Fork In Review

A few months ago, Rene Redzepi opened his pop-up Noma restaurant at Barangaroo, Sydney. Very expensive and sold out in minutes.

On 3 April 2016 at the Sydney Opera House, there was a symposium with a line-up of speakers: Rene Redzepi, David Chang, Kylie Kwong, Massimo Bottura, Neil Perry, Clayton Donovan, Rebecca Huntley, Chodo Givera and Gayle Quarmby.

The most inspiring speakers were: Kylie Kwong talking about her Chinese heritage, Massimo Bottura talking about Osteria Francescana at Modena which feeds the homeless. Chodo Givera who started her own mushroom business in Zimbabwe. Gayle Quarmby who along with her husband runs Outback Pride, an indigenous produce business.

Firstly, Tomorrow’s Meal could and ideally should include indigenous foods.

Here’s a quote from John Newton’s blog:

After all, it was founder Rene Redzepi’s musing on what was lacking in that cuisine in 2010, and he was specifically talking about native ingredients – ‘…it’s a poor culture if it doesn’t have a true, unique expression that can only be represent right there at the place’ – that led him to return and to open his pop-up Noma to end his sojourn with MadSyd.

There has been a lot of negative commentary about the Noma pop-up dinner in Sydney: too expensive, food was too technical, tizzied and tweezered, which perhaps might give rise to questioning the concept of hospitality – making the customer feel at home.

Lee Tulloch, in a Luxe Nomad column (7/11/15) wrote that she wants to be delighted when she eats at a restaurant. She suggests that one should leave one’s expectations at the door, and go with an open mind.

Terry Durack reviewed the Noma pop-up and gave it a good mark, but there were “The Worst Bits”: no bread, no meat, no red wine. Here’s the final paragraph in his review:

We already have brilliant and inspirational chefs in Australia working with indigenous produce, such as Ben Shewry of Melbourne’s Attica and Jock Zonfrillo at Adelaide’s Orana, but Noma Australia will have its own far-reaching effect; giving us the confidence to make our own, our own.

Why do we need foreign chefs like Jean-Paul Bruneteau and Rene Redzepi to tell Australia about its own indigenous foods? Maybe after about 200 years we ought to have shown some appreciation and educated ourselves about the native foods available, and how to cook them. Can’t be that hard, can it?    More about that in another blog piece.

Secondly, it seems that the most enthusiastic speakers were also those who addressed the issue of Tomorrow’s Meal from a more basic point of view: feeding less fortunate communities.

Massimo Bottura is a celebrity chef who used to run a famous restaurant in Modena, Italy doing molecular gastronomy. He changed his mind and addressed the issue of food waste and hunger by opening Refettorio Ambrosiano, in a church refectory.  For more information have a look at this:  osteriafrancescana.it /food-for-soul.pdf

He said two things which caught people’s attention: “Cooking is a call to act”, and “We need more chefs who know about the soil and farmers who know more about food.”  I couldn’t agree more – there’s another issue here: some people don’t know where their food comes from.

Chido Givera is a farmer and food activist from Zimbabwe. She runs a small business growing mushrooms. It helped her out of enslavement and ongoing poverty, and helps other women learn agriculture and business skills.

Kylie Kwong spoke about her Chinese background and her increasing interest in indigenous foods. She was accompanied by Gayle Quarmby, a supplier of indigenous foods – Outback Pride. They were both enthusiastic that indigenous foods would play a part in Tomorrow’s Meal.

Community food organisations tend to focus the mind to somewhere near you.

Kylie Kwong is involved with Two Good Food, along with Matt Moran and Neil Perry, which supplies lunch food to corporates, and gives some of the profit to those in need. She’s is also involved with local community gardens which as at the Wayside Chapel, and St Canice’s, Rushcutters Bay.

Here’s the Two Good website:  http://www.twogood.com.au/#intro

Indira Naidoo, who has a balcony garden at Potts Point, promotes balcony and community gardens eg. Wayside Chapel, Potts Point.  Here’s some more information:   http://theediblebalcony.com.au/about.html

Recently (Thurs 14 April 2016) there was a dinner run by IOOSK (Inside Out Organic Soup Kitchen) dinner at St Canice’s rooftop kitchen garden.  It’s a soup kitchen, but now an outreach cooking program for young parents. The idea is that it “Heals from the inside out.”

The entertainment was wonderful. Darren Percival seemed at first as if he was checking the audio, but was actually starting the entertainment, encouraging the audience to sing along.

Tilly Hinton is the Nourish Talks organiser.

Costa Georgiadis, the “King of Soil” and ABC Gardening Australia presenter, talked enthusiastically about his favourite topic.

The Bright Catering company provided beautiful vegetarian food, and Krinklewood provided the wines.

My friends and I really enjoyed the evening, and were happy to have some of the ticket price being donated to community groups which help people. And we can’t wait for the next one.

Perhaps, for Tomorrow’s Meal, it might have been good idea if Noma and Momofuku had donated some of their profits to charities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was a 6 hour walking and tasting tour of Thai Town, Sydney, on Saturday 30 January 2016, led by Nuch, a member of the Thai community who works with Taste Food Tours. It was also in conjunction with the WEA, the writing part being delivered by Jeannette Delamoir who has extensive qualifications and experience in writing. She also has a particular interest in food.

 

My first experience of Thai food was when I was working as a cook in the 80’s at the Bayswater Brasserie. Thai food was starting to be popular in Sydney, so they put red Thai Chicken Curry on the menu, where it stayed, surviving many menu changes. I used to sneak a tiny bit in a cup and eat it with a teaspoon. It was excellent, and I quickly became addicted.

I think it was predominantly the umami and saltiness provided by the fish sauce, but also the lime leaf, galangal, and coconut milk which clinched it.

Back in the early ‘80s we were hard-pressed to buy any Thai ingredients. This was because the focus was on Italian and French cuisines which rose to prominence in the ‘60s. French cuisine involves more complicated culinary techniques, therefore slower, more expensive, and not quite so good for take-away.

This resulted in me cooking Thai at home, along with Thai beef salad; eating out at Thai restaurants; and constantly referring to Charmaine Solomon’s Asian Cookery to find out what else I could cook.

Boon Café is where we convened first thing in the morning. Some of us had a “green drink” which is a beautiful smoothie. Nuch, our tour guide, handed around tamarind sweets. They were salty, sweet and sour; three of the five flavours, the others being bitter and umami. These flavours come into play again with green mango salad: lime juice for acidity, palm sugar for sweetness, fish sauce for saltiness and umami. Along with the crunchiness of the grated mango and roasted peanuts.

At lunch (Mr B’s, corner of Goulburn St) Nuch, asked the group how much chilli we could tolerate, from “pre-school” (not much) to “university” (extremely hot). This reminded me of a stopover in Bangkok, where I went to have lunch in a local restaurant. I ordered Pad Thai, “not too hot please”. Well, for me, it was “university” level! My palate was relatively undeveloped as far as chilli heat is concerned; to me, this seemed off the Scoville chart!

Next stop was Khao San for desserts, where we also had extreme flavours, but not with chilli.

We sampled small squares of various desserts of extreme sweetness, extreme blandness, and eggy custardy softness. One was tapioca topped with a mildly salty coconut cream. That would have been lovely combined with a sharpish fruit salad of mango, pineapple and lime juice.

Later we adjourned to the WEA where we focused on the writing component. We were shown a short video of Amy Chant and her daughter, who run the Chat Thai restaurants, including Boon Café.  And we were given a hand-out of articles about Thai food. One was a photocopy about Pad Thai, with a recipe. Pad Thai could be considered our first introduction to Thai cuisine; it’s available in every Thai restaurant.

Of course, from an Australian perspective, the Michelin-starred Thai food expert, David Thompson is someone whom we think of. A couple of articles were included about him.

What is interesting is that some chefs grew up with mothers who were not good cooks. Luckily, I didn’t have this misfortune. Maybe this causes potentially keen cooks to explore what good food should taste like.

Conventionally, learning to cook means learning French techniques because they are part of the traditional canon.  Then the next step is to start tasting other cuisines which is what I did when I started cooking at the Bayswater Brasserie – see first paragraph above.

Even though David Thompson is long gone from the Darley Street Thai, it still operates under different management, and still serving excellent dishes. So does Amy Chant at her Chat Thai chain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In The Table Comes First Gopnik looks at food and dining from a                          sociological and consumer point of view, including snobbery and food fads.

Veblen’s work, The Theory of the Leisure Class is about conspicuous consumption. The point of it is that it’s more about being conspicuous than consumption, ie. people need to show off while spending a lot of money. Some might want to separate themselves from the bourgeoisie, and the leisure class does this by taking on the mores and habits of say, the peasantry.

They can’t eat more to differentiate themselves because obesity is a sign of the lower middle class. So they eat local, seasonal and organic produce, or when they eat out, maybe some molecular gastronomy. It seems that the new best restaurants, for example Noma, combine extreme localism with molecular production. For Veblen, it’s all about status. “All rat races look the same to everyone but the rats who are running in them”. (p113)

Gopnik says that taste differences are value disputes. Green values are community, tradition, care, sustainability and pleasure. And on the industrial side: efficiency, prosperity, ease of choice and abundance. The Left is conservative while the industrial and populist right is progressive – “say goodbye to the family farm, the slow-cooked chicken, and conversely, cheap meat for everyone. Organic, local, slow – if this is what we want, it is, the counter argument goes the best way to go hungry. There is the silent spring of industrialized agriculture, but there is also the long silent summer of natural starvation”. (p117)

In 1825 Brillat-Savarin wrote The Physiology of Taste which was one of the first rule books putting gastronomy on a semi-scientific basis. It was a book about the extent of pleasures. “We chew with our molars, but eat with our minds.” A systematic study of soft power, Brillat-Savarin thought that needs become demands and desires, and that this became political through the civilizing act of the table. He thought the ideal eater was the gourmand, not the gourmet, ie. the glutton not a finicky eater. He inspired MFK Fisher to translate his work.

His rival, Grimod de la Reyniere, also suffered during the French Revolution. He sat it out in Beziers where he ate beautiful rustic food, and started to write about it. He also started the first regular food magazine: Almanach des Gourmands.

Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de la Reyniere are sincere in their passion for eating, for small discriminations, and appetite for order and system. But neither means exactly what they write. Brillat-Savarin wrote: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are”. And it’s a joke as much as a judgement, in the spirit of playfulness, similar to Mark Twain. Grimod de la Reyniere did the same thing.

Brillat-Savarin, the disillusioned liberal, remained a man of the Enlightenment, bringing order to the table. Grimod de la Reyniere, the reactionary, was counter-Enlightenment, seeking through pleasures of the table, salvation from all those scary absolutes. Both knew better than to plan the perfect meal.

Food writing was born in the wake of the French Revolution and the Terror. Brillat-Savarin’s writing on food is reformist and optimistic; Grimod de la Reyniere’s is defeatist and despairing. Among Grimod de la Reyniere’s circle a reactionary feeling sprang up romanticizing French food: it was seen as the cooking of the noble French peasant which had arrived in the cities.

Gopnik called some culinary historians “sizzlists”, ie. the atmosphere or sizzle is more important than the steak itself. The trouble with this reading of history is that underestimates the difficulty of doing things, as opposed to thinking about them. Gopnik says that it’s as hard to make good chicken soup as it is to create a reason that it’s good for you.  One of the big innovations in French cuisine is stock, providing a richer flavour, different from a pasta sauce or a spoonful of chutney beside a dish of curry.

Food on TV, according to Gopnik, celebrates in a debased and diminished form an idea of expertise and craft, which seems to be vanishing nowadays. So seeing a cook making something competently on TV is enough to attract millions of viewers. Being good at what you do seems to be a bit unusual, and so the target audience are eating takeaway while they’re watching a food show.

Le Fooding is a French food guide, whose name is insolently taken from English. “On the one side, Michelin, with its century of cultural expertise; on the other the Fooding guide born 10 years ago in an attempt to break the codes and finally offer real change to a gastronomy that its authors judge to be outdated.

Le Fooding seems earnest in the manner of the slow food movement; at others, it is merely festive, a good-time gang; at still others, it appears determined to wrench on the nationalist right, to a new home, in the libertarian centre” (p245)

Le Fooding sponsor mass picnics or “Foodings”, catered for by 3 star chefs, and the event is a cross between a buffet and a rock concert. They wanted to eat and drink with feeling; chefs who cooked from the heart, and not so much the culinary technicians.

Gopnik discovered a comment about Le Fooding, ie. that it’s not revolutionary or even original. All the customers want is a good restaurant which is not too expensive. That’s not novel. Another comment: that the conservatism of French cuisine motivated Nouvelle Cuisine in the 70s. It’s version of  Le Fooding Guide was Gault Millaut.

The top French restaurants were fine but not too imaginative. Gopnik’s opinion is that France was not short of good food, but short of think food. El Bulli and Fergus Henderson’s St John offer food which is supported by an idea, ie. molecular gastronomy, or nose-to-tail eating.

There are many food reform movements around the western world, eg. Slow Food, the Edible Schoolyard, vegan, localist etc. They share the idea that the industrial Americanised food economy is destructive of smaller traditional farms.

Le Fooding’s goal is to break down French food snobbery, and look to a different future, eg. pizzerias and quality fast food outlets –  no more false boundaries between people, brasseries, bistros, grand restaurants and the like. All that matters is talent. (p263)

And at the El Bulli, I began to see at last why the slow-food movement and techno-emotional cooking, though seemingly based on different premises – one reactionary and anti-technology, the other all technology and naïve futurism – have lived together at our mental table, as a combined part of the moral taste of our time, so easily. The Hestias of the Hearth, following Alice Waters, and the Willy Wonkas of the Chemistry Set, following the Adrias, were really united in another way, both allied as makers of true slow food. In a world given over to all forms of speed – speed-of-light communication in every sphere, where anything you write electronically is available everywhere on the planet immediately – the commitment to taking time is itself a commitment to a coherent set of values. You could go to Per Se, or you could eat at Chez Panisse, but in either case what you’re doing is going to eat. You’re not going to eat on your way somewhere else, or before some other thing, or hoping to get done in time for Dancing with the Stars. You’re going to eat in a world where you mostly eat to go.

(p294-5)

This quote sums up the book entirely.