Food

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Our daily haggis

Give us this day our daily bread: those are also words of great culinary significance. Even if the ‘bread’ takes different forms — rice, pasta, potatoes — billions of people all over the world are following in that prayer’s footsteps. ‘Staple diet’: throughout history, most people have lived off staples, or died when they ran out. Staples stimulated cookery. Over time, though it would be fun to try, even daily caviar might pall: daily bread, somewhat sooner. So those who prepared the basics tried to spice them up. If meat or fish were available, there would be no problem, but they are expensive ingredients. Most of those at subsistence level had

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Let them eat whale

If the Faroe Islanders want to eat whale, let them. So says Tim Ecott in today’s Spectator. He argues that the Faroese – who live on dramatic and remote islands in the North Atlantic – shouldn’t be victimised for killing less than 0.1% of the pilot whale population annually for food. There are far more pressing marine issues that we should be concerned about – for example the 100 million sharks slaughtered for shark fin soup, or how the EU has allowed tuna stocks to be decimated. The problem is, many people don’t agree with him. We’ve all heard that whales are highly intelligent, social and family orientated creatures, and that

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I hide my tattoo from the in-laws?

Q. I have a tattoo the length of my forearm and am worried it will alienate my new boyfriend’s parents on a forthcoming beach holiday. There will be no way of covering it up in a very hot climate. My boyfriend says his parents are way too pompous and it will be good for them to have a tattooed guest ‘in their face’ every day for a week, but I have no wish to irritate people who have been kind enough to invite me to Barbados. How should I handle this? — Name and address withheld A. Visit the website www.veilcover.com and watch a video showing how to completely mask

Clarissa Tan

Clarissa Tan’s Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol

Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though through steam. The Arno river was a dense strip of dew. At the Piazzale Michelangelo, the statue of David was etched by the surrounding murkiness to a stark silhouette, the renaissance defined by gothic cloud. I peered through a telescope that overlooked the city and saw nothing for miles. My friend Alessandro told me this was unusual for sunny Tuscany, which made me feel quite pleased. Perhaps with each day that passed I would see less of Florence — the ultimate tourist experience. At a nearby cemetery, the milky arms

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold: Child-friendly, sex-free, nut-heavy – just the hotel for my 40th birthday

Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in Wiltshire, with gables like teeth and a pond outside, possibly haunted. It is like a smiling wife who bares her fangs and eats the car park and all the Hondas within; a cinematic fiend of a house, in fact, but I am only reading Hilary Mantel these days, and she has the gift of bestowing menace on everything — clingfilm, envelopes, nuts. A country house hotel doesn’t stand a chance. We are here because it is New Year’s Eve. It is my 40th birthday, A has decided that he hates

Theodore Dalrymple

Don’t tax sugar – it doesn’t make you fat. Gluttony does

If there is one characteristic that accounts for the deep unattractiveness of the modern British, it is their lack of self-control. It is not merely that they lack such self-control as they scream their obscenities in the street, eat everywhere they go, and leave litter behind them: it is that they are actively opposed to self-control on grounds of health and safety. They are convinced that self-control is the enemy of self-expression, without which their existences would be poisoned as if by an unopened abscess. Therefore the notion, increasingly propounded in the press and elsewhere, that sugar is an addictive substance will be music to their ears — or rather

Ed West Ed West

My January diet and detox – anything to stay in the middle class

Like many of you folks out there, I’m currently engaged in the thinly-disguised admission of alcoholism that is ‘Dry January’. I’m also on a diet, and this week have eaten what looked like two shrivelled gonads for lunch, (they were boiled potatoes, I think) and yesterday a ‘salad’. The goal is to be down to Class I Obese by the summer. The diet means no white bread, no pasta (white pasta but I don’t recognise brown pasta as such) and most of all no sugar, which is now thought to account for a large number of deaths from heart disease. The Telegraph’s Tom Chivers makes the perfectly sensible, if thoughtcrimey,

Friday

Camilla Swift

Let us eat horse

Could creating a UK market for horsemeat be the solution to the increasing number of equine welfare cases? This was the question posed by Princess Anne yesterday at World Horse Welfare’s annual conference. The former Olympic eventer argued that creating a horsemeat market, and thereby adding a financial value to many horses, would most likely improve the level of care that they currently receive. Unsurprisingly, Princess Anne’s comments have upset certain groups such as the RSPCA and Peta, with the RSPCA saying in a statement that ‘the killing of horses for meat is an emotive subject, as many see them as companion animals rather than a food source, a sentiment

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Boulestin has nothing to do with Marcel Boulestin — but could entice Mary Berry

Boulestin is a pretty restaurant on St James’s Street, between the posh fag shop (Davidoff) and the old palace, which the Hanoverians thought so ghastly that they moved out to Kensington Gardens, a fresher hell full of squirrels. This is one of the more fascinating West End streets because it is 300 years old and is, as such, the only street in the West End in which the ancient nobility look safe, or even human; you pass tourists, rats and also dukes wafting towards White’s gentlemen’s club, which is duchess-free and where a grown man can be treated like a baby, and not in a perverted way. So Boulestin, named

Thursday

Charlotte Hobson

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen – review

The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and hustle for food, and the collapse of the planned economy had left the shops empty. Instead, we staved off hunger- pangs with cigarettes, and if edible matter came our way, we fell upon it like locusts. More often than not, it took the form of the Soviet staple, Salat Olivier — Russian salad, plastered so thickly with mayonnaise that the ingredients were unidentifiable. (I notice that even the act of typing these words makes my mouth water; a complicated rush of nostalgia, anxiety and greed.) Like most aspects of late

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The Wild Rabbit’s food may be organic – but nothing else there is

The Wild Rabbit is a pub in the Cotswolds, that small corner of Britain full of evil grinning cottages; if the Cotswolds were a small dog it would always be mounting interior decorators and ripping out their throats. It is owned by Carole, Lady Bamford, the wife of the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony ‘Digger’ Bamford, which of course poses the question — does she have a toy one at home? And when she proved she could look after that one she got a real one? In any case, the Wild Rabbit is a story because Lady Bamford is also the owner of Daylesford Organic, which obviously helps stock the kitchens

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A restaurant in a synagogue. How strange can it be?

A restaurant in a synagogue may be too mad even for this column but we are Jews, so why not? (Column shrugs with the secret frisson of negative stereotyping.) 1701 is adjacent to Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London; it is the oldest, wisest and most camouflaged synagogue in Britain, disguised, presumably for safety, as a Christopher Wren church. This anticipates the joy of confusion — rabbis (I have long stopped calling them rabbits, being above such idiocies, as in Orthodox Rabbit, Progressive Rabbit, Welsh Rabbit) being asked for salad dressing, waiters being asked for blessings, security men (Jews love security men, in a complex way) being asked

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Piggies in the middle: why we need to have confidence in our food labelling systems

Just 9 months after the horsemeat scandal revealed that products labelled as beef did, in fact, contain horsemeat, one might have expected the food standards authority to have cracked down on food labelling – particularly when it comes to meat. But in an investigation broadcast earlier this week by the BBC’s Farming Today programme, a reporter bought a pork chop ‘at random’ from Tesco. It was labelled with the ‘Red Tractor’ logo, which ought to mean that it ‘is fully traceable back to independently inspected farms in the UK’. However, lab tests showed that the meat probably came from a Dutch farm – in fact there’s less than a 1%

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A Roald Dahl tea? It reminds me more of Jimmy Savile

One Aldwych, an Edwardian grand hotel near Waterloo Bridge, is serving a Jimmy Savile tribute tea. It is not explicitly called a Jimmy Savile tribute tea; of course it is not. That would be tasteless, and people would not come to One Aldwych to eat it; it might, in fact, be lucky enough to get a picket, a dazzling marketing dream. No, it is called the Scrumdiddlyumptious Afternoon Tea and it is tied, in sugary, monetised chains, to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a musical featuring a man dressed as a Fisher-Price toy (and possible diabetic), child torture and obesity, and explicit abuse of small minority workers, which is playing

Jane Kelly

Hospital food isn’t a joke. It’s a scandal

One of the patients I see regularly as a voluntary hospital visitor, who has been in hospital for weeks, seems to be getting better. Still skeletally thin, he is now sitting up and complaining. His problem is that he longs for a jacket potato with just butter. He hates beans. But he might as well ask for gravadlax and dill. On the hospital menu, baked potatoes only come with baked beans. I asked one of the Thai ladies who deliver the food if he could possibly have a plain spud. ‘Not possible,’ she said, ‘all with beans.’ She said she would go and ask someone, but who that might be

Tuesday

Steerpike

Brazen marketing pitch of the day

Marketing types are desperately jostling for a piece of the action at London Fashion Week, which starts at the end of the month. Take an irony-free press release trying to flog ice cream off the backs of catwalk models. This is not any old ice cream but ‘the world’s first protein ice cream’, inspiringly called ‘Wheyhey’. The blurbers say that Wheyhey ‘will be keeping sweet-toothed models and fashionistas satisfied’. Given that it apparently contains no fat, no sugar and the same amount of protein as a small chicken breast, Mr S has his doubts about that. Most of these ‘sweet-toothed’ yet stick-thin models could do with a box of Krispy Kremes;

Tuesday

Alex Massie

George Orwell’s lesson for Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver, eh, what a card? Why can’t Britain’s revolting poor eat better food? If they can afford televisions they can afford mussels and rocket too, don’t ya know? Something like that anyway. But instead they loaf in front of the goggle-box stuffing their fat faces with lardy ready-meals and fast food. What is to be done with them? And why can’t they be more like the Spanish or the Italians? Never mind that Italian children are more likely to be obese than British children. Never mind, too, that kids in impoverished southern Italy are more likely to be overweight than children in the wealthier north. Instead just fantasise about a

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Lose weight the Muriel Spark way

Those of you dieting your way to a svelte physique amid the flesh-exposing terrors of summer should take courage from Mrs Hawkins, the heroine of Muriel Spark’s wonderful novel A Far Cry from Kensington. Mrs Hawkins, with her unfortunate ‘Rubens quality of flesh’, only starts to worry about her weight when she gets a new job and notices that all her colleagues suffer from some kind of affliction. These range from stammers to stomach ulcers, pock-marked faces to war-wounds, and so, lying awake one night, she wonders what her own ailment might be. She gets out of bed to look at herself in the mirror: ‘I stood there, massive in my

Thursday

Prue Leith

How new food rules could ruin restaurants

The coalition said they would tame health and safety, which would be great for those of us in the food -business. But they, like the public, like to blame Brussels, and the problem is not with Europe, or not often. EU law is basically Napoleonic, and sensible. It places the onus on the operators to ensure safety, and to be able to prove that what they do is safe. If it turns out not to be, then they will be prosecuted and likely clapped in jail. Fair enough if you have maimed or poisoned someone. Our law is basically Roman and we like to stipulate every tiny detail in statues. Where

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘Like a concentration camp run by KFC’: Tanya Gold visits Shake Shack

Shake Shack is a hamburger restaurant in Covent Garden market. It came from New York and it is as needy and angry and angry-needy as America itself; it is, I suspect, quite capable of inventing a bogus reason to invade Burger King while posing as a victim of Burger King’s evil machinations. ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ it says in its promotional material online. ‘See you in the queue!’ (That, if you are English and a man and have never had psychotherapy, is called passive aggression.) Covent Garden market is full of August tourists; that is, wanderers with no destination, staring blindly at the metal Apples and Chanel.