I look at recipes all the time. I also have a vast collection of cookbooks. In the abundant choice we have in the western world, about what we can eat, the ingredients available etc. one could eat different things every day if one was so minded, but there are some things (such as Elizabeth David's hot strawberry mousse) that are so delicious that one wants to go back to them.
There is a sort of decadence about how we eat now. Years ago, after the war, say, there was a lot of basic food, and cookbooks that were tentatively reminding younger women how butter was used. People still tended to use margarine in cake making, and still had some frugal habits; recipies for offal abounded! Then in the late 50's came Elizabeth David and suddenly the bourgeois housewife was confusing her greengrocer with requests for aubergines and courgettes (ED suggests substituting "vegetable marrow" in ratatouille I think). There were soon plenty of spin offs and endlessly simplified/anglicised versions of recipes. What I shamefully call spaghetti carbonara is one such (it should not have cream in it). Supermarkets, keen to sell more products, notably Sainsburys, produced little themed cook books "Party cooking" "Italian cooking" "French cooking" etc.
In the 70s I think, the great Alan Davison was born from the sea-foam and came bearing his magnificent fish books (Mediterranean seafood and North Atlantic seafood) and set up the Oxford Food Conferences - and then there was Claudia Roden's book of Middle Eastern Food, and Jane Grigson writing in the Observer and throwing out the great works on Vegetables, Fruit and Charcuterie - as well as my favourite Good Things which contains the recipe for Biscuit Tortoni, and a number of other delicacies. At around about this stage, in the early 1980s, I lived in Italy for 6 months and found that ED was shamefully inadequate in her Italian Cookery - fortunately Marcella Hazan, Valentina Harris and Anna del Conte came to the rescue with a series of wonderful books from which I cooked all the time...So, at that stage I was well set up - at the top of my game, still occasionally making something extraordinary, but basicaly revelling in a range of delicious, traditional foods from what used to be the Roman Empire: Southern Europe, North Africa and the middle east.
Since I had grown up with curry (aubergines too), that was covered, and I'd learned an anglicised form of chinese in my teenage years from a 1960s book of my mothers. My mother also had a tremendous cookbook collection - and I used to try out all sorts of things from that, but it is certainly true that those earlier attempts at reproducing foreign food were very anglicised.
So - in the 80s we had reached an interesting point - everyone had a potential for accessible, authentic foreign food. I don't really know what happened in the 90s, since I was trying to persuade recalcitrant children to eat any food at all - and by the 2000s I had given up on any sort of fancy cooking since I was focused on finding things that the children and my slightly picky husband would eat. If I had had any sense I would have fed them from Delia Smith - but I found her books a bit boring - and her recipies not enormously original - with one or two exceptions.
Meanwhile - back in the cookery books....
The celebrity chefs had arrived. Some of them were ok and fairly down to earth (I like Jamie Oliver's Italian food book for example) but some of them were getting wild and wacky and while this was all fine for people who wanted to up their game and learn new techniques (I got as far as choux pastry and spun sugar - does humankind really need too much unreality?). I will sadly never own the kind of equipment that allows me to make an espuma/ecume/foam of crevettes or whatever. I can do pulled pork, but I doubt whether I will ever start smoking it myself. Cooking had got harder, and curiously, fewer of us were doing it.
The supermarkets were having a field day - their strategy of taking traditional recipies and adding ingredients to them which weren't originally there, had paid off. Now you couldn't make a bolognese sauce without someone suggesting it needed a bit of nutmeg, and perhaps a bunch of fresh basil too,.adding another £2.50 to your shopping, without much to show for it.
Today I was looking through this weekend's media food offerings. There was much that was familiar, there was an article on kohlrabi - probably the 20th article on why kohlrabi's more exciting than you think that I've ever seen, and I reflected yet again, that I had lived too long. I cannot buy goat curd in Ramsgate, kohlrabi could be tricky - but I am surrounded by delicious fresh local fruit and veg, so why should I bother? Like Simon Hopkinson I am going back to basics. What most people enjoy eating is the delicious familiar dishes that they know; good chefs know what might be a good extra ingredient to really bring something out. This is an ingredient that is there for a good reason, not added so that supermarkets can sell more of it. The globalisation of English taste makes people conversant with flavourings they might not have used 20 years ago. I get through an awful lot of cumin these days, and smoked paprika too. So we are all jazzing things up a bit, making things nicer, without totally going wild. Classic British moderation?
When I cook roast chicken I don't do anything radical, just this:
I cut up a lemon and squeeze the juice all over the flesh, then I put one of the lemon halves inside the chicken cavity. I sprinkle salt and pepper on the bird, then rub it all over with butter. Sometimes I sprinkle herbes de provence over it. Sometimes I chop an onion and some carrot and put it under the chicken. I put it first on a slightly high oven, Gaz 6 for about 20 mins, then I take it out - check that there's enough butter etc, and sling a drop of white (or other) wine over it to baste it. Then I lower the oven to Gas 4 and cook for another 60-90 minutes depending on size. I baste it occasionally and add more liquid if necessary. When it's cooked (when juices run clear when you skewer a leg joint) you simply remove it and carve it. The juice should be good enough to eat as gravy on the meat and veg, but feel free to mess around with flour if you want to.
There is nothing special about this. It's just a matter of adjusting and compensating and checking that makes food better or worse.
What I ate
Lunch. Pork pie - bit of, and cold ratatouille (yes, last week's ratatouille)
Supper: Roast chicken, potatoes, squash and carrots.
The oreo ice cream wasn't ready.
There is a sort of decadence about how we eat now. Years ago, after the war, say, there was a lot of basic food, and cookbooks that were tentatively reminding younger women how butter was used. People still tended to use margarine in cake making, and still had some frugal habits; recipies for offal abounded! Then in the late 50's came Elizabeth David and suddenly the bourgeois housewife was confusing her greengrocer with requests for aubergines and courgettes (ED suggests substituting "vegetable marrow" in ratatouille I think). There were soon plenty of spin offs and endlessly simplified/anglicised versions of recipes. What I shamefully call spaghetti carbonara is one such (it should not have cream in it). Supermarkets, keen to sell more products, notably Sainsburys, produced little themed cook books "Party cooking" "Italian cooking" "French cooking" etc.
In the 70s I think, the great Alan Davison was born from the sea-foam and came bearing his magnificent fish books (Mediterranean seafood and North Atlantic seafood) and set up the Oxford Food Conferences - and then there was Claudia Roden's book of Middle Eastern Food, and Jane Grigson writing in the Observer and throwing out the great works on Vegetables, Fruit and Charcuterie - as well as my favourite Good Things which contains the recipe for Biscuit Tortoni, and a number of other delicacies. At around about this stage, in the early 1980s, I lived in Italy for 6 months and found that ED was shamefully inadequate in her Italian Cookery - fortunately Marcella Hazan, Valentina Harris and Anna del Conte came to the rescue with a series of wonderful books from which I cooked all the time...So, at that stage I was well set up - at the top of my game, still occasionally making something extraordinary, but basicaly revelling in a range of delicious, traditional foods from what used to be the Roman Empire: Southern Europe, North Africa and the middle east.
Since I had grown up with curry (aubergines too), that was covered, and I'd learned an anglicised form of chinese in my teenage years from a 1960s book of my mothers. My mother also had a tremendous cookbook collection - and I used to try out all sorts of things from that, but it is certainly true that those earlier attempts at reproducing foreign food were very anglicised.
So - in the 80s we had reached an interesting point - everyone had a potential for accessible, authentic foreign food. I don't really know what happened in the 90s, since I was trying to persuade recalcitrant children to eat any food at all - and by the 2000s I had given up on any sort of fancy cooking since I was focused on finding things that the children and my slightly picky husband would eat. If I had had any sense I would have fed them from Delia Smith - but I found her books a bit boring - and her recipies not enormously original - with one or two exceptions.
Meanwhile - back in the cookery books....
The celebrity chefs had arrived. Some of them were ok and fairly down to earth (I like Jamie Oliver's Italian food book for example) but some of them were getting wild and wacky and while this was all fine for people who wanted to up their game and learn new techniques (I got as far as choux pastry and spun sugar - does humankind really need too much unreality?). I will sadly never own the kind of equipment that allows me to make an espuma/ecume/foam of crevettes or whatever. I can do pulled pork, but I doubt whether I will ever start smoking it myself. Cooking had got harder, and curiously, fewer of us were doing it.
The supermarkets were having a field day - their strategy of taking traditional recipies and adding ingredients to them which weren't originally there, had paid off. Now you couldn't make a bolognese sauce without someone suggesting it needed a bit of nutmeg, and perhaps a bunch of fresh basil too,.adding another £2.50 to your shopping, without much to show for it.
Today I was looking through this weekend's media food offerings. There was much that was familiar, there was an article on kohlrabi - probably the 20th article on why kohlrabi's more exciting than you think that I've ever seen, and I reflected yet again, that I had lived too long. I cannot buy goat curd in Ramsgate, kohlrabi could be tricky - but I am surrounded by delicious fresh local fruit and veg, so why should I bother? Like Simon Hopkinson I am going back to basics. What most people enjoy eating is the delicious familiar dishes that they know; good chefs know what might be a good extra ingredient to really bring something out. This is an ingredient that is there for a good reason, not added so that supermarkets can sell more of it. The globalisation of English taste makes people conversant with flavourings they might not have used 20 years ago. I get through an awful lot of cumin these days, and smoked paprika too. So we are all jazzing things up a bit, making things nicer, without totally going wild. Classic British moderation?
When I cook roast chicken I don't do anything radical, just this:
I cut up a lemon and squeeze the juice all over the flesh, then I put one of the lemon halves inside the chicken cavity. I sprinkle salt and pepper on the bird, then rub it all over with butter. Sometimes I sprinkle herbes de provence over it. Sometimes I chop an onion and some carrot and put it under the chicken. I put it first on a slightly high oven, Gaz 6 for about 20 mins, then I take it out - check that there's enough butter etc, and sling a drop of white (or other) wine over it to baste it. Then I lower the oven to Gas 4 and cook for another 60-90 minutes depending on size. I baste it occasionally and add more liquid if necessary. When it's cooked (when juices run clear when you skewer a leg joint) you simply remove it and carve it. The juice should be good enough to eat as gravy on the meat and veg, but feel free to mess around with flour if you want to.
There is nothing special about this. It's just a matter of adjusting and compensating and checking that makes food better or worse.
What I ate
Lunch. Pork pie - bit of, and cold ratatouille (yes, last week's ratatouille)
Supper: Roast chicken, potatoes, squash and carrots.
The oreo ice cream wasn't ready.
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