Cooking for a king

Last weekend’s working visit to Brighton allowed me, for the first time, to drop in at the Royal Pavilion.

The seaside getaway for the Prince Regent – later George IV – began life as a small farmhouse in the town in 1786.

Developed a year later by Henry Holland, the Pavilion as we recognise it today was the work of designer John Nash between 1815 and 1822.

But if we’re all familiar with it’s Indian-styled exterior, the inside comes as a shock, as it crosses Asia to China for influence.

Wildly opulent – yet also surprisingly cosy in some areas – it’s a fascinating place to wander around. The banqueting hall is quite extraordinary, and the music room is simply wonderful, with its swags of shimmering curtains in blue and red, held in place by vast, curling green dragons.

Both are housed under vast domes, with massive, extravagant light fittings suspended beneath.

But while this is most certainly worth seeing, what I’d really visited for was the chance to view the kitchen.

Why? Well, because it’s historic in its own right, but also because this was a kitchen in which Marie-Antoine Carême, the world’s first superstar chef and the creator of what we understand as French-style haute cuisine, had cooked.

The Prince Regent, as he still was then, had persuaded Carême to join him in England in 1816, where he stayed for just seven months.

But on 18 January 1817, Carême cooked the most famous banquet of his brief stay: as the Prince hosted the Grandduke Nicholas of Russia, the Frenchman prepared no fewer than 120 separate dishes, of which a quite staggering 40 were entrées.

Otherwise, things seemed to come in eights: eight different roasts, eight soups .... well, until you get to the entremets, of which there are 32, half of those being desserts.

It’s hard to imagine why the Prince Regent suffered from gout.

The banquet also included eight piéces montées – Carême’s famous, architectural table decorations made out of sugar, marzipan or pastry, and which on this day ranged from an Italian pavilion to a Welsh hermitage, via a “giant Parisian meringue” and a “grand oriental pavilion”.

There seems to be some dispute as to how all this was served. Some argue that Carême was a firm believer in the à la française method – whereby all the dishes were displayed at once when diners arrived.

Others claim that the chef had, by that time, switched to service à la russe, which is essentially how we are served today, with the courses in a sequence.

Looking at the dining hall as it is seen now, it’s well nigh impossible to imagine how you’d get all those dishes, plus the sculptures, onto a single table at one go.

And then there was the inevitable issue of keeping everything hot.

At least the kitchen was unusually near to the banqueting hall for the time – the two are separated only by a narrow room in which the food presentation was finalised. It was large, at 1,600 square feet, and also the most technologically advanced of its day.

Not only was there an open fire that could take several joints of different sizes all at the same time, there was also a line of charcoal stoves and, in the centre of it all, a ‘butler’s table’ heated with steam.

The whole room was well ventilated and enjoyed natural light from the high roof that was glazed on all four sides as it rose above the centre of the kitchen.

Not that décor is forgotten, and the dining hall is reflected here, with copper palm leaves at the top of each of the four columns that help support the roof.

Carême had worked as a kitchen boy in a cheap chop house in the capital, receiving bed and board in return, after his parents had abandoned him at the height of the French Revolution.

In post-revolutionary France, as the culinary culture of the aristocracy spread out beyond the chateaus and castles in a democratising of food pleasure, Carême was formally apprenticed to a famous pâtissier, Sylvain Bailly.

He only left there to open his own shop, Pâtisserie de la rue de la Paix, which he kept going until 1813.

Although Napoleon Bonaparte was himself not particularly interested in food, he understood its social importance, and when he purchased the estate of Château de Valençay, near Paris, as a diplomatic gathering place, he gave the famous diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord the job of arranging matters.

Talleyrand, for whom Carême had already cooked, went with him.

But after the fall of Napoleon, he was available for hire, and the Prince Regent stepped in.

And so there the kitchen remains – restored greatly after the pavilion was used as a military hospital during WWI. The array of copper pans, for instance, includes many that bear the stamp not of George, but of the Duke of Wellington – which has a certain irony, given his role in the defeat of Carême’s old boss.

It is fascinating to visit – although there are two minor irritants. First, the obsessive notices about no photography. These are highly prevalent in the UK – yet I’ve not seen anything similar on the Continent.

For goodness sake, in Berlin you can even photograph the famous bust of Nefertiti – that’s 3,300 years old and they don’t get hysterical.

One of the few places in the UK I’ve come across where they have a similar attitude is Glasgow’s Kelvingrove – and good for them.

The postcard selection at the Pavilion shop is limited – and here is the second gripe: there was no book about the kitchen itself and the food and Carême and so forth. The general guide was exceptionally limited – I already knew more about the place of this kitchen historically than it contains. And to get a copy of the famous menu, the only option is a poster.

Having paid a tenner to get in (which I don’t begrudge), I didn’t feel any qualms when, on realising that there were no security staff on duty in the kitchen and I was entirely on my own, I could whip out my phone for a few quick shots.

And if anyone from the Pavilion reads this – no, I didn’t touch anything. I entirely understand the reason for ‘no touching’: it’s completely different to ‘no photography’.

Anyway, once outside, there was a need for dinner. So where and what to eat after such an educative visit?

I opted for nearby English’s, which advertises itself as “the south’s leading seafood restaurant and oyster bar”, and is a rather quaint affair, housed in three old fishermen’s cottages.

Seated in the very bijoux Red Room, which apparently “echoes back” to the Edwardian era and includes murals by local artist Marcus Stone (1840-1821), what strikes most obviously is that is most certainly does ‘echo’ Belle Époque Paris, with its suggestions of the can-can and the paintings of Toulouse Lautrec.

Hankering after something traditional, I opted to start with potted shrimps, served warm. Flint Owl Bakery bread, lightly toasted, was a reminder of how good proper bread can be, and the shrimps in their melted butter were divinely sweet and soothing.

My mistake, if you can call it that, was in selecting pan-seared monkfish, with chestnut and sweet potato hash, and creamed savoy cabbage and pancetta, for my main course.

A “mistake” because, like the shrimps, it was also a very sweet dish. And although the constituent parts were all very good, the combined sweetness was close to overwhelming – even the generous half of lemon that arrived with it did little to really cut through all that sweetness.

For dessert, a cleansing lemon sorbet was simply essential.

So, while hardly Carême, nonetheless enjoyable, if a tad flawed.

But then again, who on earth could eat a Carême banquet now?

Here comes a spice girl

Yesterday was another of the gloomy but mild days that seem to have characterised this autumn so far, but it was perfect for restocking on stock – and a little experimentation.

The remains of Sunday’s roast chicken needed using up.

Since I'd only travelled back from a weekend’s work in Brighton on Sunday afternoon, The Other Half had not only done the weekend's shopping, but was looking after dinner.

Now, while he fully appreciates the value of homemade stock, he isn't over-enthused by the smell of it being cooked, so we'd deliberately arranged that Monday would be my stock making day, with him out of the flat and the kitchen all to myself (and the cats, who were determined to help).

First, of course, the rest of the meat needed stripping from the bones. But once that was done, all that remained went into my biggest pot, together with the innards, the rest of a bottle of white wine that was hanging around aimlessly, carrot, celery, onion, peppercorns, bay and thyme leaves from the overcast garden, and water almost up to the top of the pot.

And it sat there, gently simmering away, for around an hour – losing little in volume and gaining much in the way of flavour.

Drained and decanted into jars to cool, it was time for a sort of improvised ploughman’s, with Cheddar, Shropshire Blue, lunch tongue, some pickle and a slice of the decent bread that The Other Half had found at the market.

Which does bring me to a little observation.

Having spent the previous days curled up at home with a cold, it seemed to all but disappear once I hit the seaside – and then reboot within an hour of so of chugging into London.

Is the air in this town really so bad?

Anyhow, back to that chicken.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself experimenting one evening with spices, roasting a few and then pounding them in the mortar.

I don’t know what had come over me – I’ve never really been the sort of girl to spice up my life that way.

After all, it’s so easy to use too much, and then the headlines won’t be good for any wannabe cook.

My mother was never much of a one for spices – Christmas cake and pudding, I’m sure, although spice is not what springs to mind when I recall the taste of those.

And my first experience of anything spicy, as an adult, was a disaster.

A friend took me to the Royal Exchange Manchester to see Robert Lindsay in Philoctetes, and since he’d once worked in the restaurant there, treated me to a meal.

Curiosity kicking in, I tried a curry. It blew the roof off my mouth – it felt burnt for days. I didn’t touch spice (or heat) for years.

In recent times, though, my appreciation of chili has developed, but apart from the odd shaving of nutmeg on a custard, spice has been left pretty much in the cupboard.

Yet there I was, roasting mustard seeds and tentatively adding the pounded result to ground ginger and a couple of other things, before it went carefully into the day's dish.

The result was subtle but enjoyable.

So after adding a little spice to the recent slow-cooked venison shank, I decided to try again.

This time, it was a case of roasting more seeds – mustard, black onion, cumin and fennel: don’t ask me how much of each, because I haven’t a clue. It was all about judging by eye what seemed worth getting the pan out for, without doing too much.

It was all pounded merrily and had smoky paprika added.

And so to the cooking.

Two medium onions and three cloves of garlic were diced and slipped into the pan to soften in olive oil, followed by half a thinly-sliced red chili from this year’s crop, and then the spice mix.

Once that was blended through, the meat that I had stripped from the bird followed, to be gently folded in.

Tasting followed, with a general feeling of satisfaction, before a spoon of St Dalfour fig jam was added. The brand is worth noting, since it uses no extra sugar to set its rather excellent conserves.

And to all that was added the trimmings from Sunday’s potato fondants, which The Other Half had rustled up to go with the chicken. Just a few thin slices – but why waste anything?

The whole lot was lidded and cooked very gently for around half an hour, before a dozen halved chestnut mushrooms were tumbled in.

Not long after, with basmati rice nearing completion, there was a final check for seasoning – and a little salt added – before a spoon of crème fraiche was stirred through.

If the result hardly looked like an example of stunning haute cuisine, it was tasty and satisfying.

And there's a lovely sense of adventure to experimenting with combinations of spices. What will I do next time?

Because one thing's sure: spice won't be consigned to a custard or hot cross buns any longer.

The moral equivalence has to stop

Click on the image to open a larger version.

That a picture tells a story better than words is the sort of cliché beloved of songwriters, but with the picture published here, the cliché becomes reality.

And all the moral equivalence in the world will not change the fact of what this graphic illustrates.

What is going on in the Gaza today is not ‘defence’.

It is the continuation of policies that have been being enacted for a long time, and of an ideology that is older yet, and any response to it is a direct consequence of that ideology being put into action.

Here are detailed statistics on deaths of Palestinians and Israelis killed by both sides, from the year 2000 to September of this year. If you want to know just who is the aggressor, they make revealing reading.

These statistics are taken from B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories that, according to its own website, “was established in 1989 by a group of prominent academics, attorneys, journalists and Knesset members.

“It endeavors to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel.”

The moral equivalence and the fear of being accused of anti-semitism (with all that that means for Europeans in particular) have, in effect, helped to enable what the maps shown above reveal.

It enables US President Barack Obama to state that Israel has a right to "defend" itself, as though this is what is happening.

It allows UK foreign secretary William Hague to claim that it is all the fault of Hamas – in essence, making the central 'crime' of the Palestinian people their refusal to be simply cowed and murdered and driven off their land.

As though, when more moderate Palestinian leaders are humilated in attempts to negotiate meaningfully and some of the people turn to less moderate voices, it is rocket science that rockets would be the response?

And if we do nothing else, and if we are feeling impotent as we see pictures of death and devastation, and as we hear Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, say that the aim of this new campaign (which comes only shortly before elections in Israel) is to bomb Gaza “back to the Middle Ages”, then we must at least stop the hand-wringing moral equivalence and be quite open that this is an act of Israeli aggression, following on decades of Israeli aggression, which is based on a desire to eradicate or force out all Palestinians, and to absorb all the remaining Palestinian territories into a Ersatz Israel.

A few links in addition to those included above.

Medical Aid for Palestinians

Al Jazeera (English)

Independent Jewish Voices is also interesting.

Rather differently, Zaytoun offers a different sort of solidarity, selling Palestinian products, including some very good olive oil.

For more in-depth history, Ralph Schoenman’s The Hidden History of Zionism, from 1988, is worth reading, and can be accessed here.

What shall we eat this weekend - deer?

You don't have to wait long in our locale before hearing the complaint that Broadway Market is overly expensive.

But as always, that not only depends on what you're looking at, but also on how you value food.

Last weekend, as an experiment, I picked up two venison shanks from Andy's stall. The only think that I knew about how to treat them was that old mantra of 'long and slow'.

They were £3.50 a piece: I bought a pair, simply because it's not a cut I know anything about and I didn't know how much meat there'd be to the obviously large amount of bone.

Almost as soon as I got home, I started cooking them. This was a day when I ignored recipes and decided instead to trust to the knowledge I've picked up in the last few years.

First, preheat the oven to something like 120-130 degrees C (fan).

I sprinkled a little smoky paprika on the shanks and rubbed it in, before browning the shanks in some melted duck fat in a cast-iron pot.

Remove the meat and add chopped onion, carrot and celery to soften in the fat, before popping in some plain flour and letting that cook through.

Then comes the wine. This was a barely-over-a-fiver bottle of French Merlot, stirred in gently to deglaze and create a thickened sauce.

Into that went a touch of mace and a hint of ground cloves - I'd decided that the spices would go with the game and the Merlot would complement these perfectly.

A squeeze of organic tomato ketchup, a little more wine, and then the meat went back in, to nestle amongst the vegetables, followed by every last drop of juice and blood that had been resting with it on a plate.

I brought it all to a simmer, then placed a sheet of foil over the top, lidded it and placed it in the oven.

And there it stayed for around six hours, only emerging to be checked and allow the meat to be turned, but all the time, filling the flat with the gloriously comforting, warming scent of home cooking.

The result was a delight. The meat had pulled away from the bone and was almost flaking, while the sauce was sweet and unctuous and with just enough spice to give it the merest hint of the exotic.

And as a very special treat, the bone gave up its delicious marrow to a skewer.

Two shanks had been a wild over-estimation. There was plenty of meat and it did easily for a second meal: the sauce was strained before reheating and the left-overs from the bottle of wine added.

It was reheated on the hob, on a gentle heat, for around an hour and, if anything, was even better than the first time around.

Now that is slow cooking. And, at £1.25 for a large portion of quality meat, it's difficult to know who could complain at that.

Indeed, let's do a quick comparison. Tesco has a limited number of venison products - two leg steaks, at 250g combined, are £5.

A pack of six venison sausages (300g) is £2.99. And of course, these are factory produced  and include a preservative (sodium metabisulphite).

A 284g pack of two venison burgers is £3.29 (no list of ingredients available). Now I've bought venison burgers from Andy before - four burgers of nothing but venison, for £4. That did us for two meals.

Of course, in general, supermarkets don't sell much in the way of cheap cuts - they're not as profitable as prime cuts.

But there is also an issue of many people being confused about what to do with cheap cuts - and many recipe books don't help, as they seem to baulk at describing 'slow' cooking as anything much beyond two hours.

Now it may well be that the rapid rise to grocery retail dominance of the supermarkets has helped to see these skills, this knowledge, disappear - although that's a bit of a chicken and egg question that ignores the willingness of many, certainly 20-30 years ago, to turn away from traditional food and ways of cooking to anything that offered greater 'convenience'.

But as this blog illustrates, slow cooking isn't difficult - and not only can it produce really good results, it also makes the very best of cheaper cuts.

It's a win win situation.

Everything must go

You may well have heard or read somewhere the appalling news that sex has been commoditised – the only wonder is that anyone imagines that sex is somehow unique in this way.

Just a few days ago, on Facebook, a post appeared from someone saying that they’d applied to be on Jeremy Kyle.

It’s difficult to know why anyone would do that. Their 15 minutes? A night in decent hotel? To be yelled at by Kyle himself?

There can’t be anyone out there who really believes that the people who appear on it get serious help. Because they don’t. It’s about nothing more than presenting people’s problems as entertainment, for others to point, stare and generally feel superior. And for someone to make a financial profit from.

Now it’s hardly as if Kyle is on his in this oeuvre – its apotheosis is probably Jerry Springer, although at least that programme doesn’t seem to pretend to take itself as seriously as Kyle’s modern freak show – both see the commoditisation of dysfunction.

But this type of telly isn’t alone in the commoditisation stakes either.

Only this week, the world discovered that Nadine Dorries is going on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here.

The MP for Bedfordshire has decided that this is the very best way to make use of a Parliamentary recess – although one might have expected her to spend some time being available for her constituents.

Dorries thinks that girls should have special school lessons in just saying ‘no sex, we’re British’ (but recommends nothing comparable for boys), and is also a campaigner against abortion, desperately trying to get the time limit lowered, for instance, and coming up with spurious claims about the independence of advice available to women on pregnancy issues.

She says that she is going to sit around the campfire in the jungle and discuss these issues with her fellow contestants – to ‘spread the word’.

In the meantime, of course, it’s pretty clever ‘casting’ by the makers, since it pretty much guarantees that plenty of people will tune in and (more to the profitable point) spend money phoning in just to make sure Dorries gets as many nasty ‘bushtucker trial’ tasks as is possible.

Indeed, perhaps the almost orgasmic pleasure some people are getting just thinking about her being made to eat insects could constitute a new form of phone sex.

The commoditisation of ego and ideologically-induced discomfort for the sake of an almost sexual pleasure.

In a delightful example of a lack of self awareness, the Parliamentary Conservative Party has suspended Dorries, since none of them have any interests outside politics that rake them in oodles of cash and consume time that could be spent helping constituents or on other matters political.

Dorries is not the first sitting MP to agree to appear on a celebrity ‘reality’ TV show: that honour goes to George Galloway, whose vomit-inducing performance on Celebrity Big Brother was not only the first of this sub genre of MPs making tits of themselves on reality telly, but possibly also its apotheosis.

The news that Dorries was flying to Oz emerged just days after Labour MP Denis MacShane was found to have submitted 19 false invoices for expenses – shouldn’t they be banged out of office (and up) simply for being so incredibly stupid as to keep doing things like this, given the scandal of 2009?

But it throws Dorries’s celebrity ambitions into a certain perspective and reminds us of how some politicians have commoditised their representing of us into financial gain beyond their legitimate remuneration.

In a delightful sleight, the Guardian – clever for once – produced comedy gold when it persuaded Louise Mensch to opine on the matter, condemning Dorries for ‘demeaning’ the office of MP.

Murdoch worshipper and chick lit author Mensch, who has herself just recently resigned as an MP in order to ‘spend more time with her family’ – possibly the first time this has happened without being preceeded by a sexual ‘scandal’ – enjoyed a high-profile political career (while it lasted), including appearing on topical comedy quiz Have I Got News for You, where she was pretty much eaten alive by Ian Hislop.

But increasingly we can see that politics has been commoditised, with public office a career move and a step into celebrity and/or nice business opportunities in other areas.

I can hardly be alone, for instance, in imagining that, after setting in motion the privatisation of the health service, former health secretary Andrew Lansley will not be forgotten by the private healthcare companies that had sponsored him for years before.

And Tony Blair has been busy making himself a tidy fortune ‘advising’ the despotic regime in Kazakhstan – which just happens to have oil – a move only made possible by his having held high political office.

Now of course politicians, once they leave office – or have its departure foisted on them by a disenchanted electorate – have to do something with their time. We wouldn’t them all to become benefit scroungers, would we?

But herein lies a larger issue: how many MPs, for instance, genuinely had careers before politics and have skills outside of it, that would not simply see them trading on their political experience afterwards?

Should we insist that all those who stand for election have done something other than study for a degree in PPE – that holy trinity of politics, philosophy and economics?

Because while it somehow doesn’t seem as though it should be the main point of standing for office, what is clear is that politics sells: and it sells individuals some very juicy career opportunities.

But some of those same politicians commoditise things themselves. They’re presently engaged in carrying on Lansley’s work of commoditising health care, as they parcel up the NHS and sell it off to private companies to make profit.

Yes indeed – granny’s cancer is being commoditised so that it becomes profitable for someone.

The same is true of the police and justice system, which may have faults, but isn’t going to be improved by being privatised, so that the prime issue becomes the making of profit.

Unemployment has been commoditised – trying to get people into work is a profitable business for the likes of A4e. It’s financially beneficial for large companies too, when they can get free labour via the ironically named ‘Workfare’ scheme and even lay off paid staff.

The disabled can be commoditised, as yet another company (Atos, in this case) profits from it’s update of the old Jesus and Lazarus comedy double act, by claiming that people who are chronically disabled can get up and work, and therefore require no state help whatsoever.

And yet when you hear people worry about commoditisation, it’s almost invariably about sex, as though they’d never heard about ‘the oldest profession’!

Oh, sex sells – and when people are complaining about that, what it seems to be selling most effectively is a lovely diversion from the commoditisation of just about everything else in life.

A loss of faith

Poster seen at the 20 October TUC march.

A few weeks ago, after details were revealed about what really happened at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium in 1989, when 96 Liverpool football fans died, my mother was on the phone.

A St Helens lass herself, she’s no football fan as such, but has always held a soft spot for both Liverpool FC and the city itself.

For pretty much the same length of time, she’s been a staunch C/conservative and believer in the inherent rightness of the Establishment. But the revelations had left her shocked – perhaps more than I’ve ever known before.

“How could they?” she asked, of the police decision to blood-test every victim, including children, to see if they had alcohol in their bodies. “How could they?”

But if she was struggling to come to terms with the enormity of what had been revealed about Hillsborough, then what has been trickling out since the first public allegations about Jimmy Savile must be taking her breath away.

If you’re looking for names in connection with allegations of abuse in North Wales some years ago, you won’t find them here – partly for the obvious legal reasons, but also because, even if not true, such suggestions can particularly severely tarnish the innocent.

And the issue as a whole is (or should be) way beyond the tribalism of partisan politics.

But if it is true that senior government figures were involved in abuse, then it goes further than individual politicians themselves.

It would be difficult to believe that the security forces didn’t know – certainly those on protection duties. The same can be said of the police.

If, as is now clear, many in the mainstream media knew about Savile, did nobody know about any implicated politicians – particularly given that we are now rather more aware of the links between press barons and police and politicians?

The tendrils of corruption seem to spread a long way.

In truth, there was never a total lack of corruption in this country. That is a myth. Read Dickens. Look at Hogarth. It’s there.

But there has been a belief constructed that this was never the case. And perhaps that is part of the problem – that in so doing, abusers have been protected.

It also seems worth questioning whether the culture of the English (male) public school is also an issue.

Some years ago, Channel 4 screen a very lengthy and heavyweight documentary called Sex and the Holy City. One of the issues that it looked at was child abuse by priests.

The point was made that if (as happened) parents threw children into seminaries, having decided, for them, that they would become priests and, therefore, be celibate, it halted their natural “psycho-sexual” development.

This makes a deal of sense – and I do wonder whether the English public school system does something similar.

Take the example of Andrew ‘Plebgate’ Mitchell MP.

It seems that Mitchell, who attended Rugby School, was known as ‘Thrasher’, because of what a disciplinarian he was.

Now this is someone who was a child/adolescent, who had the authority to deal with discipline toward other children/adolescents in the school. That nickname suggests that the discipline was meted out in physical fashion.

What sensible adult hands responsibility for disciplining other children or adolescents to a child or adolescent?

Seriously?

It doesn’t seem irrational to suggest that that would be a situation that is absolutely tailor made for abuse and bullying.

But let’s move on.

Given the way in which the Savile case has been grasped by some on the right as a way of beating up the BBC (calls for it to be dismantled, the licence scrapped etc), David Cameron seemed strangely reluctant to announce any review of Auntie.

It was the correct decision, because it would be naïve to imagine that the abuse of children and young people was unique to one organisation. Indeed, a great deal of what has emerged makes it quite clear that this is not the case.

But calling such an inquiry would have made a lot of sense in terms of pleasing a core of supporters.

And now it has been announced that there will be an inquiry into the Waterhouse inquiry that investigated abuse in North Wales and reported in 2000.

That inquiry decided that alleged abusers could not be identified in public.

It seems suspiciously as though the Prime Minister has been made aware of just what could come out and is desperately engaged in an exercise of attempting to bail water out of a boat that’s shipping a great deal more.

None of what is trickling through should really be any massive surprise to people. The Leveson Inquiry has pretty efficiently shone light on the links between politicians, media tycoons and editors, and the police.

Which is why Leveson is so important.

Elements of the media – the Sun, specifically – were complicit in smearing the victims and survivors of the Hillsborough disaster. The police made up lies about what happened: Rupert Murdoch's paper spread them.

Many in the UK, like my parents, have existed in a cosy bubble of belief in the innate superiority and incorruptibility of these islands.

You could point at the likes of Italy and laugh. But corruption in the UK was, if not unheard of, but a very quiet cry.

My mother’s own faith in the Establishment is such that, back in 1990, she preferred, quiet openly, to believe a Daily Mail report of what happened on the night Islington Council met to set the poll tax to what I saw that night, as a platform steward at the rally outside the town hall.

To précis: there had been no trouble early on. The local police were doing a perfectly good job, refusing to react to the few hecklers at the front of the rally.

The trouble only started when the Met came around the corner on horseback and in full riot gear.

That, at least, is what I saw. I got out of the way quickly after that.

But my mother was convinced that I was so politicised (as opposed to herself) that I could not be trusted: in effect, I would lie to my parents for political effect.

So for the likes of her, what we are seeing now must be particularly shocking.

And it is not going to go away – or get any ‘better’ any time soon.

The North Wales case is being talked of widely. It seems that, at the time, there were rumours of people dying in odd circumstances or disappearing.

Where it will end is impossible to guess.

And there are other cases that are similarly linked to widespread, inter-agency corruption, and which are also refusing to conveniently just go away quietly.

The murder of Daniel Morgan is just one such case. For an introduction to that, here is the first in a series of excellent posts by lawyer David Allen Green.

The Justice for Daniel campaign can be found here.

It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that something is rotten in the state of Britain.

You watch it unfold with a mixture of fascination and horror. But the loss of faith for some will be not be easy.

Milking the cow – another food tale of modern Britain

Kill before it can suckle?

Just over a week ago, having already bought a piece of lamb for the weekend, my peregrination along Broadway Market brought me to Richard’s Wild Dartmoor Beef stall.

The intention was to pick up some of the ‘Bury-style’ black pudding that he usually has available, but something else caught the eye: veal.

And since he doesn’t have it every week, and since it had a very good ‘shelf’ life, I picked up a piece for this weekend just gone.

The veal crate protests of the mid-1990s – raised to particular prominence by the death of protestor Jill Phipps beneath the wheels of a lorry carrying veal calves – helped to put paid to an undoubtedly cruel practice.

Yet veal still has a bad name in the UK.

Once we remove crating from the equation, it would seem that anyone who consumes dairy produce should actually eat – or at least support – the consumption of veal today.

Perhaps we have, in general, become so divorced from the origins of our food that we forget the connection between a cow (or any other animal) providing milk, and the pregnancy, birth and baby animal that allows that.

If we don’t eat veal, then those new-born calves may well be killed straight away.

Yet we Brits do seem to get squeamish over all sorts of food matters – and not all logically.

Take the production of foie gras.

Let’s be entirely clear: we’re talking about ducks and geese that, in the final weeks of their lives, are force fed grain (the method is known as gavage) in order to massively fatten the liver, which then becomes a delicacy.

Now this provokes something close to hysteria among some. As mentioned in a previous post, I have seen it, online, actually compared to people eating children. And to Nazism. Yes. That really is how stupid the debate gets.

But what is most peculiar about this is that there never seems to be anything like the same stink raised about factory-farmed chickens, for instance. Or any other factory-farmed animal, for that matter.

There is a vast trade in cheap chickens – reared in appalling circumstances; pumped full of antibiotics and hormones; never allowed to move around properly; spending vast amounts of their dismal lives sitting in their own shit.

Similarly, we know that swine flu developed in the sheer awfulness of industrial pig factories in Mexico. And such establishments are not remotely confined to the ‘developing world’. Indeed, some big agricorps are pushing to open large establishments in the UK.

Yet for all the very serious animal welfare and human health issues raised by both of these, the hysteria is reserved for foie, the production of which isn’t even close in scale.

Why is this?

I’m going to posit a suggestion: that in the UK at least, much of this is because of interlinked ideas of class and pleasure.

Like champagne, foie is hardly a staple: rather, it is a luxurious treat and certainly associated (on this side of the Channel, at any rate) with wealth.

Pleasure in general is seen as something that only the very wealthy and the ruling elite can afford, in terms both of money and time.

Now we Brits still have an odd relationship with food in terms of pleasure.

A few weeks ago, the Saturday edition of the Guardian published, in its review section, an essay on (in essence) how boring ‘foodies’ have become. It had some valid points about a certain kind of showing off, but it went further in doing a baby-out-with-the-bathwater routine on the issue of being interested and investing time in food in general.

Then along came Stephen Poole’s book, You Aren’t What You Eat, on pretty much the same subject. Followed by Jonathan Meades’s Observer review, as plumdaciously full of his splenetic brilliance as a foie goose is of grain.

‘Stop talking about bloody fuel!’ seems to be the general tenet.

It reminded me of my mother’s aphorism: “We eat to live – we don’t live to eat”. Even now, if my father hears me discussing food with my mother – over dinner – he describes me as “obsessed”.

Poole, Meades and co have a point about the minority of people who see food as a pose – but they are a minority. For millions in the UK, a dose of masticatory pleasure might be a welcome change and actually have positive health ramifications.

Perhaps this mood is a reaction to these austere times: an understanding that we are most certainly not ‘all in this together’?

Yet not only is there a sense that pleasure is the exclusive preserve of those with money to burn, there is also the sense that pleasure itself is sin.

Never forget the self-flagellatory streak in the puritanical British, who still nurse a conviction that all pleasure is something to feel guilty about.

While I have no desire to try to render pleasure ‘respectable’ by making it seem to be a synonym for ‘health’, one has to ask whether, given our general eating habits today, injecting a large dose of pleasure could not be beneficial for health.

And to go back to chicken, eating birds that are actually farmed in a way that would have welfare enthusiasts in ecstasy would be better both for welfare – and the pleasure of eating and, surely, for health too.

After all, who is genuinely convinced that eating flesh (or vegetable matter, for that matter) that still holds within it hormones and antibiotics etc is not best for optimum health?

I’d argue that well-produced foie is no more inherently cruel than well-produced anything, while the worst-produced foie is no different to the factory-produced chicken or the factory-produced pig.

To pretend that they are different is fallacious.

And the same can be said of rose veal.

But while an organic, free-range chicken might seem intimidatingly costly if you’re used to buying a £2.99 one, once a week, from Tesco, then one thing that is cheaper is to buy the best eggs you can.

More than once I’ve mentioned here how much I enjoy eggs these days – and make them the centrepiece of a meal because of that – now that I am regularly getting my supply direct from a farmer.

But it’s more than just taste. A report from a friend just recently says that their partner, who had been unable (“unable”, note, not unwilling) to eat eggs for years, is now able to – courtesy of a scheme to bring battery hens in proper surroundings and sell the eggs thus produced.

It begs the question of just what ends up in a battery-produced egg.

And so to the torturous question of class.

Now surely, if disgust with the idea of luxury foods is based, in part, on a dislike of an ‘elite’ or simply those with money, then it could also be argued that a lack of concern over food that the poorer members of society eat (such as those dismal chickens) is contemptuous of them.

Wouldn’t one be better to argue that everyone should be able to access good and healthy food that is pleasurable? Why deny ordinary people pleasure? Again – what is wrong, in itself, with pleasure?

And if you want to play the class game, then surely ‘nothing is too good for the workers’ is better than ‘let everybody eat cake’?

Anyway, while you mull over these things, I want to mention Lucky Hens Rescue, on the outskirts of Wigan, which does stonkingly good work – and which produces superb eggs. I have it on very good authority!