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'?

So what's the new peasant cuisine?

First – I’m sorry that this wasn’t the “tomorrow” that was promised on Sunday, but a nasty cold is to blame for laying me too low to do much of anything – let alone think!

But this is an appropriate day for this second article, since there’s a Panorama investigation into supermarkets on BBC1 at 9pm this evening.

Anyway …

I don’t have any concrete memory of the word ‘peasant’ until the time, in my late teens, when we lived in Lancaster and my mother would use it derisively of an elderly Polish couple who lived next door.

Which is all the more ironic because, as my knowledge of such matters increases, it’s easy to see that her own choice of husband comes from something little removed from the peasantry: a family that had a little bungalow in rural, rural Cornwall (there was a village squire – I kid you not), with no electricity, no hot running water (I actually remember sitting in an old tin bath in front of the fire) and in the rambling garden, chickens and rabbits for food.

My paternal grandfather was also a road mender (his wife an occasional barmaid) who was so short-sighted that the limits of his service in WWII was the Home Guard: he was a very quiet man, but always laughed at Dad’s Army relishing how true it apparently was.

I have no memories of my maternal grandmother’s cooking, but I assume it was basic.

But if we’re using Elisabeth Luard’s definition of peasant cuisine, therefore including working class dishes where there has been no peasantry for centuries, then what is the ‘peasant cuisine’ of today?

For working people, the choice of food is primarily governed by time.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a trained cook – and she’d continued to undertake further training and get qualifications throughout her working life, not resting on her laurels – who was made redundant from the old people’s home in which she worked when the council decided to sell it to a private developer.

She was in her 50s. She struggled to get any sort of a job – and ended up doing three cleaning jobs just to make ends meet. Her husband – who had retired from the fire service after a serious accident – was struggling on as a school caretaker, in the fairly certain knowledge that he will end up in a wheelchair.

She actually enjoys cooking, but is frequently so exhausted when she gets home at night that a take-away is all she’s capable of organising before dozing off on the sofa. And besides, it’s often so late in the evening that her husband has already had his own meal.

Where is the quality of life in this? Is this really the apotheosis of a supposedly civilised society in the 21st century?

Perversely, we now seem to be moving into an era where those people who could be described as the ‘working poor’ are vilified and blamed for their own condition.

The ‘logic’ appears to work something like this:

‘If you’re on a low income, get the training/education to get a better-paid job’.

Obviously this means that:

• there are no shortage of such jobs (as my interviewee, mentioned above, who had continued to get improve her CV, discovered);

• anyone in a job with low wages deserves to be there and to be on low pay (and, concomitantly, with a crap standard of living/quality of life).

The latter rather ignores the point that the overwhelming majority of jobs are not acts of charity: they exist because there is work that needs to be done. So someone will always have to do it. In which case, they are saying that someone will always deserve to have a shitty standard of living/quality of life.

Again – and this demands to be repeated: do we live to work? Or do we work to live? Which should it be?

And if it is the former, then why? Who or what is the work that dominates our lives for?

To clarify a point slightly (and I feel I shouldn’t have to make this, but it’s best to do so for fear of any misunderstanding): I do not mean that every worker gets the same pay, right across the spectrum of jobs.

But let’s put it another way: in the UK at present, the median wage is around £21K. Sound a lot?

Okay. The average cost of a house is £246,387. Now, in the days before the chronic housing shortage and the boom in prices that inevitably followed (and the banks deciding to offer increasingly dangerous mortgages to people who were desperate to get a home), it was considered sensible to have a mortgage that was no more than three times your annual household income.

So, to buy a property at the current average price, you’d need a joint (or single) income of over £82K. Or to put it another way, that median wage, applied to a sensible mortgage, would get you a property of £63K.

Most women – certainly in the UK – have little choice these days about whether they want to work or stay at home after having a child. The sort of financial realities sketched out above make it Hobson’s Choice.

So it could be argued that we need fast food and convenience food to help sustain the economy as it currently exists.

This is actually something that Stewart Lee Allen touches on in In the Devil’s Garden. Personally, I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories, preferring instead to apply Occam’s Razor whenever possible. And the idea that, in effect, government has ‘encouraged’ a culinary culture of supermarkets, ready meals, take-aways etc, as a way of those time-short workers feeding themselves and their families, is not one I like or feel comfortable with.

But the reality in the UK is that, for many, many people, their food ‘choices’ are now limited what they can pile into the trolley, and then into the car and then into the freezer at the weekend.

It is, in this ‘post-industrial’ landscape, quite handy when people will apparently happily spend money on mass-produced rubbish, from Lancashire hot pots that require pectin to ‘beers’ that are full of chemicals; just as it’s handy that many people have come to believe that quality of life is measured in terms of how much they can buy.

It would be more than a little awkward if that were not the case.

Yet we have increasing obesity – particularly in childhood – with the concomitant diseases that go with it. And there’s no connection to the diet that people are increasingly consuming?

Decreasing numbers of families sit and eat together, but spread out around a home, in front of the telly or the computer etc, with their own food. And there are plenty of commentators who apparently think we have increasing family breakdown and an inability amongst young people in particular to learn social skills and relate to people outside their own peer group.

We have town centres that have become no-go areas for families and older people at nights and weekends, when young people in particular (with a lack of social skills – so they find it difficult to comprehend why there is anything wrong with their being as noisy as they want, regardless of where they are and anyone else) arrive for a night’s drinking in industrialised drinking establishments.

When you think of it like this, it’s easy to see why no real changes are attempted.

And it’s easier to build more and more supermarkets, and encourage people to believe that ready-meals and junk food are cheaper than real food, than it is to deal with the equation of low pay and a high cost of living that forces many people to take two or three jobs at the same time.

Or of dealing with the whole question of quality of life and work-life balance.

Do we really live to work? Or do we work to live? Which should it be? When you look at the political decisions made in the UK over the last 30 or so years, primarily that of moving us to a ‘post-industrial’ economy, you can see, for such a post-industrial economy to work, what the answer has to be (for ‘them’, at least).

Against this background, how odd that Lancashire hot pot is something that you might (if lucky) find in a gastro pub now – although such an approach is considerably later than the French taking their peasant cuisine and moving it into the restaurant … think duck confit, for instance.

The new ‘peasant cuisine’ in the UK is either fast and take-away food or over-packaged, pre-made, ‘ready’ meals – supposedly cheap but not really, but which offer people ‘convenience’ and big business ever increasing profits, at the same time as destroying town centres and communities, and aspects of our culture.

One is left with a question: we’ve been on this path for some years – but where does it lead?

Salty tales to pique the appetite

Salt: A world history by Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlanksy’s Salt: a world history promises to do something that seems rather obvious on the surface – to illustrate the importance of salt in the history of the world.

After all, we can all acknowledge the importance of salt in a general sense, can't we? But if ever there was an illustration of history being news, then this is it.

There will be many for whom this book is still a revelation in terms of just how many uses – culinary and non-culinary – the world has found and developed for the whole range of salts that have been known of and used since the dawn of time.

Ham and salted fish and gunpowder are one thing (well, several things, actually), but I confess that it’s to my shame that I personally didn’t realise quite the role of salt in cheesemaking, for instance.

This extraordinary book covers as wide a geographic terrain as the author found possible, from China to Cheshire.

It touches on politics, on economics and on religion, as well as science, engineering – and, of course, food, with a host of salt-related recipes.

There are times when Kurlansky’s tale is a whirlwind that leaves the reader dizzied.

As when he writes: “In the Caribbean, the leading cargo carried to North America – more tonnage than even sugar, molasses, or rum – was salt. The leading return cargo from North America to the Caribbean was salt cod, used to feed slaves on sugar plantations.”

There’s something so circular, but so crazy, about this scenario, that it is difficult to get the mind around it.

And personally, I knew nothing about the role of salt in the struggle for Indian independence, with British imperial bans on the people of Orissa making or gathering their own salt – in order to create a market for Cheshire salt – helping cause famine and much hardship.

It's rather amusing – in a wry sort of way – to realise that current economic orthodoxy both rails against any form of the protectionism that enabled the British (and US) economy to build in the first place, and claims that for growth, developing world economies must open themselves totally to foreign investment. In other words, they must 'choose' to do (because they're told there's no alternative) what they previously had to be forced to do.

And then came the 240-mile march by Gandhi and some of his followers to Dandi to gather salt illegally – and integral part of the struggle for independence.

Nor did I know of the role of salt in the American Civil War, where one unexpected legacy from that period is Tabasco Sauce: another circle, with the seeds for the peppers having been originally taken from Mexico to grown in the US – and recently having been returned to be grown there for the same sauce, while salt continues to be mined at great depths on Avery Island.

Circles are no more evident than at the conclusion, when Kurlansky describes how most salt became uniform, and then most salt producers were bought out and absorbed into a few massive companies. And yet … some people persist in wanting variety; in searching for something more authentique, if you will. So small producers start making salt again in the old ways.

I could be pernickety and point out that Kurlansky is a tad inaccurate or misleading when he describes Port Vendres in the South of France as: “a contemporary hillside monument to industrial efficiency”. It was first discovered by the Greeks as a safe port in around 600BC, and while parts may be new and industrialised, and while Port Vendres is certainly no Collioure, it is not all modern and it is not without its charms.

But that feels a tad churlish, for in general, Kurlansky’s book is an entertaining, informative, fascinating read.

And all this from someone who makes no claims to be a professional, trained historian (so in the same boat as Stewart Lee Allen).

On the other hand, a preliminary browse through the second edition of Cuisine and Culture: a history of food and people, by Linda Civitello, who has an MA in history, was more than enough to annoy me out of starting to read it properly.

For instance, in the introduction, one discovered that there have been nine world wars. Yes, you really did read that correctly.

I thumbed rapidly to the appendix that apparently detailed this, together with all other important wars and battles since ancient times, starting with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476.

The War of the League of Augsburg is listed as one of her ‘world wars’. As are the Wars of Spanish and Austrian succession, the Seven Years War, the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars …

This, after some Googling, seems to be the ‘theory’ of a US historian called Thomas A Bailey, who produced the original version of a textbook for US schools, The American Pageant. I couldn't find any other historian, reputable or otherwise, supporting the same idea. I can't imagine many people are about to start describing the events of 1914-18 and 1939-45 as WWVIII and WWIX.

Returning to Civitello’s own tome, however, let’s set aside the typo (presumably) that omits the US from the “who fought” list of WWI (well, they did wait until rather late in the day to get involved), but then there’s the classic error that surely a real, live historian with an MA should know or check before making, of describing something as the “Civil War” in England (there were three English civil wars).

And then there’s the matter of referring to “England” as a combatant in many wars (including the two real world wars), as opposed to Great Britain.

But this appendix, set out as a chart on a gray background, in the fashion of the charts that pepper the rest of the book, is part of the problem: it’s enormously simplistic. To describe, for instance, the Thirty Years War as simply “religious”, 'fought by' Catholic v Protestant, is to almost sinfully misrepresent the extremely complex nature of that conflict.

So is this book intellectually rigorous and authoritative or not?

On page XIX of the introduction, she also repeats as fact the story of the Romans feeding “Christians to the lions for entertainment”. The Romans did persecute Christians, but there is no supporting evidence for the idea of mass throwing of Christians to lions in arenas. It is a myth. And 21st-century historians should not be citing it as a fact.

And on p221, on another of these charts (which make the entire book seem less like something aimed at intelligent grown-ups and more like a school textbook) laying out the gender division of work on a Midwestern farm in the 19th century, she includes the somewhat unscientific phrase: “Make everything look nice”.

On p361, of a Fox Network programme called Glutton Bowl, she comments that it “presented chow hounds as athletes”. “Chow hounds”? Oh pur-lease. It’s the same sort of sloppy language and approach that has no place in a book that sets out to be serious and intellectually sound.

And that was after a glance inspired by reading the introduction and finding the nonsense of ‘nine world wars’.

I’d trust Kurlansky infinitely more, and it returns to the shelf fully read and as an important part of my growing culinary library.

The Civitello – unread, apart from the gems cited above – has only been allowed back on the shelf for when I need a sort of Daily Mail moment to make me shake me head in irritation and horror.

In danger in the devil's garden

Taking Wednesday off work, I journeyed into deepest, darkest Surrey – and all by a spanky new train service – to visit my parents.

It was an odd sort of a day; mentally exhausting. No rows or disagreements, but it was such an effort to make any conversation at times, with both of them dozing off at different moments while I wondered what subject could safely be used to fill in the silence.

And then there is also the matter of my mother’s cooking. For our evening meal, she took some chicken breast, diced it and cooked it in the oven in a dish with some broccoli and a ready-made sauce. I saw the empty jar but not the label and, to be honest, I couldn’t tell what the sauce really was – if it was anything much more than the sort of ‘white sauce’ she’d once have served with cauliflower.

On the side were some new potatoes, scrubbed and picked over with a knife for the smallest imperfection. It was bland but inoffensive.

Yet it took her around two hours to prepare. She doesn’t have a chair in the tiny kitchen, so she wasn’t exactly sitting down and secretly quaffing sherry. But every meal, no matter how easy, takes her such a long time.

I keep out of the way, while my father asks me, as though I can explain, why it always takes her so long.

Well, to start with, she’s no youngster any more. She’s slowed down a lot. But perhaps as obvious to me is that cooking has always been a chore for her – never a pleasure.

Oh, she took great care to ensure that her family were fed properly, with a varied diet, but I don’t think that it was ever really a pleasure. Then again, considering her oft-stated belief that: “We eat to live – we don’t live to eat”, this shouldn’t be much of a revelation.

I did manage, between both train journeys and then sitting in bed at night with a soothing cup of camomile tea, to finish reading Stewart Lee Allen’s In the Devil’s Garden: a sinful history of forbidden food, which may sound rather po-faced, but is actually very entertaining and informative.

Talking of the Victorians and their attitude to childhood – they were the first people to view children as inherently different to adults – and of Pye Henry Chavasse, a 19th century Dr Spock who penned that handy 1844 tome, Advice to Mothers on the Management of Their Offspring, Allen notes that the blandest of food was recommended for children.

Developing the theme, he goes on: “This sadistic approach to child nutrition was a perfect match for the theories of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who believed children were ‘natural atheists’ because they enjoyed nature instead of God.

“He recommended bringing this under control by reminding them that ‘they are more ignorant and wicked than they could possibly believe,’ and breaking their spirit at every turn.

“Withholding pleasant food was considered a particularly plum way to do this, because it trained them out of the expectation of ‘natural’ pleasure at the table.”

Now, as readers may know, my father is a (retired) Methodist clergyman – and from the particularly fundamentalist, evangelical end of Methodism (although he’s mellowed over the years). He even claims that, in the early days of his ministry, the aforementioned Mr Wesley appeared to him and gave him some advice on preaching.

My parents were never as intent on delivering a totally pleasure-free a culinary existence for their children as Chavasse or Wesley might have recommended.

Looking back, it was as though they obviously didn’t believe in eating the worst imaginable foodstuffs themselves or foisting such on their children, but it was as though there was a constant battle not to enjoy food ‘too much’.

Clearly, if one follows the logic of Chavasse or Wesley, the highest compliment available to one’s mother, after dinner, would be: ‘Yuk. That was bland and boring’.

Although perhaps that explains partly why my mother has, by and large, eschewed spices in her cookery and food – apart from Christmas cake, mince pies, Christmas pudding and hot cross buns? Although it’s equally true that, in the post-WWII years, British cooking in general was notoriously bland.

But what a way to spend one’s life – waging a perpetual war against experiencing ‘too much’ pleasure. It makes me think of the oh-so-religious guests in Gabriel Axel's film, Babette's Feast, determined to simply eat but not enjoy the feast that Babette cooks for them as a thank you. And how do you define what’s an acceptable level of pleasure and what steps across the culinary rubicon?

Personally, I find the following description by Allen of the Marquis de Sade’s perfect breakfast to be far more up my street: “The marquis recommends a simple breakfast: a plain omelet, served piping hot on the buttocks of a naked woman, and eaten with ‘an exceedingly sharp fork’.”

As I noted, this is a very enjoyable and fascinating book – but it’s also very moving in places, as in Allen’s descriptions of the food aspects of the US state’s genocide against the Native American peoples. After massive attacks on their diet, both in almost entirely wiping out the buffalo and in the onslaught against corn, a government-approved corn was allowed to be grown in the south west. It gave diabetes to a people who had no history of that disease.

His overall conclusion though, is interesting, as he suggests that the current situation in many Western countries, where food taboos have almost entirely died out, is not necessarily a good thing; that our obsession with unrestricted pleasure is not necessarily healthy.

Yet I suspect that there was an element here of trying to find something controversial to say at the end – of playing devil's advocate.

He had already discussed fast food, the culture of not cooking, of not sitting down to eat as a family, of TV dinners etc, and decided that such behaviours are not about pleasure, but quite the reverse, and are essentially part of a massive con by big business. One could argue that the ‘taboo’ for many of these people these days is the idea of spending time cooking and shopping more than once a week at the supermarket to stock the freezer. Such a ‘taboo’ can surely be seen to be not entirely disconnected from the taboo of taking too much pleasure in food?

Further, many people eat constant take-aways in front of the TV etc as a direct consequence of not taking real pleasure in food: the pleasures gained are often the 'artificial' ones of too much salt and sugar, which are added to compensate for poor flavour etc.

But even for real foodies these days, there are plenty of new ‘taboos’ – one might suggest eating fast food, for instance, is a taboo for many foodies.

For the environmentally concerned, there are questions of the carbon footprint of a foodstuff and whether it’s organic or not.

For many others, there is the issue of fair trade – of the actual producers being paid a decent amount and not being ripped off.

And indeed, for many foodies, these ‘taboos’ are also linked directly to greater pleasure: for instance, seasonal food is environmentally sound – but it also tends to be when the ingredients are actually at their best, when they haven’t been flown 6,000 miles between continents.

So it’s rather odd to imply that we have no food taboos any more. We simply have different ones. And as always, these vary according to what group we put ourselves in.

And for many groups who foist taboos onto other groups, they see themselves as above such rules. Class is a perfect illustration as, time and again, Allen reveals how, for instance, the upper classes fretted about what the lower classes ate and whether it would render them either slothful and indolent or overly aggressive. Yet of course they rarely felt inclined to worry about the same matters for themselves.

Now, it could be argued that a certain 'elite' attacks what are often working-class food choices for creating obesity etc.

But all in all, a cracking good read – and dangerously pleasurable.

When the chips are down

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I was Heston Blumenthal’s greatest fan: any interest I might have entertained in the man frequently described as the country’s ‘best chef’ was pretty much finished off by his Guardian column some years ago, which notoriously included a recipe for fried eggs that involved cooking the white and the yolk separately.

And I cannot claim to be particularly inspired by the sort of dishes that are served at his highly lauded restaurant, The Fat Duck. Snail porridge is one example.

And then there are what I think of as the gimmicks: for instance, serving a scallops dish with an iPod in a conch shell playing sea sounds for the diner.

‘Molecular gastronomy’ is apparently the name for the cooking bit of this – a term coined in the late 1980s by French scientist Herve This and Oxford University professor Nicholas Kurti.

Perhaps the most famous exponent is Ferran Adria, at El Bulli near Barcelona (he spends six months of the year in a laboratory in the city, apparently), while such luminaries as Wylie Dufresne at wd-50 in Manhattan, and Grant Achatz of Alinea and Homaro Cantu of Moto, both of which are in Chicago.

I suspect the thing about the fried egg annoyed me so much because this really is everyday food: I’m quite prepared to spend hours in the kitchen for things that require it, but a fried egg never has been, is not now and never will be haute cuisine: it’s quick, everyday fodder.

Earlier this year, “the UK’s top chef” joined up with Waitrose, a chain of quality supermarkets that are part of John Lewis – in other words, a co-operative. Delia Smith was also part of this big new advertising campaign – Britain’s “best-loved cook”. An intriguing combination.

I was browsing the Waitrose site the other week and came across a Blumenthal recipe for cream of mushroom soup that actually caught my attention.

It caught my attention particularly because of the garnish – dried mushrooms that have been roasted, then blitzed and pressed through a sieve to leave a powder.

The thing is, you look at that and think: ‘Well it’s hardly complicated and I can see that it would add a really intense zing to the final soup’.

So I tried it today. I modified the soup a little – not completely puréeing it, as The Other Half prefers his soups to have some texture – but it had oodles of flavour and the powder really did add something.

For dinner, I’d decided to do chips. Now this might seem a rather strange way to plan a meal, but faith needed to be regained for the humble chip.

Yesterday’s lunchtime had demanded something more substantial than soup or a sandwich since we were meeting a friend for a post-work drink. So I nipped down to the North Sea Fish Bar to pick up chips (one portion between both of us), a chicken and mushroom pie for The Other Half, scampi for me and a pot of mushy peas to share.

As always, I soon wondered why I'd bothered. The art of the hand-cut chip seems to have disappeared and the scampi wasn’t anything to write home about. Yet this has a reputation as a good fish ‘n’ chippy, with an attached restaurant that does good trade (and isn’t cheap).

But frankly, it’s no better or worse than Faulkners in Hackney, which has also somehow acquired the status of being excellent.

The last time I had really good fish and chips was some years ago in Hull, in a really old-fashioned place, with plastic gingham tablecloths, thick sliced bread to make chip butties and tea in white mugs. The fish was sensational; the batter superb. The mushy peas hit the spot exactly and the chips? Well, needless to say, they weren’t out of a freezer.

There used to be a brilliant chippy next to the bus station in Piccadilly, Manchester, but that’s gone the way of all flesh, replaced by characterless glass and polished metal.

My father would sometimes drive to a chippy in Mossley to bring back fish and chips for a Saturday lunch. I remember it as a glorious treat.

But somewhere along the line, the English have gone off fish and chips – or at least lowered their ideas of what is good about it. A world of fast food outlets, with their skinny ‘fries’, has left us with barely even a memory of what good chips are.

Gastro pubs do their bit. But I’d decided to cook my own – something that I probably only do about two or three times a year.

I don’t follow Heston’s recipe – which involves cooking them three times. But I do use Delia’s method, which means cooking them twice.

Peel your potatoes and cut them into chips – not too thick. Pop them in a bowl of cold water and leave for half an hour – this gets rid of some of the starch and also helps plump them up. Drain and dry thoroughly.

Get your vegetable oil (or lard) hot enough that a cube of day-old bread with brown in it in a minute. Put the chips in carefully and cook for around 4-5 minutes. Remove carefully to a plate and then let the oil get back to its previous temperature. Pop the chips back in and cook for another 2-3 minutes – watching that they don’t get over-cooked.

Remove them to a plate with kitchen paper on it and serve as quickly as possible – chips don’t take kindly to being left around.

Lovely – soft and fluffy in the middle, beautifully crisp on the outside.

That meant that this morning’s main shopping question was what to serve with them. Now I didn’t want to deep fry fish too, but was wondering about grilling or roasting some fish.

Then, as I was walking up Broadway Market, Andy waved at me from the new game stall and I popped over for a chat.

Inevitably, I also found myself looking at the produce and, when I spotted venison burgers, the choice was made.

As I mentioned in that post about game, many people believe it's all – and always – expensive. These burgers were four for £4. Two were more than enough for us for a meal, so the others have gone in the freezer.

Now apparently, a spot of Googling informs me that the price of a McDonalds burger meal is nearly a fiver, which people seem to consider is cheap (it comes with ‘fries’, a drink and your bun, after all).

But let’s see: £1 for a meat patty made from top-notch meat, plus a few pennies for the potatoes, a bit more for the oil to cook the chips (about £1.50 per person and assuming it only gets used once) and let’s be generous about the frozen peas I served (it was a generous portion) and say 50p per portion. If I’d wanted, we could have each had a top-brand fizzy drink for 50p (assuming I hadn’t bought in bulk).

So being generous in my estimates, our meal was less than a McDonalds meal and would still have come in cheaper even if I'd added a liquid equivalent – so why do people think that McDonalds is expensive, but that markets such as Broadway Market are insanely expensive?

And that’s without even mentioning the issue of quality – and honesty, I’d back my chips against McDonalds’ ‘fries’ any time!

When and how did this massive con happen?

In his very entertaining and informative In the Devil’s Garden: a sinful history of forbidden food, Stewart Lee Allen discusses (amongst many other things) the issue of ‘appropriate’ foods for the working class. Some were banned because they were seen as likely to produce sloth (although they were fine for the aristocrats, on the grounds that they were entitled to a life of doing nothing – France and white bread is a perfect example of this).

But the thought of the plebs getting the idea that food could be sensual and wonderful was not to be tolerated.

Just as ancient Sparta, with its national dish of ‘black broth’ – pork stock, vinegar, blood and salt – “banished citizens who enjoyed eating”, Allen suggests that “both today’s fast-food outlets and Spartan mess halls are/were designed to discourage lingering over dinner and eliminate the need for people to “waste” time cooking for their family.

“And, like the Spartans’ legendarily bad food, many of these convenience foods are so unpleasant they even make work look good. They’re also immensely profitable for the corporations who produce them.

“Perfect: American workers now pay more money for worse food so they can hurry back to jobs they hate.”

He has a point about the big con at the heart of all this.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people in my little bit of Hackney complaining about Broadway Market. Local Trotskyists, showing a remarkable lack of interest in actual facts, spent ages shouting about how the council – which had not set it up, had not funded it and doesn’t run it – should have built a community centre instead. ‘Instead of what?’ one asked.

There was no ‘instead’. A group of private individuals and traders and producers got together and got the market going. It didn’t replace anything. Apart from dodgy property dealings by our local council, which saw two long-term shopkeepers pushed out (and which market stallholders helped campaign against), nothing has been lost.

Local people now have more choice than they had six and a half years ago when, as a famous bit of local graffiti had it: "Broadway Market – not so much a sinking ship as a submarine". In those days, if you couldn't get what you wanted at the one butcher, one chain baker, one very limited fruit and veg stall and the one independent general store, you had no choice but to tramp to one of the supermarkets that have taken over the area. Now, we have a realistic choice of where we shop, because we have genuine alternatives.

Yet some continue to believe the myth that it’s all criminally beyond their means. Unlike McDonalds or any other fast-food joint. Obviously.

Why do I bet that the con isn’t as effective across the Channel?