The pleasure principle

With The Other Half traveling to northern climes for more rugby league yesterday, I did a few bits and pieces in the kitchen in the afternoon and then I sat down, with camomile tea and chocolates, to watch Julie & Julia.

Nora Ephron’s 2009 film weaves together the story of Julie Powell’s blog project to cook every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a single year, with dramatisations of Child’s own life in France in the 1950s, where she studied French cooking, through to the publication of her book.

Child was to US cooking what Elizabeth David was to the UK.

I searched for YouTube for footage of the woman herself, just to verify that Meryl Streep’s performance wasn’t completely over the top. It wasn’t.

Setting aside how irritating one would find the fluting loudness of her voice and an almost boyish physical clumsiness, it’s a charming film that, at it’s heart, celebrates the pleasures of life: not just food, but also sex – both couples seem to have plenty of that as well as good food.

This relaxing viewing came at the end of the week in which Oliver Thring’s article on lard appeared online at the Guardian and triggered not only a wave of nostalgia, but also the arrival of another of the food fundamentalist brigade, shrilling that we should all stop eating all fats – there are enough in vegetables and fruit to keep us healthy (no mention of happy); olive oil is processed/refined, and potatoes can be cooked and eaten without any fat involved, so bid farewell to mash with cream/milk and butter.

“You get used to it” apparently – which begs the question of why you’d want to. Health is what is always cited.

Child herself lived to 91. She never skimped on the cream or butter. Her husband lived to 92.

Eleswhere, an article on the paucity of good food programming on British TV mentioned the execrable Man vs Food, where the presenter travels around the US taking on eating ‘challenges’ to see just how much he can stuff into his face in a single sitting in places that specialise in massive portions.

It’s on the Good Food Channel, despite pretty much being the antithesis of good food – indeed, it could be seen as the other side of the coin that produces the streak of food puritanism that, on Facebook, saw me effectively branded a murderer because I am not a vegan.

Is this an indicator of dumbed-down education, the ‘nanny state’ or an illustration of how, with the decline of conventional, mainstream religious observance in the UK and the failure and/or apparent abandonment of left-wing political alternatives to what seems to be the current political and economic orthodoxy, a void has been left?

A void that, in so many situations, seems now to be being filled with a variety of extremisms, from fundamentalist versions of traditional religions to other sorts of ‘faith’, but all sharing a complete moral certainty, an evangelical fervour and pretty much total contempt for anyone who dares to disagree.

The Facebook incident was amusing in some ways: it was on a page for a campaign against plans for a dairy factory farm in the UK. I 'liked' it some time ago and have signed the odd petition and whatever else. But at the news that the application for planning permission by the 'farmers' appears to have been dropped, the vegan fundamentalists were out, having a go at those who, unlike them, are not vegan.

I pointed out – entirely politely – that we're not vegetarians, but omnivores. I don't remotely have an issue with veggies and vegans – just don't lecture me about how I should become one.

I also gave an illustration of the advantages of meat for me personally (not even mentioning the pleasure). This involved a portion of liver or kidney solving occasional bouts of monthly anemia. Iron tablets bring me out in a rash. I was told off and informed that I obviously 'hadn't tried hard enough' to find an alternative – Guinness works, apparently – to murdering animals.

Yet this was from a supporter of the same campaign! They don't seem to realise that, were it not for human consumers of dairy and meat products, there wouldn't be any cute animals in fields for them to get pseudo-religious about – never mind being able to cope with the fact that many meat and dairy eaters actually care about husbandry and animal welfare.

One of the things that Thring’s article notes – and he also mentions Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient with Recipes, which is currently sitting in my kitchen waiting to be read – is that a lot of myths have been spun and fat in food – yes, even saturated fat. Indeed, the rise in obesity has come as we eat less saturated fats in the form of butter (replaced by the dreadful margarine) and, of course, lard.

We take less time over food, considering it instead to be primarily a fuel, the preparation and consumption of which merely interferes with other things. This isn’t unique to the UK’s food culture, but it is a reality. And yet as this happens, the weight is packed on.

Is this, as some people have suggested, beneficial to the extreme ends of neo-liberal economic set ups? Is that why such an approach to food has become so prevalent in the UK and US? It's certainly something that Stewart Lee Allen posits in the enjoyable and informative In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food.

In a climate where instant and repeated consumerist gratification is essential to an economy that has become hugely reliant on retail, to the extent that, in recent years, quarterly retail figures have become a regular and important part of news programmes, isn't it better that we spend our time and money in the shops or buying online – and, indeed, grabbing a bite at our desks in work rather than going out for a proper lunch. Further, if we do the latter, do we not also fill space in an outlet that sells food than if we merely walked in, bought something and took it back to our desks?

There's a Pret a Manger near where I work. It's certainly better than the 'deli' at work itself, but it's far from cheap. A sandwich or salad and soup will set you back well over a fiver. On the other hand, if you take the time to make a lunch, you can eat better and far, far cheaper (and this is partly a recurring memo to myself). And of course you get to control what you eat.

One of the things that I discovered a few years ago, in the years immediately following my own decision to give up the cycle of dieting and putting more weight on, was that one thing that saturated fat does is comfort and sate us. And it does so far more quickly than, say, a plate of complex carbohydrates – pasta, for instance. And in substituting the latter for the former, we can end up consuming more calories in order to reach a point of being sated.

A few weeks ago, I bough lamb chops and grilled them. For some time, I haven’t been able to eat crackling, but that evening, I could. The chops had a thick layer of fat, which crisped up, beautiful and golden.

It was a divine taste. And, by the time I’d eaten that, I felt almost full – and also utterly satisfied by the taste experience.

Personally, the older I get, the less certain I am about so many things. With the exception, perhaps, of food and even of life: enjoy it. There’s no second chance. And life is really far too short to eat mashed potatoes with no butter.

What's wrong with pleasure? Outside of religious extremists, when did we start to see pleasure in food as something 'wrong'?

Getting pie eyed about detail

In his first Food for Fort answers to foodie questions column of the new year, Guardian columnist Matthew Fort was presented with the following query by a reader: “I make lots of stews like boeuf bourguignon, but never sear the meat first; I just add it to the pot. Is it really necessary to sear the meat?”

“Necessary, as in will the dish be an utter failure if you don’t?" he began in response.

“Probably not. Necessary, as in will the searing add another layer of flavour? Yes. The searing causes caramelisation, which adds sweetness and fruitiness and the Maillard reaction. I checked the recipe in Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, as close to a divine text as you can get, which adds the flour after browning the meat. I think boeuf bourguignon deserves that attention to detail.”

That is precisely why reading stuff about food is worthwhile. It’s those technical things that, otherwise, you don’t know.

Personally, I’d have seared meat if a recipe calls for it – and boeuf bourguignon is certainly not on the limited list of dishes that I can whip up with reference to the written word.

But I would have done so without really comprehending what the process was intended to achieve. Caramelisation is easy enough to understand, but as for “the Maillard reaction”, I had to check out Wikipedia for an explanation.

Yet once you know that, even if you can’t quite get your head around the actual chemistry, it gives you a reason for the searing – and that helps you understand exactly what is required.

The Fort answer also encouraged me to look up the book that he had described as being “a divine text”. It was written by Julia Child and published in 1961.

Having trained at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and gone on to study privately with a number of chefs, Child wanted to introduce audiences in her native US to French cuisine. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the result. She went on to become a hugely important figure in US culinary life.

According to Wikipedia, her “use of ingredients like butter and cream has been questioned by food critics and modern-day nutritionists.

“She addressed these criticisms throughout her career, predicting that a ‘fanatical fear of food’ would take over the country’s dining habits, and that focusing too much on nutrition takes the pleasure from enjoying food.

“In a 1990 interview, Child said, ‘Everybody is overreacting. If fear of food continues, it will be the death of gastronomy in the United States. Fortunately, the French don’t suffer from the same hysteria we do. We should enjoy food and have fun. It is one of the simplest and nicest pleasures in life.”

All that butter and cream and enjoyment of food sent her to her grave at the age of 91.

We seem to be between editions of the book – books, actually: there are two volumes –so I haven’t ordered them yet. I have, however, got hold of Julie & Julia, a recent film based on her life and career, and the attempt by a blogger to cook all of the recipes in the book in a year. I might watch it over the weekend.

In the meantime, wondering what to cook for last night’s dinner, I had pulled out a packet of frozen mince before pottering off to work, and left it thaw out.

What I’d decided to do was a cottage pie. Nothing ambitious in that, you say. And quite right you’d be.

But what I wanted to attempt was to pay a little more attention to detail when cooking it – and see if that made any difference.

First up – chop an onion and soften it in olive oil. Nothing different here.

Add the mince – after turning up the heat a bit. Although I’m not as bad as I used to be, I can still be a bit tentative about heat when cooking. But having caramelisation in my mind as the desired outcome helped and I made sure I’d got the pan and oil far hotter than in my previous efforts at cooking mince.

After browning the meat – and the noise and smell tell you it’s cooking differently – I sprinkled a heaped teaspoon of plain flour on the meat, stirred that around to cook through and then deglazed with a little red wine that was conveniently lying around. These were two of my new ‘details’.

Next up, a little celery salt and some diced carrot (these two, with the onion, seemed to represent the vital flavours of a mirepoix that’s the base of so much), a squeeze of tomato purée, a shot of Lea & Perrins (which I cannot remember buying but which I had discovered when clearing a cupboard before Christmas), a small glug of sherry vinegar, a teaspoon of sugar, salt and pepper and some beef stock.

I’d have added stock previously, with the carrot and possibly a little Magi, plus the seasoning. The others mentioned here were more of the evening’s ‘details’.

Now the other thing that had struck me as I’d started thinking about the dish in this way was the question of peas. There’s nothing wrong with frozen peas and I have usually just chucked a few straight out of the freezer into the cooking meat mix.

But hang on, if you do that, you’re adding water and you’re also lowering the temperature of what’s cooking, because you’re putting in something that’s effectively ice.

So I decanted a few peas into a saucepan of boiling water, gave them a minute and then drained them well before adding them to the mix.

Whack the lid on, turn the heat right down and leave it all to cook for around half an hour.

When I came back to it, I decided that I wanted to make it a little thicker. Helpfully, I had some beurre manié in a bit of foil in the fridge from something I’d done last week. It was easy to stir some in, little by little, until I was satisfied with the consistency.

Then it was all decanted into a dish and left to cool while The Other Half, the cats and I got on with putting Christmas back in to assorted boxes.

Next stage: peel, cut up and cook some potatoes. Easy. Then, with my nice new potato ricer, purée the potato, add butter, double cream and seasoning, and spread on to the cooled meat mix. Mark it with a fork and dot with more butter.

Shove into an oven that’s been preheated to 200˚C and leave for around 25 minutes, until the potato is beginning to brown at the edges.

As it happens, I also took account of something I’d read on a forum about fan ovens – that you need to give them longer to pre-heat because they fluctuate quite wildly for a while after you put them on, before the temperature stabilises. Sure enough, I noticed the little indicator light going on and off and on again quite a few times before I was ready to put the finished dish in.

The result was really pleasing. Certainly more flavour than my previous efforts with the same culinary staple.

Cottage pie is hardly haute cuisine, but made properly, it’s good and enjoyable fodder. It isn’t particularly quick to cook, but I think that the extra attention to those few little details really boosted the finished dish.

And hopefully, the technical lesson of caramelisation and Maillard reaction will have stuck and, next time I need to sear meat, I really will sear it and not just vaguely let it near some moderate heat.