Of tinned potatoes and balti pies

Generally speaking, I think it's fair to say that I have a reasonable knowledge of food matters - I wouldn't want an unreasonable knowledge, that's certain.

Frankly, I'd rather be thought of as something of a bon viveur or a gourmand or even a gourmet.

Choices, choices: which one?

There are intriguing differences in those latter two words. A gourmet is someone who relishes fine food and drink. A gourmand, on the other hand, is someone who simply enjoys food and drink: there's no suggestion here of it having to be haute cuisine.

The latter has seen it's meaning change over the years, initially having been a synonym for a glutton - and one of the Seven Deadly Sins. As that older definition has altered, culinary proponents in France have, apparently, appealed to the Vatican to change the word to gloutonnerie rather than gourmandise.

Once we remove that understanding of the word, then we're left with something expresses a more general pleasure in food - and frankly, while the posh stuff can be very, very good, food doesn't have to be flashy and complicated to be worth eating and taking the greatest amount of pleasure in.

So it's gourmand for me.

But I'm probably something of a food geekette too: years of reading diet 'advice', followed by years of reading why the diet advice was crap, together with goodness knows what other food information in the last couple of years has left me with a certain knowledge.

And so it came as something of a surprise to see, in one of my local shops, a tin of baby new potatoes from French tinned veg specialists Bonduelle.

It seems that, according to the label, potatoes count as one of your five a day. This wasn't just news to me - it'll be news to the NHS when our national treasure finds out.

Because although potatoes are a great source of vitamin C, they are also a starchy or complex carbohydrate and, as such, they don't count as one or your five a day.

I have emailed Bonduelle and queried this, but have thus far only had an automated response - in French. Your food detective is on the case - and will report if she ever hears anything.

But while we're on the subject, there is a perfectly gourmand use for tinned potatoes.

Drain, rinse and pat dry with kitchen paper.

Heat some duck or goose fat - or lard - in a high-sided pan. Pop the potatoes in carefully and cook until turning golden, shaking frequently to help prevent them sticking.

Serve with good sea salt.

With such sophistication in mind, I want to report that I had a new culinary experience the other night: a chicken balti pie, that legendary Manchester City treat.

One bite and my eyes had crossed while I was fanning my mouth desperately.

The packet claimed that it was 'diced' chicken. It wasn't. The filling was a small amount of shredded chicken, some veg, some very hot sauce and a large portion of empty space. The pastry wasn't bad.

Chips, with skin on, were rather better.

The beer that a friend and I discovered after the match, with the somewhat unexpected name of Dizzy Blonde, was better yet. Brewed in Stockport by Robinson's, it was light and almost fruity, at 3.8, less strong than many other beers, and a pleasant surprise.

The Voluptuous Manifesto - now offering a testing service so that you don't have to take the risk!

The unhealthiest shopping basket?

After the debacle of the missing lard, I needed a few bits and pieces in a midweek shop and decided, for a change, to head to Waitrose – a somewhat more acceptable supermarket than assorted other options, if only on the basis that staff are partners.

There, I found Kerrygold lard – although that's slightly confusing, since as far as I know, Kerrygold produce butter from cows, which doesn’t really suggest piggy products. But hey ho, I’m not complaining.

I did, however, decide that, as a response to all the obsessive, joyless – and downright inaccurate – emphasis on so-called ‘healthy’ eating, I would see just how ‘unhealthy’ a shopping basket I could stomach.

Thus a second block of lard, beef dripping – I’ve never used it before and don’t know when or how I will, but I will – French butter with salt crystals, potato farls (to be grilled and then drenched in butter), cream cheese with garlic (Otto loves this too), nacarons and chocolate, although I did nearly leave that out given positive health reports.

Cooking a French dish at the weekend, I was happily able to employ some of the lard.

The dish was a boeuf à la gardiane – essentially, beef of the cowboys of the Camargue.

Using a recipe from Hot Sun, Cool Shadow: Savouring the Food, History and Mystery of the Languedoc by Angela Murrills, The Other Half had set out to cook this one weekend last year when I was away.

You start by marinading beef that’s been cut into smallish cubes – skirt or a similar cut.

The marinade is based on red wine and includes the usual sort of aromatics.

He told me later that one of the hardest things was being able to tell whether you’ve browned the meat after the marinade has so changed the colour.

I had decided to use a different recipe from Flavours of Provence by Clare Ferguson. Murrills’s book is a delight, but I think that the recipes have been simplified a tad. Ferguson’s version was a little more complex.

It began in the same fashion, although with 50ml of cognac as well as 250ml of robust red wine ion the marinade. I used a couple of onions, peeled and then slashed across the top, with a bay leaf inserted. Two cloves were also pressed into each onion.

These, together with plenty of sprigs of thyme, were added to the marinade, together with salt, pepper and crushed garlic.

It stayed like that for around three hours, before the liquid was strained into a jug and the meat dried off with kitchen paper.

Now the recipe then called for some slices of unsmoked bacon, rind removed and the slices quartered, to be sizzled in a dry pan until there’s enough liquid to cook the beef in two batches.

It occurred to me, as I was waiting for even remotely enough liquid to emerge, that this was bonkers. There was no bacon in the dish we ate last year in Nîmes.

The only reason this bacon was here, I concluded, was to create fat. In the Murrills book, olive oil is used.

The more I start thinking about this, though, the more I see it as unlikely. Why not just use a little lard? It’s difficult not to believe that the French themselves would use duck or goose fat, if not lard.

And where The Other Half had had some difficulty getting the meat properly brown when he’d cooked the dish previously, it’s much easier when you can safely get the fat as hot as is possible with lard.

I could, of course, be entirely wrong. But when you realise just how much the French do use natural fats – and their nose to tail philosophy too – then it’s difficult to imagine whole regional cuisines without such fat.

It’s equally easy to see the likes of Murrills and Ferguson as being persuaded that either such fats aren’t healthy or, more likely, I think, that publishers or readers in North America and the UK just won’t swallow the use of such saturated fats in their cooking.

As for the rest of the dish, I discarded the bacon, added the marinade to the browned meat, then some beef stock (enough to cover) and simmered it away for two hours before adding black olives and cooking for a further half hour.

You then take 50ml of cognac and beat into it a good couple of tablespoons of plain flour, and then add that to the pot, stirring until it’s all melted and gives you a thicker, glossy sauce.

Well, that’s the theory.

It wasn’t bad, but it still wasn’t a patch on the dish we had in Nîmes. I’ve got some way to go to find out just how they make something so fabulous.

And as for that unhealthy shopping basket, I’m now working on a scheme to create a dish that uses all those ingredients.

Because obviously, when people go on about how unhealthy those things are, they presumably imagine that everybody wants to eat nothing but those things, and in copious quantities, all together and all at once.

When did common sense go so out of fashion?

Beauty in different places

It was just gone 11.20am on Saturday morning and the train was hauling itself out of London. There was Wembley on the right, with Norman Foster's already-iconic arch towering over the skyline.

All those times I passed it and uttered a silent prayer to the gods of football for City to make it there. There was no need for the same prayer on Saturday: we have been, seen and conquered and, if I couldn't get a ticket for last May's FA Cup final victory, at least I was there for the semi win over United.

Saturday itself was the first act of live worship this season, with the visit of Wigan. It continued a mightily impressive start to the term – with a brand of football that really is beautiful on the eye and likely, on occasion, to take the breath away.

I’m still expecting someone to wake me up – and I’ll be on a train to somewhere like Scunthorpe.

So I'm long enough in the tooth as a City fan not to take anything for granted. Things have changed enormously, but there is still a little niggle in the back of my mind, a tiny gnawing doubt that says that we, the club that was famously described as being able to win cups for cock ups, can still do exactly that.

As the train got under way I listened to Beethoven's sonatas for piano and violin. Beautiful.

It's probably ridiculously juvenile, but the juxtaposition of football and 'culture' always tickles me.

It's amused me to wonder what people have thought when, after clocking my football shirt, they'd notice the title of a book that was slightly beyond Janet & John.

Not, I hasten to add, that anyone can hear the Beethoven.

I'm not the only one who has such thoughts, either. A colleague, who is a season ticket holder at Arsenal, was telling me only the other day that she regularly used to go to a match on a Saturday afternoon and then to the English National Opera to see whatever was on there.

And it amused her to wonder how many other people enjoyed such a combination of entertainments.

Even in the 21st century, it seems that we compartmentalise culture - so that we find the idea of a football fan loving opera too as rather odd.

In Italy, of course, opera has long been popular across society's boundaries - not least Verdi, who has long been linked with the Risorgimento, that country's unification movement.

And opera there was also accessible across the social spectrum, unlike in the UK, where it's still often viewed as an elitist form of culture.

Back in 1996, when England was hosting the European Football Championships, I had travelled to Liverpool to report the match between Italy and Russia. My main memory of a less than scintillating encounter was seeing Gianfranco Zola for the first time; the little man getting his foot impossibly high to bring down the ball that then seemed utterly glued to his boot. Such instant control.

But the journey back to London was memorable for being chaotic. One train had been cancelled, so most of the fans were backed into a single train.

Seat reservations were useless unless you were lucky enough to find your seat before someone else with the same number.

I was ticked off by a very young policeman for swearing at one point, and I started the journey standing until doing something very unusual for me and flashing my press card at the train manager (who was trying to hide from the chaos) and demanding that I sit in first class, together with the half a dozen fans whi were also standing in the same corridor.

Press cards have their uses.

But in the coming days, it emerged that a train from Glyndebourne, bound for the capital one night, had been held in order to wait for a business bigwig or two who had been at the opera.

Football has long been known as ‘working man’s ballet’ – the apotheosis of male working-class culture in a country that effectively kept the plebs well away from high art – just as the cult of amateurism in sport was simply a way of keeping working people away from many other sports.

Now, it’s not been quite as simple as that for some time: in the north, for instance, women have attended football for a long time.

And post-war equality opened up opportunities not simply to see art, but also to participate in it. A blossoming of film, theatre, music and architecture all benefitted from the greater social mobility for working people.

But football’s audience has changed again in recent years, as the cost of going to matches has risen. There are good and bad points about this: personally, while I can look back on going to matches in run-down stadia with only one loo for women, I don’t have any sense of rose-tinted, misty-eyed longing to stand at the bottom of a terrace (me being a short arse) and see streams of piss bubbling down between my feet.

The view I have when I go to City games allows me to really be able to watch the game, unhindered.

On the other hand, as with an increasing amount of things, many ordinary people are being priced out of attending. That’s not just about football, though, but about a far wider cultural change that’s been taking place in Britain – and England particularly – for the last 30 years, and to even skate the surface would take a lot more words than you want to read here and now.

But for me at least, to be a football fan doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate opera (or Beethoven) – and visa versa.

In Amadeus, Peter Schaffer portrays Mozart as a musical genius with more in common with Sid Vicious than was entirely in keeping with the polite society of his day. I have little problem imagining Mozart attending football matches as an Ultra.

Beethoven was an awkward sod. So were many other composers – and countless authors and painters and sculptors etc.

For their work to be co-opted by respectable society is rather amusing really. Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but I wonder sometimes how much some of those who spend small fortunes to be seen at, say, the Royal Opera House, really get of what they see.

And sometimes it’s difficult not to feel that art has, in the UK at least, been largely neutered to make it polite.

A couple of years ago, I saw Daniel Barenboim play some Beethoven piano sonatas at the Royal Festival Hall. All alone on the stage with his piano, it was Beethoven as I’d never seen or heard preformed before – but Beethoven as I suspect it was meant to be: wild and angry and full of Romantic passion and energy.

The vast auditorium flashed away and it was as though I was the only one there, watching something that was as close to its original intent as to suggest I'd been thrown into some time flux and the pianist and composer had become one. It was magnetic and magnificent and deeply intense.

Like music, football is the personal and the public combined. And on Saturday, what I saw was art made flesh. And like the Beethoven, it took my breath away and left me with a sense of awe.

They are not so far apart as some would suppose and as some would like to suppose.

The case of the missing lard

With the last of a block of lard shrinking gradually, and a very real danger of running out altogether, action was needed.

There’s only one place locally that I’ve been able to buy lard, in one of my close-by grocers. But in the last month or so, they don’t seem to have had any in.

Finally, with the proprietor back from holiday, I was able to check when they would have some in.

There is, it seems, a problem. From what I could gather, trade publication Independent Retail Magazine had carried some sort of item on the subject a number of weeks ago, which was linked to difficulties in getting/supplying the stuff.

The reason, apparently, was that it’s ‘unhealthy’.

Now I’m long enough in the tooth, sceptical enough and a good enough hackette not to simply accept this as gospel – although I do trust my source.

Google, of course, is your friend. So I looked up Independent Retail Magazine and searched that.

A big fat (lardy) nothing.

Metaphorically donning the old deerstalker, I rang the editorial desk. A very helpful gentleman took my call. He couldn’t remember anything, but asked in the office.

Nobody could recall specifics, but it “rang a bell”.

I looked at The Grocer too, but to no obvious avail – although there was plenty of other food for thought.

Via an advert, according to Unilever, those friends of the government and the public health, customers decide to buy a spread – “ie butter, healthy spreads” – “depending on their attitudes to taste and health”.

Don't you just love rocket science?

Now I can’t answer for anyone else, but personally, I choose on the basis of both criteria – hence butter every time. But note that, to Unilever, butter is not healthy.

The myths about fats are widespread even in the retail trade press. In The Grocer, a columnist talked about “calorie porn” in an article that also seemed to believe that we “mortals” had no chance of recreating actual recipes from a TV programme.

And, of course, it enabled a throwaway comment about one dish “looking as healthy as a lard enema”. Because lard is inherently unhealthy.

Mind, you get the feeling that The Grocer really does it have in for poor old lard. In a regular column, one Titania Touché had penned a few comments about producers’ covert attempts to decrease package sizes, while still retaining the same price.

All well and good, but in the context of this, the writer – who understandably is so ashamed of themselves that they hide behind the name of a Shakespearean fairy – notes: “As the momentum behind teeny tiny groceries grows, so our Calories Don’t Count campaign, a covert initiative for long-standing client United Lard, is hitting its stride.

“The Express out-Mailed the Mail this week by reporting that dieting gives you cancer. A fine fillip for the fuller lard-fuelled figure.”

The “lard-fuelled” figure. Because lard, as we know, is the reason behind rising obesity.

Now it strikes me that there are a few possible explanations for all this.

One is because however much some researchers have realised the counterproductive nature of dietery advice on fats (and complex carbohydrates), it really has not sunk through to most of the rest of the populace – including those linked to the food industry itself.

But would it also be entirely cynical of me to point out that lard is considerably cheaper than any of the other fats out there? The one pack available from Ocado, for instance, is just 40p for a standard 250g.

With profitable markets among both foodies for butter and those thinking it’s a healthy choice for marg, both of these have the opportunity for greater profit, particularly in the top ranges – be that for gourmet butters or, say, margarines that have felt the whisper of an olive, thus allowing producers to market them in such a way as to suggest a direct link it to the wonderfully healthy Mediterranean diet.

I am presently no closer to finding out why small retailers are having difficulties getting hold of lard. But I won’t be giving up.

Later, I made the first turbigo of the season: kidneys and sausages, with button mushrooms and baby onions in a velvety sauce of butter and flour and sherry, with beef stock and tomato purée, that becomes richer than ever during the cooking thanks to the kidneys.

Lovely.

As I cooked, I found myself musing on how well it would work using lard at the base. As you brown the meats in butter first, you often have to clean out the pan and melt more butter before browning the onions and starting to cook the mushrooms, because the butter has started to burn.

Unfortunately, that loses a lot of the flavours. But lard is a wonderful cooking fat precisely because it doesn’t burn.

Since you make the sauce by mixing the flour and sherry, before adding the purée and stock, you don’t have to worry about the butter making a roux.

However, since my supply of lard is currently so shrunken, that experiment is on hold.

But have no fear – the lard detective is on the case.

The joy of real food

It's late on Sunday afternoon: in the oven, a leg of lamb is roasting away, in olive oil, rosemary and garlic. A culinary cliché, chef Rowley Leigh argued recently in the FT, but there are reasons for clichés - and often because they work.

Potatoes are being par-boiled and will finish off in the juices while the meat is resting, along with some similarly par-boiled florets of cauliflower and a small tin of cannelloni beans.

The smell as I sit writing is wonderful, with the promise of magnificent tastes to come.

But this, to me, is not simply good eating in the taste stakes, but there's nothing unhealthy about it either.

I noticed this morning that the media is getting excited again about fat people - more to the point, the obesity epidemic. It helps that Jamie Oliver was involved in the story, thus giving a celebrity angle.

As so often before, the subject allowed space for a rush of bigotry as well as some staggering displays of ignorance in the online comments sections of at least one publication - and experience says that it will not have been unique.

Condemning the overweight has not only taken on the scale of a national obsession, it seems to be the one remaining bigotry that you're allowed. People who would object to racism or sexism or myriad other isms suddenly seem liberated from such squeamishness when the subject of fatties raises it's heavy head, and freely burst out into tirades of nastiness.

But the same people are staggeringly ignorant too. They seem to think that weight is a simple issue: in effect, that it's just a matter of calories in and calories out. That the overweight are simply lazy and greedy.

Well, it isn't that simple. As more and more researchers are discovering.

In fact, it's more complicated than anyone really knows.

We know now that telling people to cut all fat is unhealthy and counterproductive. We know now that the advice to fill up with complex carbohydrates like potatoes and bad and pasta is flawed and actually helped people to pack weight on.

The French, as so often, provide an interesting comparison and some probable pointers. They don't have the same widespread problem - and yet neither are they a nation of gym bunnies. But they do walk more and aren't so obsessed with taking the car on even the shortest journey.

They sit down to eat properly - they don't eat lunch at their desks or dinner in front of the TV, which probably doesn't do much for the digestion.

Although some changes have occurred, they still, by and large, eat proper food - far less processed and fast food. And in one intriguing piece of observation, it's apparently been noted that even with eating at McDonalds, the French actually sit down and eat properly.

They don't have the snacking culture that we do.

Generally speaking, their food is a great deal better than ours - bread is just one example of an area where we fill our food full of rubbish.

There are also question marks over artificial sweeteners - just as there are over artificial fats.

But one thing that struck me about the level of debate is how much there is also an assumption that healthy eating means eating 'health food'. We seem to have reached a point where many people would not consider the meal I described above as 'healthy'.

Now I'm not suggesting that we want to start thinking of food in such terms - quite the contrary. A bit of real joy in eating would be a move in the right direction.

There is a nasty puritanism to those who rant, from the anonymous safety of their keyboards, where their own bodies cannot be judged, about the bad fat people. Similarly, there is an unpleasant puritanism and life-denying joylessness to ideas that to eat healthily, you have to forego anything that's actually nice and take on the attributes of an aesthetic.

The absurdity of thinking that the alternative to a diet of junk food is, say, 'whole foods' and no fats (say bye bye to that mashed potato with butter and cream) seems to be a perfect illustration of just how messed up the food culture in the UK is.

Before the lamb went into the oven, there was plenty of other culinary activity of a distinctly joyful type.

As planned, it was time for chutney: I opted for a pear one from Lynda Brown's The Preserving Book, using pears, a couple of onions, three tomatoes, some sultanas (instead of raisins), ground ginger, chilli flakes (instead of cayenne pepper, which I didn't have in), demerara sugar and, instead of cider vinegar, the remains of a bottle of Breton cider.

The only other change I made to the recipe was to skin the tomatoes first.

It took well over the two and a half hours to cook, but the smell was stunning and it developed to a really rich, dark hue. Now it's all packed into a jar and has been put away to mature for that festival at the end of the year.

With that done, it was onto the blackcurrant jam. A simple matter of the fruit, washed, with a little water, the juice of a lemon and some sugar, all brought to a bubble and then cooked vigorously for a good 10 minutes.

It was another lovely smell - and the taste is fine too. Blackcurrants have naturally high levels of pectin, so a jam sets really easily, while the lemon juice ensures that it's not too sweet.

Now I don't know about you, but that sounds a pretty healthy day's cooking to me.

It's a rum old game

Perhaps, in years to come, I’ll feel the same way about the arrival of autumn as I do about the arrival of spring, when I make a pilgrimage to find the earliest Jersey Royals and English asparagus, and sit there, grinning like a loon in celebration of this declaration of the end of winter.

In terms of food at least, autumn has plenty to offer – and not least among the pleasures of this time of year is the start of the new game season.

Game, as I mentioned last year, has become bogged down in England with ideas of class – it’s seen as posh food.

It’s different in Scotland, where – like golf – hunting has never been viewed as the sole preserve of the well-to-do. And it’s not just killing for sport either.

A move across the Channel, not just to France but beyond, north, south and east, offers a host of culinary cultures where hunting is far more egalitarian – and game an entirely democratic food.

But then again, most of these places still have ‘common’ land where people can hunt (and forage too): they never enclosed it and felled the forests in order to drive the people into the developing urban areas to become economically ‘active’.

Flying into Berlin takes my breath away with all the wooded areas so near to the city. No wonder the forest looms large in the German psyche. For me, I realise I’ve probably hardly even seen a wood worth the name.

But for the moment at least, let’s get back to game.

In an increasing spirit of welcoming the change in the year, I set about a midweek game dish to brighten the evening.

The game in question was pigeon breast, which isn’t seasonal – indeed, I’ve used it a number of times throughout the summer as the centre of a salad. But this was an attempt at a gutsier dish.

For two people, take a couple of medium onions and chop – not too finely, since you want to retain some texture.

Heat some olive oil in a pan and start to cook the onion gently. This is the time consuming part of the dish, but you want it to start to turn brown.

When it’s at that point, add a seriously generous glug of good, sweet sherry and (if you can get some) another of raspberry wine vinegar and continue to cook gently.

What you want is something that has the consistency of a marmalade. If it’s getting very dry too quickly. Add some more of your sherry and/or vinegar.

Taste – and season accordingly. And once it gets seriously thick, it’s very easy to pour off any excess oil that’s still visible from the start of the cooking process.

Cook the meat in a hot, dry pan – a minute and a half each side at most. Pigeon needs to be really quite rare or it gets very dry, but that’s a great contrast with a nicely caramelised outside.

Serve with the onion and sherry marmalade.

On the side, I added some simple basmati rice – and some shredded cabbage, sautéed in a little lard and then left to steam in the lidded pan for around eight minutes.

And that was not a bad way to welcome the season.

Bottle it up

After what can, at its most generous, be described as a somewhat erratic August, September made a point of stepping out, fresh and bright this morning.

It soon clouded over, of course, but there are pleasures aplenty to be found at this time of year and the thought of them can make even such grey days brighter.

I have most of Saturday to myself, with The Other Half Yorkshire bound for Castleford’s final home game of the ordinary season.

So what to do?

This is, surely, the season of putting things into jars – and indeed, it’s the perfect time to think about chutneys and so on for the end-of-the-year jollies – it might be September, but I refuse to mention ‘that’ festival by name this early.

Indeed, if I do make chutney, it’ll actually mean that I’ve managed to be more advanced in my culinary planning than at any time previously in my life.

Within the last year, I’ve picked up a copy of Lynda Brown’s The Preserving Book, which is a mouth-watering volume of ideas for a wide variety of preserving styles.

So right at this moment, I don’t know quite what I’ll make, but it will be a pleasure all of its own to spend a couple of evenings browsing and musing.

But continuing the theme, I know that I want to make blackcurrant jam, so Saturday morning will probably see a raid on the local Turkish grocers that has these glorious, grown-up fruits on sale.

And then there’s the possibility of a rather big challenge: for some years, I’ve been trying to get my hands on some crabapples.

My maternal grandmother had crab apple trees in her garden, and every year, we’d collect bags of the fruit, to be made into a beautiful, clear pink jelly by my mother.

These absolute gems make a magnificent savoury condiment that’s utterly divine with good sausages – and other thing, of course. Well, that’s certainly my memory.

Finally, after so long, Mark, the organic greengrocer on Broadway Market, thinks that he can get me some this year.

But on one condition – he’s promised to ‘do me a deal’, on the basis that I’ll make sure there’s a jar of the finished jelly for him too, since he says he’s too busy to make his own.

I’m tickled pink. There is something so gloriously old-fashioned about making such an arrangement. It’s a market working at its best, on a genuinely human scale.

There are one or two other things that tempt me: I know that The Other Half, for instance, is rather hoping that, if I carry out my threat to render pork fat at home and produce my own lard – so that, unlike most shop-available stuff, it hasn’t been pointlessly hydrogenated – I’ll do it when he’s away.

Or perhaps that’s already quite enough for one weekend!