Food Culture – Page 2 – New Farm Food Stories

Five Days in Vernazza

April 22, 2013 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

Vernazza, one of the five villages in the Cinque Terra, is an impossibly perfect slice of Italian life. During the day, waves of sightseers wash down from the train station into the square and then onto the ferry to the next town. Later in the afternoon, guided walking groups stagger down steep stairs still gasping from their hike over the mountains, high five, and then head off up the opposite stairs for more feats of endurance. In the morning and the evening, except for a few strays like us, Verrnazza returns to the locals.

We are staying in an apartment owned by Alessandro. He offered to meet us at the station which I thought was a kindness until we started heading up the steep steps to the apartment. He hauled both bags up in a Herculean effort which still brings a sweat to the brow thinking about it. Alessandro must have taken a while to recover because for the next few days he seemed to spend all his time sitting in the sun at Ananasso Bar in the morning and then working his way around to the Enoteca for late afternoon drinks which continued into the evening. No wonder Alessandro is ‘very ‘appy’ living in Vernazza. Whenever we spotted him in the square, we gave him a cherry wave to embarrass him in front of his cool friends. The mystery of Alessandro’s leisured life in the Piazza remains unresolved. Is he a professional footballer, or an artist (the bookshelf in the apartment is full of art books), or a village entrepreneur with many little income earning apartments scattered around Vernazza?

Walking in the Cinque Terra is tough. After the big flood of 2011, many of the paths are still closed and there iis continual confusion about what is open. The paths they tell you are definitely closed, are open, though often in poor condition and those that are definitely closed and fenced off, are never mentioned until you come across the gate. It is all worked out by word of mouth by stopping the walkers coming the other way and asking ‘did you get through? Is the path open?’.

But of course the walking is only the prelude to justify the eating of three large meals a day. The food in the village is based around seafood and is fresh and delicious. Sardines dressed simply in lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper, followed by a whole baked bream with crispy potatoes. One night, for a change, I had veal cooked in wine which was the sweetest and ‘vealiest’ veal I had tasted for some time. All of the meals come with salads made with astringent radicchio and peppery rocket. The local Cinque Terra white wine is dry and delicious and perfectly matches the seafood. Each meal is pronounced the ‘best ever’ until the next day’s eating starts.

The charms of Vernazza are many. There is a small beach with easy access to swimming, lovely views of the surrounding hills and vineyards and a central piazza full of great food at extremely reasonable prices. As well as the pleasures of sitting in the sun with your morning coffee at Ananasso Bar waiting for the day to unfold.

Top Times at the Top Hotel

April 17, 2013April 17, 2013 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

The Top Hotel on the edge of Prague is 800 rooms of unreconstructed Soviet gulag. It was the venue for this year’s public management conference and it offers the kind of experience which lingers in the subconscious in different nightmarish guises for some time. As Rod Rhodes said when he picked up his lifetime achievement award at the conference dinner “little did I realise that when I started my career in Bradford in 1956, I’d finish up here in Prague in 1956” (Rhodes 2013).

So what happens in the Top Hotel? Smoking is compulsory. They hand out packets of Marlborough Reds when you check in. Customer service is non-negotiable. Nothing is too hard for them not to do. Many things are withheld from guests so not to spoil their discomfort. For example, neither the fridge or hairdryer work. the most used phrase at the Top Hotel is “not pozzible”.

As would be expected, the food is very special, when it is available. Despite the booking of about 700 conference goers, none of the restaurants open for lunch.

We stayed in and ordered the Czech specials one night. I had the roast chicken with braised red cabbage and potato dumplings. The chicken and dumplings were fine, but the potato dumplings turned out to be potatoless stodge.
Tracey was not so lucky and ended up with gristle in gravy with a splodge of whipped cream.

The Top Hotel is very far removed from the usual tourist haunts in the old city of Prague but it has a way of creating memories that will far outlast cobbled street and beautiful buildings.

Magazines and the Art of Food Writing

March 14, 2013 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

A new generation of food magazines are blurring the distinction between art and food. These highly curated publications seek to explore new ways of thinking, writing and presenting food. In contrast to the glossy temptations of Gourmet Traveller, the aesthetic of the new food magazines is decidedly matte, both in paper and intention. Food is seen as a metaphor for a range of human activities and this frees it to be explored through many approaches, some of which have only a marginal relationship with food. Below is a snapshot of some recent food inspired magazines.

Cereal: In Pursuit of Food and Travel

Cereal is a new magazine with the first edition published late 2012. It is a substantial publication and structured like a book and includes six chapters with headings such as Copenhagen and Carrots. The aim of the editors, based in Bath in the UK, is to explore subjects in-depth, and allied with beautiful imagery and design to create a magazine which can be read and re-read. The format works with a combination of historic overview of selected foods, recipes, personal stories and interviews. For example, the chapter on matcha, a powdered Japanese green tea, has detailed article on the history and ritual of making matcha, a story about a tearoom in Bristol that specialises in matcha and a recipe for a matcha cake with ginger and lemon.

The photography is beautiful and the layout clean and it looks damn fine lying on the coffee table.

Cereal – available from Scrumptious Reads, $20.00. www.readcereal.com

Gather Journal

Gather is another substantial publication designed to sit on your shelf for some time. Printed in the US, it is seasonal and recipe based, with the first edition coming out in the Northern summer 2012. The journal follows the courses of a meal with chapters from Amuse Bouche and Cocktails through Starters, Mains and Desserts. The final chapter is on Salt and covers the many types and uses of salt as well as recipes for salty treats such as peanut brittle.

The recipes are accessible and show influences from Asian through to Middle Eastern and includes starters such as oysters with a summer vinaigrette and shaved asparagus salad with poached egg. For mains the stand-outs were grilled pomegranate chicken and steak and caponata. Gather is a great addition to any recipe library, but for Australian cooks, we will always be a season behind (or ahead) when the issues are released.

Gather – available from Scrumptious Reads $25.00. http://www.gatherjournal.com

meatpaper

meatpaper has been going for five years and is the most established of the new food journals, though it often has only an elliptical relationship with food. Unsurprisingly, the focus of the magazine is on meat, and to reinforce the love, many photos of meat. There is much to find out about meat with Issue 18 including articles on making bollito misto which is a medley of boiled, fatty meats from Northern Italy, Hungarian sausages, and for the adventurous, a recipe for a Turkish custard dessert made with chicken breast. To counter balance the meatiness, there is four page spread on the national dishes of the world. Australia’s, was predictably, the meat pie though our near neighbours in Papua New Guinea are much better off with mumu, a dish pork, sweet potatoes, rice and greens cooked in an earthen oven. The Canadians have to make do with poutine, described as french fries covered in cheese curds and brown gravy.

meatpaper is both ironic and serious at the same time. It is published in San Francisco and its focus is more domestic than some of the other magazines but this is redeemed by arty graphics and a curious take on all issues meat.

meatpaper: Journal of Meat Culture – available from Scrumptious Reads. $15. http://www.meatpaper.com

Condiment

Condiment:Adventures in Food and Form, the most self-consciously arty of the magazines. Published out of Melbourne, the focus is relentlessly global with articles from Germany, Japan and the United States. The magazine is highly graphic with collages, photography and selected works by particular artists. The writing has a manifesto feel about it as the writers explore the far reaches of what is gastronomy. For example, Cameron Allan McKean, in his piece on walking towards an expanded gastronomy and ponders that ‘chemical and molecular science did not free food through molecular gastronomy, it tethered it to technology and abused it: a fearful overwrought approach to food.’ Like the other magazines, there is a desire to stretch the notion of what is food writing and to do this through exploring the links between food and art.

Condiment – available from the Queensland Art Gallery. $15. http://www.foodandform.com

Spring at Brambledene

December 24, 2012January 7, 2013 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

It doesn’t get any prettier than Spring in the Dandenongs, and after a hard couple of days puzzling my way around constitutional conventions, I spent a weekend with some friends near Olinda. David McClymont and Janet Austin live at Brambledene on the western side of the Dandenongs, about an hour from Melbourne. The property includes the main house, and an historic cottage which has connections back to the Heidleberg painters. The houses sit in a couple of acres of Edna Walling inspired garden. Edna Walling was influenced by the arts and craft movement and her style included dense planting, the use of stone walls and lots of pathways to connect different garden spaces or rooms. Though English, she was one of the first gardeners to incorporate Australian natives into her planting.

Garden 'room' at Brambledene — Garden ‘room’ at Brambledene

Before David and Janet moved there about eight years ago, Brambledene was an old flower farm and in spring all of the bulbs and flowers come back to life. Now, the big dogwood trees are flowering, as are the irises, hydrangeas and roses. Tiny sea-side daisies pop up everywhere among the stonework and overrun the edges of the paths.

As well as the flowers, there is quite a bit of food which can be foraged from the grounds. At the moment the walnuts are coming on as are the nashi pear and crab apple. David has planted out a large herb garden with mint, fennel, thyme, oregano and rosemary. I also saw some lively looking artichokes which seemed ready for the pot.

The Saturday I was there was book club night, so after a mega shop in Melbourne we got into the kitchen. The book was a Salman Rushdie and the theme Indian, and as both David and Janet are vegetarians, a couple of vegetable curry dishes were the go. David is quite, ahem, particular in the kitchen so my duties including chopping pumpkin to two centimeter squares and separating the cauliflower into tiny florets.

The pumpkin went into the pumpkin and ckick pea curry and the cauliflower for pakoras. Neither of us had made pakoras before, but if you get the batter the right coating consistency and the oil at the right temperature, they are not that hard.

The final dish was a fried potato curry, all served with naan bread, rice and raita. To keep it simple, we cut up some mangoes and had them with ice-cream for dessert.

Apparently being part of a book club and not reading the book isn’t a problem. Only one swot wanted to discuss the book over dinner and the rest of the time was spent chatting about the news of the ‘nongs.

Though it is lovely in the mountains it is a lot of hard work. The garden needs constant maintenance and there is the ever-present danger of fire season. David and Janet both work from home and have put a lot of time, effort and money into restoring the gardens and the historic cottage. Walling style gardens are designed to look ‘natural’ and their beauty hides the work that goes into crafting their wild appeal. But for escapees from the Brisbane humidity who wander around taking photos and sit down for delicious meals, spring in the Dandenongs looks pretty good.

Duck with olives

November 9, 2012 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

There are some classic food combinations such as tomato and basil, peaches and cream and, I think, duck with olives. With some friends coming for dinner I cooked Neil Perry’s Honey braised duck with orange and olives . This recipe is a clever mixture of the traditional French duck recipes with a middle eastern touch. Neil Perry’s addition of cinnamon and coriander to the French duck flavours of orange and olives makes for a modern dish which can happily be served with cous cous or more traditional vegetables.

After the dinner, a friend sent me the link to restaurant Allard in the rue St-Andre-des-Arts in Paris. Their reputation is built on their Canard de Chellans aux olives (though apparently not on their service, if you read the reviews on Trip Adviser). The French recipes tend to roast the duck first and when plating it up, pour the sauce and olives over. All of the recipes agree that the olives must be green, which also means being careful not to over-salt. The olives by themselves add enough additional salt.

Duck with olives is perfect dinner party fare. You can organise most of it beforehand, the meal is not too heavy and duck always imbues a sense of festivity. Then, as Brillat-Savarin says, the true pleasures of the table can be enjoyed where ‘at the end of a well-savoured meal both soul and body enjoy an especial well-being’.

James Street Food Trail

October 18, 2012 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

New Farm Food Stories has been dedicated to some more, er, mundane writing jobs and has been remiss in filling in readers about this week’s James Street Food and Lifestyle Trail. Events started Monday but the big day is Saturday 20th October. All day events include a Vietnamese street stall set up at kitchen shop Taste (behind Space) and Bucci will transform its restaurant into a side street with producers and suppliers offering samples of wine, olive oil and other treats. As well the Cru Bar will set up a Veuve Clicquot Bar in James Lane.

There are also many scheduled and ticketed events all day Saturday. Free events include sample breakfast bites from Gerard’s Bistro at 10am and the launch of The Foodies Guide to Brisbane at Scrumptious Reads at 2pm. If you don’t mind paying a bit there is a tasting of high end Italian wines at Taste at 1pm ($10) and for the enthusiastic, a five course degustation menu with wine at Gerard’s Bistro for $80 per person.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Gerard’s Bistro

Parking will be atrocious though the 470 bus goes down James Street. The full itinerary is at jamesst.com.au

Feasting with the Classics

October 5, 2012 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

There are many writers who celebrate the pleasures of the table, but few who do so with the elan of the original gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and his 20th century disciple MFK Fisher. Both authors genre hop between memoir, social history of food, anecdote, travel and preparation techniques. They remain immensely readable and inspiring today.

3813_Brillat-Savarin-Anthelme — Brillat-Savarin

Writing in the early 19th century in France, Brillat-Savarin had a distinguished career as a judge and a man about town. He was reluctant to publish his collection of thoughts about food, The Physiology of Taste or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, while alive because he thought it would detract from his serious professional career. Though loath to be remembered as a writer of ‘fiddle-faddle’, this fiddle-faddle has enriched our thinking about food for the past 190 years and his many musings about food continue to inspire food writing today.

The Physiology of Taste is an eccentric and post modern bricolage of personal anecdote, theories about food and meditations on issues such as obesity and thinness, or the enervating dangers of too much fish in the diet (leading to the observation that fish eating people are less brave than those who live on meat). Brillat-Savarin lived during the dawn of the scientific age, and in common with educated men at that time, was as interested in the new scientific findings as he was in arts and culture. The book encompasses both grand theories on taste and the senses as well as specific instructions on who should or should not drink coffee or in the difficulties in making good chocolate. He also coined many aphorisms about food including ‘tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are’ and ‘the most indispensable quality of a cook is promptness and it should be that of the diner as well’.

Much of the joy in The Physiology is in knowing the book is Brillat-Savarin at play. He sometimes writes about himself as a third person character called the Professor. It is the Professor, ensconced in his easy chair, who calls in his cook to chastise him for a flabby sole, poorly prepared because of the cook’s neglect of the theory of frying. The book is both eccentric and enlightening and resonates anew with each generation.

MFK Fisher is an avowed fan of the Professors and her homages to him are many and heartfelt. She named her book The Art of Eating after one of his aphorisms, wrote about her ‘man crush’ on him in A Few of the Men and spent two years in the later 1940s translating the The Physiology of Taste. In a writing career of over 30 books, MFK picks up and amplifies many of the preoccupations of Brillat-Savarin.

MFK was born in the United States in 1908 to a newspaper family who soon relocated to the new growth area of California. As a newly wed, she lived with her husband in Dijon as he studied for his doctorate. Here, for the first time, she learnt the principles of fine dining and the joys of seasonal food, simply prepared. MFK’s experiences of France during the 1930s influenced her approach to life and she revisited Dijon and Provence for extended periods for the rest of her life. MFK’s books are a mixture of memoir and the social history of food. The Gastronomical Me is a memoir of her early married life in France and later Switzerland and pinpoints her moments of food awakening from her California childhood through to her experiences in France and Switzerland. In the 1940s she wrote a book dedicated to the oyster Consider the Oyster and in the 1960s specialised in writing about French food and Provence in particular.

MFK’s writing seeks to find the poetic in the everyday and her evocative stories stay with you. Vignettes such as her description of her first restaurant experience in Dijon, eating fresh peas cooked over a pinewood fire in Switzerland and of visiting her brother in Mexico and the female mariachi singer, disguised as a boy, who serenaded him, linger with you as if you too had shared the dish of peas or listened to the singing. It is easy to see why John Updike called her the ‘poet of the appetites’.

Both Fisher and Brillat-Savarin share the desire to elevate the experience of eating to one that is both transcendent and poetic and as Brillat-Savarin points out ‘the pleasures of the table are only known to the human race’. Both writers seek to improve our historic understanding of food as well as draw us into the universal understanding that food can be both indulgent and necessary to enhancing our everyday wellbeing.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin 2009. The Physiology of Taste or, Meditations on Transcendental Gatronomy (ed MFK Fisher). Everyman’s Library, New York.

Joan Reardon 2004. Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of MFK Fisher. North Point Press, New York.

Five foods that don’t work

August 31, 2012 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

There are many foods out there that just don’t work or are misapplied. Here is my personal list which shows up all of my food prejudices. All correspondence will be entered into.

Bircher muesli. I love a bowl of porridge in the morning with some poached fruit. I even like uncooked oats in muesli. But I don’t understand bircher muesli. It is a soggy, mess with the consistency of puppy’s vomit. The texture is soft and cold and it adds nothing to starting the day on a good footing. In the spirit of ‘never waste a meal’, let us never waste another breakfast on bircher muesli.
Shop bought pesto . Pesto is easy to make. Whiz up some fresh basil, toasted pine nuts, parmesan and garlic with olive oil. It is the taste of summer. It is meant to come from the garden to the plate. All of the life goes from pesto as soon as it is bottled. It is not a food that keeps so is not suitable for commercial production and must be laden with preservatives to give it a shelf life. Avoid that bottle and make your own.
Pesto ingredients
Soft shell crabs. My friends assure me they are delicious and I just haven’t a good one. If that is the case, there are a lot of bad ones out there. My first concern is provenance. As far as I can see they are imported from developing countries with no food regulation and appear to be harvested from lagoons flowing with raw sewage and industrial waste. My second concern is taste. When I bite in, all I get is a mouthful of crab gunk. Is there no meat in these things? And what about those icky, little legs. Until provenance is clarified, I recommend sticking to locally harvested seafood.
Aoli. Aoli falls into the misapplied category. It is everywhere and way too much of it. I am always trying to scape it off my lunchtime sandwich. The place I go to has a particularly nasty anchovy version which does nothing to enhance the flavour of a ham and salad roll. I will give it the benefit of the doubt and accept it may work on the end of a hot chip. A lot of people seem to like that, though a sprinkling of salt does it for me. Hopefully the aoli mania is peaking and we can go back to a nice mayonnaise.
Brawn. And really I mean anything gelatinous, but brawn can stand for the genus. Meat and jellyness don’t go together. It is the slippery and cold elements which don’t work for me as well as the indistinguishably of the meat used. Meat is best, grilled, baked or casseroled. Suspending shreds of pig’s ears in jelly is way too Depression-era for me.

Scrumptious Reads

August 13, 2012 by New Farm Food Stories, posted in Food Culture

With the maturing of the food culture in Brisbane, the timing could not be better to open a bookshop specialising in books about food. Julie Tjiandra and Reyna Portillo have spotted the opportunity and opened Scrumptious Reads in the new precinct on the corner of James and Robertson Streets.

The shop opened just over three weeks ago and the owners are still sourcing specialist stock from overseas and building up the collection. Julie talks about the shop as an extension to her own library. ‘I read and collect old books,’ she said, ‘particularly books about food, including the history of food, food science and food and travel.’ As well as a beautiful collection of cooking books, the shop has reference books on food and books on specialist topics such as tea and wine.

As expected, a few chefs have made their way through the door, but the majority of customers are curious browsers looking through the collection.

Julie and Reyna intend to make Scrumptious Reads a centre for food culture. They are working with experts in different fields and are developing a calendar of events with appreciation classes and information evenings.

If you are after a classic cookbook or want to deepen you understanding in one area of food, Scrumptious Reads meets those needs. And like all bookshops, there is the chance for the serendipitous moment when you find exactly the book you need, even though you didn’t realise it before you walked in the door.

Scrumptious Reads

Shop 5 and 6, 19 James Street

Fortitude Valley Qld 4006

Phone: 07 38710199

http://www.scrumptiousreads.com