Health stories to make you give up: pt2

A salad of rare quality

The award for the biggest throw-your-hands-up-in-despair moment to come out of last week’s health stories was not membership fees for the NHS or even African sand clogging up our lungs.

It goes instead to University College London for announcing that five a day isn’t enough, and we should all aim for seven a day.

Actually, there’s no scientific evidence that five – or seven – a day is an essential health requirement, although this advice does at least have the benefit of making sense.

The recommendation also says not that the majority of your seven should come from veggies, because fruit contains sugar and even natural sugars should be treated with care.

At which point I find myself musing over whether olives and tomatoes – technically fruits – count as such in this context.

I’m not bad on the old five a day: sometimes I don’t make it and sometimes I get more than that.

Breakfast is the biggest bugbear though.

A helpful – or attempting to be – piece on the BBC website last week was trying to suggest how you could increase your intake of veg, but managed only one practical (sort of) suggestion: adding a handful of spinach to a breakfast omelette.

Now, my understanding on five a day has long been that a portion is something like a whole apple, where it's an obvious whole, or about 80g of a food that doesn’t come as such a convenient handful.

But that’s an awful lot of spinach – or any other leafy food.

The advice also suggests swerving clear of fruit juice and drinks like smoothies, simply because they concentrate a lot of fruit – and therefore sugar – into a single portion.

And also based on my understanding of previous advice, only one portion of any veg counts per day – so no, if you have three portions of mushrooms, you can’t count it as three – and the same goes for pulses.

Variety is part of what makes sense.

To be honest, I ignore the fruit juice one myself – a small glass a day of pure stuff will not be the death of me.

So how else do you get your five – let alone seven?

Weekends are easy. On Sunday, for instance, I had a late but substantial breakfast, with quality bacon and scrambled egg, fried bread – and enough tomato, mushrooms and baked beans to constitute three portions. Plus a glass of fruit juice.

After that, it’s a coast.

Dinner came with carrots and leeks, and there was a little fruit after.

That was seven without any strain.

The difficulty is weekdays.

The most I’m likely to get if I breakfast at home is fruit compote (which means some added sugar) in plain (unsweetened) yogurt and a small glass of juice.

These days, breakfast out usually means eggs on toast – the toast might not be top-quality bread, but at least it's mostly my only bread of the day.

Quality eggs on toast

Lunches are easier – if I take my own, which I manage approximately 2/3 of the time, then it’ll be assorted salad and pickled veg, with some source of protein.

But if lunches are bought out, then most of the time I either end up with soup (vegetarian, so a source of at least one portion) or something between lumps of factory bread, which is never going to give you much on the greens front.

It’s worth noting here that mass-produced bread may be the reason for the rise in some intolerances: there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of people who cannot eat bread in the UK because it makes them feel bloated, but have no such problem on the other side of the Channel. And that’s without mentioning the taste.

However, back to those bought lunches: most salads struggle to be appetising.

Last week saw an exception that proved the rule. Arriving early in Islington for a job, I had time to while away and a need for lunch, so took the opportunity to enjoy the first al fresco meal of the year on a gorgeous spring day, at a café called The Blue Legume (geddit?).

Scanning the menu, I opted for a goat’s cheese salad.

It came in a large bowl that was filled with a veritable mountain of assorted leaves, plus cherry tomatoes, all topped with garlic ‘crouton’ – actually a thick piece of baguette, sliced on the bias – and a roundel of very slightly melted cheese, and with a dressing that included loads of finely-chopped walnut.

The main thing to point out is that the leaves were worth eating – not bland or lifeless or left in a dressing for hours to become simply depressing, as it so often the case. Even the little tomatoes had actual taste – no mean achievement in this country, particularly at this time of year.

The crouton was seriously garlicky, the cheese as pleasing as it should be and the dressing an ideal compliment without overwhelming everything or soaking the leaves.

I like salad, but there’s a reason I still remember one eaten in a café for local office workers near the railway station in Perpignan in spring 2006.

And the reason that I remember it was because it wasn’t a posh café and yet it was one of the first times I realised how good leaves can be – and it had three sorts of cheese and not just the one, rather bland one that you’d be likely to get in the UK if you ordered a cheese salad.

Dinner, as on Sunday, sorts itself out quite efficiently: it's not difficult or time-consuming to peel and slice a carrot and toss a few peas into boiling water out of the freezer – and frozen peas are one of life’s decent conveniences that don’t destroy the nutrition.

But given UK food culture in general, it’s not difficult to see why anyone would, on reading this new health advice, just feel like giving up entirely.

Ultimately, all this sort of advice seems counterproductive and will leave people feeling that they face impossible challenges – particularly if they read enough to know that it’s not even grounded in concrete scientific proof.

So what do you do? The easiest thing, it seems to me – and I realise that this too has its logistical complexities – is to eat fresh food, freshly prepared; to eat as little heavily processed food as possible and to eat as big a variety of vegetables as possible.

Eat good-quality protein, cut back on the crap bread, eat three meals a day and don’t snack as a matter of routine.

Don’t worry about a couple of sugars in your afternoon cuppa, but avoiding processed foods and loads of fizzy drinks will keep your sugar consumption down – and there seems to be a growing body of evidence that artificial sweeteners aren’t good for health either. But do drink water – something that you can even get free.

Apart from our food culture, though, there is another elephant in the room. And that is falling incomes and the rising cost of living.

It’s easy to tell people to eat better: to eat this or that or the other. But when the majority of people’s incomes have been falling steadily for 30 years – and more rapidly in recent ones – against a rising cost of living, then something has to give.

And for many, one of the few things that they feel they can control to a degree is food. It’s arguably easier to buy cheaper food than it is to cut lighting or heating beyond a certain point.

It’s no surprise that, in the last few years, average household spending on food has declined further, from a point that was already well below that on the Continent.

If we really want to change how people eat, there are a very great many things that need changing. Hectoring them with constant messages about what they should eat and how many minutes of how many days a week they should do whatever amount of exercise really will only start to make them feel it’s all hopeless anyway.

Small pleasures, from good eggs to good books

Della Street and Perry Mason

It’s doubtful that there is any better way to start a working day than a leisurely breakfast with a good book by your side.

If it means getting up a tad earlier and rushing a bit more, the more relaxed minutes that follow make it worth while.

And Albertini, a small, local café just off Euston Road – so just away from the worst of the traffic fumes and noise – is the perfect spot for such indulgence.

Even the simplest foods can be got wrong. On Tuesday, with an appointment elsewhere early in the morning, breakfast was taken in an old-fashioned greasy spoon, where the eggs and baked beans did the job of providing fuel, but nothing more.

But whoever is on duty at Albertini in a morning, be it Albert or Tini, they make a mean fried egg on toast, and it’s one of life’s small pleasures to sit and eat, taking care to avoid any of the rich, golden yolk dripping onto the plate.

And then there’s the coffee: a good old-fashioned, plain white mug – none of that overpriced, absurdly-named stuff so beloved of the endless chains that have invaded these shores in the wake of Friends.

There are no baristas at Albertini, but there is always good coffee, at a decent price.

Once the eggs are consumed, I pull the mug closer and return to whatever my current reading matter is.

It’s all been fiction of late – simply because my non-fiction reading, volume one of John Richardson’s behemoth of a three-volume Life of Picasso (with a fourth volume in the offing) may be brilliant, but it is also far too big and too heavy to lug around in a day-to-day bag.

And as so often, crime fiction is what I turn to when I want something a little lighter to read, but which still doesn’t actually insult the little grey cells.

So here is a brief look at a few recent reads – although that doesn’t mean they’re new books.

Earl Stanley Gardener’s the Case of the Stuttering Bishop is really the odd one out in this batch – it’ll become clear why quite quickly – so I’ll start with that.

There’s not really much to say about the Perry Mason books except that they’re fun in a fairly predictable way, but without the writing itself being too ‘pulpy’.

When I lodged in Bloomsbury some years ago, my landlady had most of them, in lovely old editions, on narrow shelves in the flat’s littlest room. I developed a fondness for them then and it was nice to return to one now.

They remain snappy and twisty, with a strong set of central characters – even though the descriptions are largely irrelevant, because I can’t see Mason as anyone other than the late Raymond Burr and Della Street as anyone other than Barbara Hale, while William Katt (Hale’s son), who played Paul Drake in the later TV reincarnation, looks nothing like the Drake of the written page.

But no matter, it was good fun.

Arturo Peréz-Reverte is the Spanish author who has given us, among many other works, The Club Dumas, which was subsequently adapted into The Ninth Gate, starring Johnny Depp.

The Flanders Panel starts with the discovery of a hidden clue in an old work of art, hinting at foul deeds.

In a 15th-century Flemish painting, two noblemen are pictured playing chess. Yet two years before it was painted, one of them had been murdered.

Five centuries later, in Madrid, picture restorer Julia is preparing the work for auction and uncovers a hidden inscription in Latin that points to the crime: Quis necavit equitem? Who killed the knight?

But this isn’t just a medieval mystery, because it becomes clear that, even after five centuries, the game isn’t up.

Combining art and chess, Peréz-Reverte spins a tale that possesses a genuinely creepy quality. And he writes so convincingly that you do find yourself wondering if the painting and the painter really existed.

Thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying, and with a conclusion that surprises – well, it surprised me.

Montalbano and Catarella

Having discovered that another Spanish writer, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, influenced Andrea Camilleri to the extent that the latter named his own protagonist after him, I decided to chase down some of the books that are available in translation.

Murder in the Central Committee possibly isn’t the best of the Pepe Carvalho series to begin with, since it uproots the private detective from his usual Barcelona setting and sends him to Madrid to solve an apparent closed-room killing.

In a Spain still recovering from the Franco years, the murder of the general secretary of the country’s communist party causes unrest.

Can Carvalho, drafted in as a former member of the party because he understands its workings, solve the case?

Rather over-wordy on occasion – particularly when he’s illustrating that he does actually know the politics – it’s still an interesting read with a quirky central character, and while Montalbán isn’t in the business of rubbishing communism, he’s good on the way people will argue over the finest imaginable points of what could be described as political theology.

I look forward to reading one of the Carvalho books that’s set in Barcelona.

But this moves us nicely to Camilleri and The Voice of the Violin, the fourth of his series of novels about Sicilian police inspector, Montalbano.

Here, our hero is faced with the murder of a woman that has all the hallmarks of having been the result of a burglary – or was it a rape?

Camilleri can, extraordinarily, create stories of tragedy and horror, highlighting corruption and venality and many another human failing, yet all with a sense of humour underlying the deep cynicism.

Salvo Montalbano is a wonderful protagonist – unorthodox, flawed but humane, and there’s a delightful cast of other regular characters too. In this novel in particular, the well-meaning but woefully inept policeman Catarella offers comic delight, as well as providing a way to comment on ‘modern’ approaches to policing.

And if Montalbano was named in homage to Montalbán, then another common factor is the love of food of both author’s central figures.

Mind, just as with Perry Mason, I can now no longer read about Montalbano without seeing Luca Zingaretti in my mind’s eye. They’re wonderful adaptations, but it leaves you with the question of whether seeing them impinges on the altogether more individual experience of reading the stories.

It’s not as though, however, these a 'bad' performances or examples of casting. And Angelo Russo’s Catarella actually helps read the character's muddled language.

Finally, a new discovery from Italy.

Gianrico Carofiglio is a former anti-Mafia prosecutor-turned author from Bari, and Involuntary Witness serves as his introduction to lawyer Guido Guerrieri, who now features in three further novels.

Guerrieri’s wife is leaving him, he’s hitting an early mid-life crisis and depression that’s only exacerbated by making a living that often involves defending the less-than-innocent.

Then he finds himself defending a Senegalese immigrant who is accused of murdering a nine-year-old boy.

Not only does he have his own demons to contend with, the lawyer faces small-town racism and a judicial system that is going to make any defence difficult.

If all that sounds incredibly heavy going, it’s to Carofiglio’s enormous credit that it simply flies past, leavened as it is with a great deal of dark, self-deprecating humour.

A great onslaught on the idea of Italian machismo, Carofiglio has produced a powerful novel about redemption.

It’s absolutely superb – just don’t read the final pages anywhere in public, whether on a bus or over a plate of eggs on toast in a café anywhere.

North and south on a plate

Boles de picolat

It seems almost impossible that only just over a week ago, the days were still sunny and hot, with humid nights.

It’s perfectly possible that such weather could return to grant us an Indian summer, but at present, it feels very much autumnal.

The nights are lengthening and the days shortening. The tipping point cannot be far away.

As we emerged from the British Museum on Friday evening at around 7.20pm, it was already pretty much dark, and rain was pitching down.

It didn’t stop until the following morning, yet there was something comforting in hearing the rhythmic pattering outside as I curled up in bed later.

The temperature has dropped and, while it’s not actually cold, it’s a lot cooler. The weekend saw more rain and some pretty blustery wind, largely grey skies, and the first signs of yellowing leaves on the two tall, slender silver birches in the carpark.

When all this is happening, the last thing you want to eat is salad.

I had already contacted Longwood Farm early last week, deciding that a slow Sunday afternoon cook was perfect and could easily be done again.

This time, it was shin of beef and beef kidney for a Vlaamse Stoverij, the Flemish dish that we first ate in Bruges 18 months ago.

The meats are diced and sautéed, followed by onion, carrot and celery. Everything goes into the big Le Creuset pot and is topped with three bay leaves, a sprig of thyme and a slice of bread, spread on one side with mustard.

Then it’s all covered with beer, lidded, and popped into the oven.

I stuck with the 160˚C (fan) from last week’s casserole and cooked it for approximately four hours.

Shin has to be cooked for a long time so that all the connective tissue beaks down, but it’s a cheap and tasty cut – and not one you’ll easily find in a supermarket.

And that was pretty much that.

But if Sunday’s dish evoked northern Europe, and that fluid region where the northernmost part of France meets the south of Belgium, Saturday’s food was all of the south.

I have cooked Boles de Picolat before, but only from that sort of point where you’ve never tasted a dish and are, ultimately, guessing what it should be like.

After our experience at Le Marinade, I decided to give it another whirl.

As with so much traditional food, there is no one cast-in-stone way of doing it.

Between French-language Catalan recipe books and a recipe postcard, I have five recipes – and all are different. One even calls for a small cup of coffee to be added.

The nearest coffee came to my version was the mug beside me as I spent an amiable hour or so studying the recipes on Saturday morning. After that, the books were put away and I worked from the memory of that meal in Collioure, taking a general sense of all the written recipes I’d looked at and combining it with the fact that meatballs are something I consider myself rather good at.

Figs, raspberries, blackberries, cream

So, for two of us, I used 400g of mince.

Now it should have been a mixture of beef and pork (some recipes also use sausage meat or substitute it for the pork), but since no pork mince was forthcoming, I stuck with beef, without too much sense of major loss.

Two small slices of bread were soaked in a small amount of milk and then added to the meat, together with an egg.

Normally, I don't add milky bread or eggs to meatballs – they do not need it to bind – but these ingredients do help to make a particularly light meatball, and the Le Marinade experience suggested that this is what you want for Boles de Picolat.

The flavourings that were added were a good shake of smoky paprika, a little cinnamon and slightly less ginger. You just want a hint of spice to come through.

Once thoroughly mixed together and shaped into balls, these are rolled in plain flour and browned in olive oil.

Okay, I don’t usually flour my meatballs either, but when the mixture is this soft, it helps with the initial cooking. One of the recipes, clearly aimed at rather inexperienced cooks, offered a ‘tip’ in a sidebar, explaining how to four your meatballs by rolling them on a plate of flour. Rocket science.

Once browned, set the balls to one side.

Add a little more oil if you need, and soften a diced onion and some finely chopped garlic. I added a stick of finely chopped celery too.

Give it a very, very large squeeze of tomato purée – we’re probably talking half a 100g tube here – and stir gently into a little warm stock (I had a small jar of defrosted homemade chicken stock that was perfectly okay).

To all that, add some dried mushrooms, a cinnamon stick, some ground black pepper and some finely-chopped flat leaf parsley. Pop the meatballs back, lid it and cook gently for about half an hour.

At this point, test for seasoning and add salt if needed, then add a drained and rinsed tin of haricot or cannellini beans, and some drained green olives. Pop the lid back on and give it a further 30 minutes.

Serve in bowls with the broth, and top with more finely-chopped flat leaf parsley.

And that is that: easy and very tasty.

I might not seem as obviously ‘southern’ as, say, a ratatouille or a bourride, but it is every bit as much indicative of a region that includes mountain country as well as the coast and the plain.

Perfect Sunday brunch

As a fusion of north and south though, a quick Nigel Slater dessert of figs, served with clotted cream and a scatter of raspberries would take some beating – perfect at this time of year, and you could easily substitute blackberries for the raspberries depending on taste and availability.

The final food note for an autumnal weekend that is worth a mention is the joys of a decent home-cooked English brunch late on a Sunday morning, after a delicious doze snuggled beneath the covers.

Downland’s marmalade sausages and a huge, halved tomato were grilled, while tinned (sorry) mushrooms were cooked in butter.

Three eggs were scrambled in more butter and were served on real fried bread – cooked in lard, in other words.

The only other addition was HP sauce.

North or south, it’s good to remember that, even as you mourn the passing of summer, autumn has many glories and pleasures to offer.

Marketing at its brightest: the breakfast edition

Earlier today, someone in the office in which I was working brought in a freebie that they’d been handed at one of London’s major railway stations.

It was a little packet containing two biscuits, both of which were filled with what the packet described as “creamy live yogurt”.

This was, apparently, a "belVita Breakfast” biscuit – a “yogurt crunch”, indeed, which is the latest addition to a range of ‘breakfast biscuits’ from Kraft/Nabisco.

The packet suggests something incredibly wholesome. Look at it the box. That’s the sun that you see, shining down onto wheat (or some other grain crop), while a rustic-looking biscuit leans temptingly between a cup of some hot drink (probably coffee) and a little pot of plain yogurt.

So why on Earth had he decided to look such a gift horse in the mouth and leave this freebie for someone else to pick up?

belVita Breakfast is one of those things that is marketed – very carefully and rather cleverly – as healthy.

The whole bit about the biscuits containing “creamy live yogurt” suggests both luxury and something completely natural and healthy. It’s fair to say that yogurt is viewed as a generally healthy product, while “creamy” suggests luxury.

A pack contains two biscuits. Each biscuit contains 119 kcals, which is “6% GDA” (guideline daily amounts). So if you’re watching the old cals, that sounds pretty darned good.

The biscuits are “made with 5 wholegrains” – now we all know that “wholegrains” are nutritional nirvana, so what could be better?

And according to the packet, they are “rich in cereals” with “no colours or preservatives”; they’re “made with a blend of 5 wholegrains”, they’re a “source of fibre”, a “source of calcium and vitamin E”, and you can “enjoy as part of a balanced breakfast”.

Which, just in case you don’t know what a “balanced breakfast” actually is, is also explained: “eg with a latte and a banana”.

Oh well that’s clear, then.

Although: “a latte and a banana”? Have we become part of the States sometime recently? Why not a cuppa tea? Indeed, if you want to be posh, why not a cup of Earl Grey in nice bone china?

Nope, it’s recommending something that, most likely, you will buy from a shop. You won't make it at home – you'll buy it from a franchise. Oh, how big business friendly.

But okay, let’s move on.

The ingredients list makes for fascinating reading.

Now, I’m sad enough that I copied the ingredient list out in full – and here it is, right down to the weird use of commas instead of full points in the middle of the percentages.

“Ingredients: wheat flour 31,4%, wholegrain cereals 23,9% (wholegrain wheat flour, oat flakes, wholegrain barley flour, wholegrain rye flour, wholegrain spelt flour), sugar, vegetable oil, wheat starch, dextrose, yogurt powder 3,0%, whey powder, raising agents (sodium hydrogen carbonate, disodium diphosphate, ammonium hydrogen carbonate), vitamins and minerals mixture (vitamin B1, vitamin E, vitamin B3, iron, magnesium, calcium), flavouring, skimmed milk powder, emulsifier (soya lecithin), salt, acidity regulator (citric acid).”

Wow.

You need all that to make a biscuit?

As far as I know, I’ve never made anything that included “sodium hydrogen carbonate, disodium diphosphate and ammonium hydrogen carbonate”.

Well, I bloody well hope not!

And I bet none of you realised that you needed those things to make a biscuit, now did you?

But look at it again. This is actually really rather clever. Sneaky – but clever.

By having both wheat flour (at 31.4%) and a selection of five other grains – at 23.9% combined but all listed individually, it makes a long list before we hit sugar as an ingredient.

In other words, it disguises the fact that sugar is the third largest ingredient in this ‘healthy’ breakfast, making it appear, at a glance, as the seventh largest ingredient.

But that's not all: carry on reading and the sixth largest ingredient is dextrose – or 'corn sugar' as it's otherwise known.

Kraft Foods/Nabisco – take a bow.

Your marketing of a highly processed foodstuff will probably con some people into believing that it forms part of a genuinely healthy breakfast (with a shop-bought latte and banana, of course).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just one illustration of why, when defenders of Big Food claim that the relationship between consumer and industry is, in any way, shape or form, entirely even, and that what you eat is 100% a matter of 'personal responsibility', with no concomitant corporate responsibility, it's a load of total bollocks.