boiled potatoes and the jacket potatoes all contain less calories than the other foods named.
Getting down to detail, let's take the average sized portion (3 1/2 oz) of each. Chips are high enough, true, at 230 calories, but still not as high as bread with 243. Cream crackers are 557. Cheese is 425. Fried onions 355. Grilled steak 304. The fried chop is 629 calories – but the mashed potatoes are only 120, the baked potatoes 104 and the new potatoes 75.
And how many times have you heard friends say they are cutting out potatoes in order to slim? Yet they still go on consuming chocolate, Coke, biscuits, cake and booze – all with high calorie counts.
Poor old potato! Perhaps – but things are changing.
If you had to choose between sugar and potatoes in a diet, you'd be mad to drop the potato. Sugar provides energy, but is otherwise useless. The potato provides carbohydrate and more. It provides Vitamin C, some of the Vitamin B group, iron, and there's even some protein – four per cent of your daily needs.
Scientists still disagree over the exact value of Vitamin C, but they don't disagree that the lack of it leads to scurvy, which rots the gums and afflicted sailors as late as the 17th century. Vitamin C certainly keeps the gums, muscles, skin and bones healthy.
Dr Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize-winner, goes even further. He takes massive doses himself in the belief that it keeps the common cold at bay.
This is by no means proved in clinical tests. But, on the basis of Pauling's recommendations, chemists do a roaring trade in Vitamin C powder and tablets. If you want to follow his advice, though, you can save more than a few pence by shopping for Vitamin C at the greengrocer, not the chemist. The potato alone will give you one third of your daily Vitamin C needs.
What else? Well, there's iron, nearly 10 per cent of your daily needs; that's what you require to keep your blood corpuscles tingling. There's thiamine, which keys up your appetite and digestion; potatoes give you 12 per cent of your daily needs. And there's niacin (sometimes called nicotinic acid but nothing much to do with the stuff in cigarettes) which is especially valuable to growing children. (If your child's tongue were to become red and sore, it would mean he wasn't getting enough niacin. Lack of niacin is also responsible for diarrhoea.)
But these are scarcely the most exciting reasons for eating potatoes. The fact is they are really marvellous to eat. If you were to become an expert in cooking potatoes, and only potatoes, you could delight your family continuously. But because potatoes are so common in Britain (and Britain is the only country in the world where potato consumption is going up), we have never greatly prized it in the kitchen. The French, though, with their superior culinary standards, rate it very highly, and have hundreds of sophisticated potato recipes. We just boil and mash them, or we make them into chips – and that's about it. A terrible waste.
Marcel Boulestin, a Frenchman who came to England and opened restaurants in our parents' and grandparents' day, wrote a book about potatoes, and gave a hundred charming recipes. The Potato Marketing Board (50, Hans Crescent, London SW1), naturally, puts out potato recipe books. The prettiest – unfortunately nearly out of print – is The Midweek Cookbook by Elizabeth Gundrey, the fierce champion of consumer rights and the driving force behind Which? This book (for 50p and 10p postage) gives 200 recipes. The Board's new book is Spuds Galore by the eminently sensible Zena Skinner, giving 84 recipes for 20p (and 5p postage).
Four centuries ago, in Tudor times, the British had rather more respect for the potato, but those were exciting days and the potato was a romantic, exciting object from distant climes. In the absence of pot, they had the potato to turn them on. Falstaff is wishing sexual satisfaction on his friends when he cries: 'Let the sky rain potatoes.' And there is also rude and ready reference to potato fingers – neither potatoes nor fingers in this context.
Sir Walter Raleigh may have introduced the potato into Britain from Virginia in the Americas, but the vegetable is generally believed to have come from Peru. In fact, I once drove through the village famed as the birthplace; it lies between two mountain passes high in the Andes. The potatoes there were tiny compared with the monsters we know, and were light, dry and wrinkled like brown puffballs. These were dried potatoes. Seems they invented the concept of freeze-drying a few thousand years before we did; in this case, because of a natural combination of effects – freezing cold nights and blisteringly hot days.
The English were extremely slow to take to the potato. These white tubers with peculiar growths resembled the pale skins caused by leprosy, a disease feared with good reason in Tudor times.
In a sense, their fear of the potato itself was not unreasonable. One story has it that, when the Royal cooks at Ham first picked their potato crop, they cut the green stems and leaves, cooked these and ignored the rest. People were very ill – not at all surprising, since the leaves contain a poison called solanine.
In the potato, also, there are about 90 parts of solanine per million, but this is a level with which we easily cope. But potatoes left in the sun turn green and build up this toxic matter. In a greenish potato, the solanine content can increase to 400 parts per million.
Dr Magnus Pyke, the distinguished food scientist and writer, is fond of pointing out that if Raleigh brought potatoes over today, the food and drugs authorities and the Food Standards and Labelling Committee would require him to spend about £50,000 or more on testing for toxic acceptance. And then the potato would not pass our laws. But, as he points out, the extreme rarity of illness from eating potatoes shows there's little real toxic danger. Common sense prevails.
It's a mark of the desperation and poverty of Ireland that this is where the potato first became established in the British Isles. Irish dependence on it was so great that, when the crop failed due to potato blight throughout Europe in 1845, the effect was disastrous. It wasn't just a question of going without potatoes; there was nothing to fatten the cattle, and without cattle nothing to pay the rent, and no rent meant evictions.
While Vitamin C deficiency led to scurvy, many who didn't die were forced to leave their homes and thus Ireland began the first of many mass emigrations which have produced a larger Irish population abroad than on native soil.
That's what the potato did to Ireland. Obviously the potato can have no very lofty place in Irish cuisine.
The potato was introduced with far more determination in France by the man who gives his name to several potato dishes, Auguste Parmentier. He even persuaded Louis XVI to wear the yellow-and-white potato flower in his buttonhole to help popularise it.
But it wasn't actually a cake-walk, even for Parmentier. He believed potato flour could replace wheat in bread – reckoning without people's simple, natural prejudices – and he had little success with this in his own day. He grew the tubers along the Seine under armed guard – not, as some historians have recorded, because people would steal the precious potato, but because he feared the sabotage of bakers and millers who were intent on destroying the crops.
Parmentier's enthusiasm did eventually catch the French imagination, however, though it wasn't until a century later that the greatest chefs of the day – the greatest era of French cooking – blessed potatoes with their genius, and found ways of serving them as specialities ... Pommes Duchesse, Pommes Anna, Pommes Dauphinoise, soufflé potatoes and so on.
And it was the French who evolved the chipped potato. While Londoners were still buying baked jacket potatoes from street vendors, pommes frites established a beach-head in the North of England in the 1780s – and they've never looked back. Now there isn't a café in the land that doesn't offer chips.
Unhappily, though, we haven't taken to many of the other ingenious inventions of the French chef, and there may be a reason for this. Potatoes are basically of two kinds – floury and waxy. Our cookery writers are often very careless when they transcribe recipes from other countries (or perhaps they know the housewife hasn't much hope of getting what she asks for at the greengrocer), so they don't often specify exactly what potato is required.
Even the Potato Marketing Board is blameworthy here. I asked them for a soufflé potato recipe, a delightful, original way of cooking them. The PMB gave me a recipe all right – and I followed it to the letter, my wife at my side, watching out for innocent blunders. We carried out each step exactly, from the immersion of the sliced chips in iced water, to the exact temperature for the fat (measured with a cooking thermometer). But only one of the fifty slices ballooned up into the soufflé shape. Only one.
Well, we amateur cooks do experience failure and presume it reflects our lack of expertise. But, having eaten soufflé potatoes in a restaurant, I knew what they should be, so I searched for some other recipes.
I found the answer in Marcel Boulestin immediately. The Potato Marketing Board hadn't specified the kind of potato you must use. Boulestin says it's very important to use a waxy potato, a potato he calls the 'yellow, soapy kind'. Now, we can't even buy these (two varieties are Record and Bintje) in Britain, but a new potato is the next best thing, and the PMB should have specified this.
All right, but why can't we buy the waxy potatoes? Ask a greengrocer and he'll tell you there's no demand – and that's because the housewife doesn't know what she can do with them. And she doesn't know what she can do with them because she's never had them. It's a vicious circle, within the circumference of which British culinary interest has gone to sleep, if not died.
So, which potatoes can we buy in Britain?
Well, it's the old story. The most available potato is the one that gives farmers the biggest yield and the biggest profit. Number one on the farmer's hit-parade, then, is the big, bland Pentland Crown, a pale, creamy, thinnish skinned variety. It is far from being the tastiest, far from having the best texture – and far, even, from being versatile. It's also a pale ghost of the number two variety, the King Edward, a floury potato which we do use well, especially in mashed and jacket form.
Third is Maris Piper – not quite so mealy; number four is Pentland Dell – rather like number one, a good cropper, but lacking character; number five is the pretty, blush-pink Desiree – also floury, but not as sound as the King Edward.
The Scots have different tastes; they're more likely to be eating Golden Wonder, the variety which gave its name to the crisp company (although crisps are actually made with Record potato) and Kerr's Pink, and Redskin – all rather floury.
All of this may be good news for those who use their potatoes for soups, baking and purées. But no good for those who'd like to explore the delights of potato salads, soufflé potatoes, many sauté dishes, and many of the other French specialities mentioned already.
One thing no-one can complain about is the price of potatoes. We do get good value, and there's little saving in growing your own, especially since you can use the ground for other more profitable vegetables – courgettes, for example.
Potatoes keep well (except in extremes of heat or cold), just as long as they're kept well out of the light. Otherwise, they'll start to go green. If you eat as much as 7lb a week you should think about buying in bulk, 56lb at a time.
British farmers grow 6 million tons a year, a trade which is worth £140 million to them. But the percentage of this crop that goes to the shops costs us about £240 million. The moral is clear: cut out the middlemen and the processors and you'll make a good saving. Happily, a large number of Britons do just that; nearly half a million tons are bought over the farm-gate, direct from the farmer.
Most potatoes go to the wholesale trade, which also supplies the caterers and fish-and-chippers; but over half a million tons go for processing into crisps and frozen chips and powders which are quite the most expensive ways to eat a potato today.
There's nothing wrong with the modern instant potato if it's handled right; nothing except the price. There's certainly nothing wrong with a modern crisp, a miracle of technology which keeps crunchy in its film bag for up to ten weeks; nothing except the price – nearly a shilling for less than an ounce of potato. (And you're not giving your children Vitamin C in a bag of crisps, by the way; that vanishes in the processing. In fact, what you're paying for is the oil – a crisp contains 40 per cent oil.)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Delicious Way to Earn a Living"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Heather Bateman.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Foreword,
Hack's Lament,
Poor Old Potato!,
Pan's People,
What Kind of Eater Are You?,
Vanity Fare,
Elizabeth David,
Good English Grub,
A Roman Banquet,
Len Deighton,
Vanity Fare,
Slice Out of Life,
Vanity Fare,
Fish 'n' Chips,
Vanity Fare,
Collier's Cuppa,
Atticus,
Badger Gammon is Off - may we recommend the hedgehog?,
What Makes One Run, Stops the Other,
The Bland Leaders,
Heinz,
Wall's,
Harp Lager,
Coca-Cola,
Libby's,
Stuffed Sweet Aubergine (Recipe),
Goodbye Fish Fingers ...,
Self-Sufficiency,
Self-Sufficiency - Living off the Land,
The Skinny Side of Sausages,
A Hot Little Number,
Fat Chance These Ads Give You,
The Strange New Taste of Tomorrow,
Secret Super-Crop Down on the Marsh,
The Cost of Vitamin C,
Good Beef about Bad Beef,
Whisker-Licking Good?,
Whatever Happened to Carnivores?,
Ginseng and Tonic,
The Pie that Stares,
Black Pud gets Fishy Face-Lift,
Test your Nerves on Guga,
Even if it's only Eggs, Scramble Them with Style ...,
Baby Big and the Magic Milkmen,
A Taste of the Times,
The Good Prison Food Guide,
Big Bang Beans, Aloo Baji and Æbleskiver,
Gourmet with a Conscience,
Campaign for Real Bread,
An ABC of French Wine,
The Hidden Side of Majorca,
Gastronomic Grand Tour,
The World's Top Chef,
The Emergent Cookery of Australia,
True Confessions on a Plate,
Smokescreen,
Real Chickens Don't Eat Sheep,
Snob Appeal on a Plate,
Beyond Paella: Spanish Food gets Serious,
Paella (Recipe),
A Famine in the Classroom,
Safe and Sound, but Still not Stylish,
Heartening Times for a Fish called Wonder,
When Yellow is a Sauce of Courage,
Sixty Ways to Woo your Shopper,
Red and Yellow and Tartrazine,
No Need to Beef about Meat,
A Steamboat Full of Eastern Promise,
The Book of the Dish of the Day,
You Don't Have to Mortify the Flesh to be a Vegan,
Everything but the Quack,
A Little Bite of What You Fancy,
Designed by Italians . . . Eaten by Everybody,
Little Ears of Pasta (Recipe),
Treat Yourself to a Belly Full of Roots Recipes,
Reach for the Stars, Inspector Brown,
Eat Your Way to Perfect Health,
Hasty, Hasty, Very Very Tasty,
Homage to a Taste of Catalonia,
A Crustacean Worth Shelling Out For,
Grey Mullet for Grey Matter,
A Great Tradition goes up in Smoke,
Sophie's Choice,
How to Make the World of your Oyster,
The Big Apple,
Cappuccino Crazy,
More than One Way to Souse a Herring,
Rio is Cooking,
Feijoada (Recipe),
Some Like it Hotter,
Rich Pickings,
The World of Spice,
Spicy Lamb Stew (Recipe),
Berberi Red Pepper Paste (Recipe),
Clarified Spiced Butter (Recipe),
Sources,