Foxes, cheese, all that

This is not a French-bashing post.  A French-bashing post is, as any scholar of social history will tell you, a pole that existed in many villages during the Napoleonic wars to which suspected French spies or sympathisers (anyone smelling of garlic), was tied for their beating.  Today only a few exist as relics, historical curiosities and gallows for foreigners with beards.  Or for passing historians who cannot explain why the Napoleonic wars are called the Napoleonic wars when we sodding won!

Today, Britain has a much healthier relationship with the Continent, so good in fact that when teachers run off with under-age schoolgirls, France is the country they choose to flee to.  Amazing that you can get to 30 years of age, be a teacher and yet still not capable of basic research such as Googling ‘what do they do to peados in prison?’ followed by ‘What countries do not have an extradition treaty with Britain?’.  Of course, not everyone can afford the ferry fare to Equador and, to be fair, Mr Forrest may have Googled ‘Equador’ after Googling ‘what do they do to peados in prison?’ and made an informed choice.

My favourite quote about the Continent comes from Peter Mandleson, who once remarked ‘don’t talk to me about the French social model…the whole country’s in flames’.  Glossing over the events of last summer, Lord M had a good point – maybe it’s because as we are always being told fuel is so much cheaper on the Continent, but bloody hell do they love a riot and petrol bombs!

Possibly then the ‘rather a lot’ tax on fuel is intended to make rioting too expensive for the classes that want to riot, traditionally, ‘working’ and ‘under’.  Rarely do you see a couple wearing Hunter wellies on the forecourt filling up milk bottles with four star because they are upset about something.  This is because the middle classes are not upset enough to riot…yet, and because if you can pay a hundred quid for fucking wellies, then your sense of values are so totally warped you can pretty much put up with anything.

Britain does a lot of things very, very, well.  War and sport (which is just war with rules), that’s what we do.  And magnificent food.

Pardon?

Oh yes we do.  And here’s why – a popular myth has grown up that somehow or other Britain was less able than other countries in the cooking Department up until a few years ago.  Let me raise a point here – rationing.  We were an island cut off by Nazis.  Underwater Nazis.  Nazis in submarines.  No wonder we learned to do interesting things with offal. 

Also, we love offal. 

But I have to say fair play to Jamie Oliver (the man who taught me to love cooking as well as food).  What ignited, with his help, around the turn of the century was a passion for cooking. 

The passion for food had always been here because, with rationing people never got enough of it, and in the seventies prawn cocktail and Angel Delight were just scrummie.  They burned your mouth with chemicals, but what the hey.

Now, things are very serious indeed.  Austerity is biting and there are flaming riots in Spain, where people are annoyed, possibly at being charged so much for sun loungers because Christ knows that always annoyed me.

Luckily, France is currently exempt from this sort of thing.  I know this, because recently I was in a French restaurant (in England, obviously, what do you take me for?) and saw the delightful advertising that decorates this post, a fox and a crow advertising camenbert cheese.

Now, it’s obvious that there is some kind of story here. The fox wants the cheese, the crow wants the cheese, they share the cheese, the fox craps cheese, I have no idea.

All I know is this.  I had an excellent coffee in the French place but I had my dinner at Jamie’s.  It wasn’t (I hope) snobbery or xenophobia, or even that foxes are more likely to crap in my garden than plunder my cheese, it’s just that the Brits do food better than the French.

Epecially the paella.

This, by the way, is what a fox really looks like.

Marinade musings

Weatherwise, it's been hot and sultry recently. Over the weekend this was very good as it allowed me to sit in the back garden all day not taking the opportunity to read Tennessee Williams in the sort of soupy, southern atmosphere he manages to evoke even if you're reading him on a freezing railway platform in December but instead listening to Test Match Special, reading the papers, swearing once again never to buy the papers as they just irritate the hell out of me, and alternating refreshing hot drinks (tea) with refreshing cool drinks (cola) before, wired to the eyeballs on caffeine, I decided that it was a respectable hour to switch to alcohol (five o'clock, red wine, it’s acceptable, and there’s an end to it).

The other benefit of the hot weather is being able to use the barbeque on a regular basis. This has resulted in what I am pleased to describe as a well-seasoned grill, what the Food Standards Agency would call a type two health hazard and what the local fox population probably describe as the second most tempting smell in the postcode (the first being the bins of the family a few doors down, but only because they don't use that ultra-spicy marinade that I favour).

Cooking over fire though is, without doubt, the most satisfying of all the culinary arts. Possibly because it taps into a primal urge, possibly because it's associated with good weather and probably because you need a dousing agent on hand at all times and a large glass of red is ideal.

Even vegetables taste good, this is essentially because they have been cooked on a grill that retains the ghost of a thousand meaty dinners. God knows how I'm going to cope when the weather changes but dousing anything green on my plate in gravy has to be an option. Either that or simply crumbling an OXO cube over my salad.

12 days of Christmas – any nuts left?

This is the time of year when people eat things they would never normally consider consuming. Honest to god, if you put me in charge of a trolly and send me round a supermarket on a normal shop, I can do it in half and hour on autopilot, the only moment of real choice coming when I face the drinks aisle and wonder what’s on special or think about trying some exciting new east European breakfast lager.

At Christmas though, people buy stuff they would never normally eat – to be precise: vegetables. That’s why you see baffled men holding up phallic root crops wondering if it really is okay to serve that up to Aunt Irene or whether it will simply bring on one of her ‘turns’ and why you see women buying packs of sausage meat and spices and stuffing mix – instead of a pack of ready made stuffing.

Much is made of people suffering for long hours in the kitchen over Christmas, slaving over a stove stirring vegetables that go from firm as pebbles to mush in an instant, throwing out more steam than a laundry, an industrial cooling tower and a 01B482 Class 7 loco combined.

In truth, the kitchen is not a bad place to be over Christmas. For foodies it’s where they can practice their art and relax, for harassed hosts it’s a place with unlimited access to cooking sherry.

As for the nuts – throughout the year the decision is normally ‘salted or dry roasted?’ – at Christmas we’re confronted with the real thing and, the arch-nut…the walnut, in shell. This is the king of nuts for two reasons – to get at it requires effort disproportionate to what is revealed inside (eating a walnut usually makes you think ‘great – so where’s the chocolate and fondant?’) and watching somebody try to open one allows you to pick your time to say…’you know, squirrels can open one of those in about three seconds’, leaving the inference hanging until answered with ‘well why don’t you go and fucking well fetch one instead of these crap nutcrackers!’.

The real purpose of a walnut, shell on, is to allow Aunt Irene to do her party trick – thighs of steel that woman.

In praise of...Cat Deeley

It was only what a couple of surveyors from the Ordinance Survey turned up and started debating whether my pile of clothes awaiting ironing was properly a hill or a mountain, that I realised I had been neglecting sartorial chores. (The correct term is, of course, a ‘mound’ of ironing, not just because in shape the piled-up clothes resemble a barrow or grave-site of a warrior-king, but because, like ancient burial-sites, such mounds often contain treasure, such as that excellent party shirt you’ve been looking for for weeks.)

There was no snow on the peak, a sure sign that things had got beyond the point of recovery and where the only sane option is to start flogging lift passes and hope that ‘crumpled’ becomes the look for the season, but action was required.

I wrestled the ironing board into position, set the iron to ‘steam like the Flying Scotsman on the Edinburgh - London run!’ and turned on the telly.

Watching a recorded programme about the history of the Victoria Cross passed the first hour very agreeably (tee shirts, boxers and assorted casual wear). This came to an end just as I finished shirts, so I flicked channels, alighting on foul-mouthed cook Gordon ‘fucking’ Ramsey presenting a programme about how to cook things - the self-confidence of anyone in his kitchen being roasted for instance.

He appeared to reserve most of the spice in the kitchen for his language, with more effs than a kid with a stammer doing a reading of a Famous Five book. The odd thing was that, talented armature as he was, he occasionally missed the opportunity to slip in an eff where a professional might of done so. Ideally, when swearing, I like to slip in an eff between every syllable of every word, a practice that makes the ordering of ‘haricourt beans’ in a restaurant something of a chore.

The format was GR in the kitchen, GR dropping in on people who think that a dinner part is five pot noodles and a kettle in the middle of the table and saving them from ready meals and so on. They also have a restaurant with celeb guests - tonight’s was Cat Deeley.

I remember Cat when she used to present SMTV with Ant and Dec and, after initially thinking ‘what the hell?’ and ‘ah, something for the dads’, realised that anyone who could present live telly for two hours on a Saturday morning with every sign of obvious enjoyment was pure tee vee gold.

What it boiled down to is here’s somebody who appears to be very beautiful, Brummie and proud, poised and elegant and STILL manages not to be up herself. For instance, on the show last night, she did a champagne challenge where, for instance, she picked the best champagne in a blind tasting, then picked the vintage champagne and then picked the champagne that was a supermarket brand that was considered superior to a ‘name’ brand. Pure. Class.

The corker was though when she removed the top from a champagne bottle using a sabre! What a girl! She was then invested into the order of people who can decapitate magnums!

Okay, not the hardest job in the world, but I can’t think of any other celebs who would be quite so unpretentious - or could swing a sword like that. Every fantasy geek watching must have been hitting the ‘video capture’ button on their remotes.

I, of course, was too busy ironing.