There is something very tempting about them…..

Let us consider the artichoke. There is something very tempting about them which conflicts with the something about them that is very annoying. They have such a decorative value that eating them is akin to pulling the petals off a daisy, in the “she loves me, she loves me not”vein,  with the same nutritional value. The pleasure of seeing them in their glorious piles of subtle colour and texture and choosing your particular favourite from amongst the bevy of beauties on display is going to be the apotheosis of the artichoke experience.This same burlesque quality is apparent in Mediterranean small town fish mongers and butchers, as I remember them some dozen years ago, which provoke in me a similar emotion. I have seen a butcher’s display that included a heron ( or maybe it was a stork but it certainly wasn’t a turkey) hanging alongside a bizarre array of poultryish creatures and other avian specimens that it didn’t look remotely out of place. Fishmongers offer creatures that are no more than a set of black spikes with a spiteful pair of eyes which are positive beauties in comparison with the other submarine nightmares on offer that compete for a purchaser, invariably successfully. with shiny, silver sea bream and stiff, bright eyed sardines. Please don’t misunderstand me, this desire to not to waste and to find new tastes is a good thing, but it can be soul destroying to be party to this goodness to which anyone who has spent a long afternoon peeling scorzonera will attest. Scorzonera and Jerusalem artichokes taste great but are too biblical for their own good in that one needs the patience of Job and, usefully, the life span of Methuselah to arrive at the moment of pleasure after the agony of preparation. Such tasks, if regularly undertaken, need to be a central part of what one does in life, which is how most of these foods ended up as foods.

Those who prepared them were totally concerned with finding nourishment and were not put off their quest  by the bizarre costumes nature’s Diaghilev had chosen for them. What sort of inquisitiveness led anyone to believe that the artichoke might offer sustenance because, let’ s be honest, it doesn’t. What the artichoke offers is grist for the still life mill which is more than can be said for scorzonera or Jerusalem artichokes.The early demise of creative cooks on the look out for handsome vegetables must have soared in the dark ages, just think of those too good to be true red and white spotted mushrooms, and maybe this culinary inquisitiveness accounts for the amount of people deemed necessary to run a restaurant kitchen when such a rate of attrition prevailed. Having time and finding delight in all things edible, both of which qualities I now possess, are the true reason for spending time in the pointless preparation of wonderful looking ingredients that are totally unnecessary to our well being. I am not a hunter gatherer, but I’m willing to gather from the experienced hunter. I never tire of looking at, tasting, preparing and cooking even the strangest ingredients because I can see that the hunter gatherer is alive and well. The Borgia in me demands a food taster.

Days of wine and posers..

I’m feeling enervated. I know that I’m enervated because I remember the day, and nearly the hour, when the meaning of this word was made clear to me. Once upon a time there was a celebrated watering hole in Covent Garden called the Zanzibar, a 70′s deco dream designed by Tchaik Chassay, at whose feet, not Tchaik’s feet but the Zanzibar’s, can be laid the collapse of many a career, business and marriage. I have apportioned the blame thus as it is far easier to lay it at the feet of another rather than inculpate the feet of clay that were the true cause of these mishaps. This bar was a bar of near Anitpodean extremes. The bar stools were very tall chrome constructions which led to  the management working on the principal of “three strikes and you’re out”. Falling from one of these bar stools was not uncommon as the Martinis served were of Dean Martin strength and proportions. I remember sitting with another clayfoot who had taken a couple of falls and was sporting a blood stained handkerchief around the head to staunch the flow of blood after striking the foot rail on the way down. The clayfoot was now hanging on to the hand rail for dear life knowing full well that another tumble would entail the “third strike” enforcement of being bundled into a taxi home, or somewhere. Work was accomplished at a different rate in those heady days which meant that lunch time, to all intents and purposes, signified the end of the working day. It was essential to arrive early at the lunchtime session in order to claim a barstool that would keep one close to the action. Cray fish racing on the smooth, curvaceous, mirror studded black bar was a Woosterish event that I remember clearly at this early session, although the word “clearly” may well be an oxymoron when paired with the Zanzibar. As food was definitely of secondary importance in this drinking establishment, although the cook at the time was none other than the now iconic chef Alistair Little in embryonic form,  maybe the crayfish were not racing but in fact sedately making their way to the kitchen under their own steam as no one seemed to be taking any interest in them as a possible foodstuff. It may well have been a safe haven for crayfish as I rarely heard anyone ordering food or, if someone did, the food often remained uneaten meaning that a live crayfish would be absolutely safe, under its glossy coating of mayonnaise, as long as it remained motionless and managed, chameleon like, to look pink. It was a morning such as this that found me climbing onto my upholstered chrome drinking stool and bidding “Good day” to a fellow clayfoot, Angus Forbes, a very clever Australian photographer and film maker. Angus had gone to Geelong Grammar so he nearly spoke English. He loved words, nearly as much as he loved Seagrams Bourbon for whom he was a test pilot, and enjoyed quizzing me on the meaning of random words as he got great pleasure from my infallibly incorrect answers. Thus we return to “enervating”, which I immediately defined as meaning exciting and elevating when, as we all now know, it means the direct opposite of those qualities. That was the icing on Angus’ morning and he laid another fiver to win on the crayfish who was washing his claws, pre race, in a red wine vinegar and shallot mixture which had been recommended to him by an oyster chum.

Do you believe in magic….

The trouble with Spring is that we, of the Northern hemisphere, eagerly await a beautifully orchestrated season filled with soft,warm weather that draws up legions of palely beautiful flowers, still yawning, from their comfortable winter beds to carpet the bosky clearings in pale green leaved forests as part of the acid fuelled fantasy that we remember as Spring. The Spring that we all remember only happened in a near identical communal memory, which we all luckily possess, enabling each of us to bemoan its absence to another in the full knowledge that we can both draw on similar detail from the mentally shared romantic illustrations of Primavere. Maybe my failure to capture the mythical essence of Spring in my images is because I’ve already decided that it doesn’t exist, or if it does, I fail to make it look like the Arthur Rackham illustration that has attached itself to my phychic retina. The thick clumps of wild flowers are bereft of pixies this year, so no point wasting good digital space on them. As it turns out, my attention span in the quest for the spirit of Spring is short as it takes very little time for me to realise that I would much rather find the  spirit of William Eggleston. That might be because I already have a very clear picture of Spring which, if tampered with, will only whither and die.

As a postscript I want to mention that I get a great deal of pleasure from reading these two blogs - http://thekitchensgarden.wordpress.com/ and http://kateshrewsday.com/ - and I recommend that you look at them yourselves as these two people can write.

How to cook a wolf….

“How to Cook a Wolf” by M.F.K Fisher has gone missing. It was on the bookshelves the last time that I looked for it, or to be more accurate, the time before the last time that I looked for it as the last time that I looked it was missing. Could this wonderful book have been animated by the spirit of its extraordinary author and set off, with a red spotted handkerchief full of oysters and a bottle of Picpoul, to live with the nearby colony of missing socks? She came into my mind yesterday afternoon as I was cooking a very good leek flamiche from a recipe by Patricia Wells, who has the admirable habit of placing small boxes, filled with amusing anecdotes or quotes, on the pages of her cookery books. The box that caught my eye contained a quote by M.F.K.Fisher which, apart from reminding me of my loss, gives a good insight into her delight in food and sharing that pleasure with others – ” I feel that gastronomic pleasure can be achieved in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hillside; two people of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.” This struck a chord with me because my pleasure in cooking diminishes with each additional person over and above the number of six. There are people who enjoy the challenge of producing a multiplicity of complicated dishes for the groaning board. I am not among them. I have never understood the idea of a challenge which normally involves something that I don’t want or need to do. I remember when I used to religiously go daily, at the crack of dawn throughout the year, to an outdoor pool, in England, to swim a mile before I went to work. After a good many years of this punishment  I realised that I didn’t want to do this at all and I stopped at once. The idea of running marathons is anathema, although I went through a 10 year phase of running until the blood was coming out of my eyes, not with effort, but with the unbelievable boredom. I would have preferred to have done my exercise as a member of M.F.K Fisher’s Alpine Club of the Cote d’Or which entailed climbing gently sloping roads to good restaurants or eating chocolate on a  Burgundy hillside. When asked by a journalist why she wrote about food, and eating and drinking instead of the struggle for power and security, or love, she replied “It seems to me that our three basic needs for food, security and love  are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot think of one, straightly, without the others – there is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk.”Which leads me neatly to a wonderful recipe for brownies sent to me by Mary Cadogan a few weeks ago. Originally Mary delivered a box of them specifically for my wife, but unfortunately I must have walked in my sleep because it appears that I ate them all before giving her any. The upshot was that Mary sent me the recipe with clear instructions on sharing. And then I looked on my bedside table where I noticed that the colony of lost socks had forced my copy of “How to Cook a Wolf” to return home. They’d probably drunk the Picpoul, eaten the oysters and, determined to keep their location secret, had returned the book so that the search would end.

Whores razing or hearse raisin?

On the Saturday of last weekend the majority of the population of Great Britain gave a slice of their hard earned cash to a small body of professionals in the unlikely hope that it would be refunded with interest. This lemming like aberration occurs annually on the day of the Grand National when the nation’s interest turns to whores razing, oars ricing or even hearse raisin depending on who’s asking. To avoid my fingers dancing a diatribe on the keyboard against unintelligible pronunciation, whilst simultaneously being mentally tarred and feathered by my readers, I am crossing the Channel to a place where accent gives way to language and I can get on with making pesto, pistou, romesco or whatever name may be given to a sauce made from basil, pine nuts, cheese and oil (plus or minus a few other things, but always with love) because the sun is shining and I don’t want to argue or to have to pluck feathers from my tarry hide. Why did I ever mention that fecking hearse raze?  I started the day with my mind untrammelled by thundering hooves, or tondering hoofs, but filled with the pleasure of remembering a wonderful book entitled “A Taste of France”, published in the early 80′s, that was filled with calmly beautiful food pictures by the great American photographer, Robert Freson. Food photography is, of late, as prone to the foibles of fashion as any other genre but, even though I do not own any of his books, his pictures remain as fresh in my mind as on the day that I first saw them which leads me back to the moment that I was making a shopping list in the kitchen, seeing the basil in the sunlight and deciding to make some pesto. Being too lazy to pulverise the soft green leaves in a mortar I can still relish the first waves of basil laden scent as they are released by the whirling blades of the processor while I carefully grate a chunk of crumbly Parmesan, making sure to eat any stray pieces that fall onto the board. My laziness allows me to watch, through the transparent side of the bowl, as the cheese, basil, pine nuts, walnuts and olive oil slowly metamorphose into a viridian paste that I finally loosen with a tablespoon of warm water. Impossible to resist a green and yellow flecked finger full just to check that all’s well and another just to be sure. I feel that whatever it has cost me to make this deliciously beautiful condiment has been refunded with interest and I certainly feel richer for the pleasure that it has afforded me, in any man’s language

It’s the real thing….

A soft, misty morning is irresistible to the hunter. That most elusive of prey, the good picture, is sure to be out there somewhere. Being a master of disguise, this highly prized rarity is often cleverly disguised in a cloak of dullness from beneath which it sneers, unseen, at the big picture hunter who is standing before it yet seeing nothing. To ensure that the hunt is a cruel, unfair contest the good picture has an ephemeral ally known only as “light”. I remember when I was an assistant to a celebrated photographer, , some 40 years ago, that he would point out the quality of light to me ad infinitum and I equally remember not having a clue what he meant. It seems to take a lifetime before the mental cataracts are lifted, ironically just in time for the physical ones to begin to take their place. Pictures, like sudden emotions, are passing and irrecoverable but nor irreplaceable. As with emotions they appear unbidden and one is ready for them, or not. There is also the problem of not knowing, at least until a later point or maybe never, as to whether they were the real thing, whatever that may be. 

Making friends with an old enemy…….

Beetroot, in recent years, has at last become persona grata in my kitchen. As a baby boomer, I still have a clear image in my mind of what passed for a fresh summer salad in the days of my youth.  The collection of over cooked hard boiled eggs, with black edged yolks and crimson stained whites, nestling amongst flaccid pale green leaves, slices of seed filled pale tomatoes and, most horrid of all, cubes of beetroot that had been preserved in cheap vinegar were a feature of the season. Vinaigrette, or even a simple dressing of oil and lemon, was only encountered on rare occasions and was replaced by various versions of “Salad Cream”, a thick,viscous condiment that was quickly reduced to scarlet streaked curds on first contact with the virulently infectious beetroot. Part and parcel of a reasonably privileged background was the thrice daily appearance of , at best, unappetising food.  Restaurants were no better apart from the fact that someone brought the unappetising food to your table and took it away afterwards. My childhood visits to France had shown me that things could be a lot better but I think my psyche associated the good tastes with the pleasure of “holiday” rather than any superiority of cooking skills. There is a notation in an early Elizabeth David book which says that when recipes in the book included olive oil as an ingredient,  small bottles could be obtained at a good chemist. Back to beetroot. The markets here are awash with beetroot, but they are of a different ilk to those found in floating like medical specimens in jars of clear, acidic condiment. The beetroot that I favour cannot be judged by its cover. Its cover is dark and wrinkled with a suggestion that all may not be well within, and how misleading is that cover. Beneath the skin there lies a sweet, soft garnet coloured flesh. This is a roasted beetroot that has all the delicacy of a confit. The dish in the picture was produced by cutting some rough chunks of beetroot and adding a tablespoon of creme fraiche. A few small wild rocket leaves, some capers and baies roses make it taste wonderful and look like a bowl of jewels. A splash of walnut oil didn’t do any harm either.

To market, to market to buy a fat pig….

Yesterday I was splitting the logs of the last of our winter firewood in the warmth of the sun. The crisp sound of the logs splitting under the axe has the effect of bringing my neighbour, Fernand, out of his kitchen for a matinal “Ca va?”. This entails a welcome break in the work as well as a chance to share in secret information concerning the nefarious activities of local ne’er do wells. This information is offered under a strict bond of silence which makes the vow of  Omerta take on the casual assertion of “..you know me, I wouldn’t tell a soul”. Yesterday’s revelation brought into question the trustworthiness of various “organic” producers of this parish. As the majority of my 8 neighbours are farmers as were their families for generations before, and I am not, much of what he tells means nothing at all to me, but I still nod sagely whilst leaning on my axe. In fact his eyes, as he speaks, are scrutinising the axe and all the signs that it bears of misuse by a rank amateur. I rely on him still to guide my hand as I sharpen the chain saw and the axe as I never get it quite right without his judgement. The condemnation of the local organic felon was followed by a stroll to his vegetable patch to get some of his truly organic leeks – or so he said. The rules of organic farming seem so complicated, if I have understood them correctly, that I’m not sure if I believe that any local “Bio” producer can be above suspicion. It has been said that if all the rules of Rugby Union where applied to the letter it would be nigh on impossible to play a game and I feel that organic farmers’ rule book may share the same author. I’m probably happier trusting rather than condemning. When I’m at market I’m sure that I, and everyone else, are paying more than we should for each delicious purchase. I feel this because I’m now used to being penny pinching and paying as little as possible in supermarkets, as opposed to my previous life where I would go out of my way to find the most expensive example of whatever product I felt that I needed. Markets offer me the same “Ca va” as my neighbour, Fernand. That’s why I enjoy choosing the beetroot that I want, or the exact four sardines that have caught my eye, safe in the knowledge that the stallholder expects me to be selective. Market seemed to be the right place for Easter. There is a congregation of all kinds of people, there is the arrival of the fresh and the new and above all a feeling of celebration without cant or doctrine. A good day for the humans of this little corner of a troubled world.

Another bad meal at Restaurant Television….

I’m beginning to experience a previously unknown frisson of excitement each time I turn  on the television in the evening. We have entered a golden era of extended choice of viewing which bears an uncommon resemblance to an embossed leather bound, silk tasselled, multi paged restaurant menu offering a dazzling choice of hastily made, unseasoned, badly presented dishes garnished with a piping of pap to fill out the plate. Initially the rich and copious variety of ambrosial delights creates a lip smacking anticipation which is quickly followed by the realisation that the majority of those on offer are tired, reheated dishes that we have eaten, and sometimes regurgitated, many times before whilst the others are sugar sprinkled, puffed up soufflés filled with hot air. Sitting in restaurant Television I have the illusion that madly smiling, white teethed waiters are serving me endless “amuse bouches” interspersed by a series of tasteless, or dull, or just plain dreadful hors d’oeuvres, entrées and desserts which are served with the same fucking annoying self satisfied rictus of a grin. As long as Hello Magazine, Has Britain Got Talent ( who gives a monkey’s and it appears not) and all things monosyllabic hold sway, the moneymen will continue to tell the kitchen to keep serving up the same tasteless gruel as the public are wolfing it down, and are even begging for more. Any way, summer is nearly here and I won’t be going to restaurant Television very often for a few months. On the bright side, last night I made a very simple dish of couscous served with vegetables in a highly spiced broth. To mop up the latter we used a wonderful flatbread created from a recipe in “Casa Moro”. This was very good but was followed by a dish at restaurant Television called “Fake Britain” which says it all. The program, amongst other things, suggested that it policed the current proliferation of counterfeit goods which is ironic as the program itself is a perfect example of such an artefact. Here’s the recipe for the flatbread from the fabulous Sam & Sam Clark of Moro.

I have a dream….

Food, Photography and France are my motivating trinity and I’m continually looking for ways to share the pleasure that they afford me with as many of you as possible. The idea of combining cookery and photography together with the opportunity of enjoying the pleasure of spending time exploring deepest Perigord Noir, in Southwest France, seemed to be the sort of package that would accomplish that dream. So , with the help of one of the most respected cookery schools in France and a very talented Australian chef, the word has become flesh, so to speak.

The cookery school of La Combe, run by the guiding hand of  Wendely Harvey, who was previously the publisher for Weldon Owen in the United Stated, is situated in this elegant 18C manoir in the Dordogne. The ancient house sits in 40 acres of parkland and boasts 5 guest apartments, all with American size beds and en suite bathrooms. The next ingredient of this potent combination is chef Tonya Jennings, owner of the celebrated Cooking on the Bay Cookery School in Australia, who will be the guest chef at La Combe from Aug 28-Sept 04. The icing on the cake will be that, during this course, I will be on hand to share with you some of the photographic knowledge that I have acquired over a long career as a professional photographer. There will be opportunities for food photography as well as taking pictures in the markets, restaurants, farms and even at rare events such as truffle hunting with a pig. Although there is not a cookery class each day, I will always be on hand to help you with your cameras, to show you new techniques or just to answer your questions. The variety of locations that we will visit is mouthwatering both in visual and gustatory terms and includes the caves of Lascaux with their remarkable pre-historic cave paintings, an ancient water driven mill still producing artisan walnut oil, the market in picturesque Sarlat, the Michelin starred Vieux Logis in Tremolat (amongst a fistful of other restaurants, bistros and fermes auberges) and an early morning truffle hunt which is now carried out with a dog, as the delightful pig Gollum was too keen on eating them, rather than handing them over. I have visited La Combe twice before, in a professional capacity as a photographer shooting features for Taste Magazine ( a Williams Sonoma publication) and D Magazine ( The best of Dallas and Fort Worth) , and on both occasions I was equally impressed with the professionalism of the teaching and the relaxed holiday atmosphere created by the beautiful surroundings.  Prices and details can be found on www.lacombe-perigord.com but please contact me at info@camerahols.com if you want further details.