Mad Heston's Tea Party

For his Victorian Feast, it would have been easy (and boring) to simply cook the type of food that was actually eaten in those times, so instead chef Heston Blumenthal decided to recreate the experience of the mad hatter's tea party from Alice in Wonderland. It was on TV yesterday, and I'm still astounded.

For his soup, he did actually catch a wild snapper one-handed, but eventually decided that real turtle meat was too stringy. So instead he just made soup from stock. In order to make his stock, after extracting the juice from his mock turtle, he froze it, filtered it, froze it again (at -80 degrees) , whizzed it around in a centrifuge, froze it yet again, set it in specially-made watch-fob-shaped moulds, then individually covered each one in gold leaf.

That was the simple soup starter. His main course seemed to be a complete Victorian garden, with everything from the "soil" to the borders to the plants to the "rocks" to the decorative insects having been carefully placed there as part of the whole culinary experience.

To drink - a single beverage that would have the flavours of toffee, hot buttered toast, custard, cherry tart and turkey. But that description was from a book of fiction, a fantasy story created by Lewis Carroll as an exercise in lunacy. It was not a recipe, and obviously it was not meant to be taken seriously ... except by Heston. He really created it. A single drink, together with a custom drinking vessel, that sequentially offered each of the flavours described in the book. His guests were gobsmacked.

And for desert, a giant vibrating jelly made of absinthe, mindblowing.

Heston Blumenthal already runs what is arguably the best restaurant in the world. He takes your senses to the limit, and then that little bit further. He is polite and courteous in his demeanor, yet outrageous and over the top in his creation. He takes the fictional cliché and makes it real. So the punchline: he is the Jim Steinman of food.

Cooking Christmas Lunch

As it's festive break, please excuse a short personal post.

I rarely cook. But a recent long vacation in India (see here and here) reignited my taste buds. And I've discovered it's easy. Time-consuming and tedious, but easy. The results are excellent, even though I say so myself. Nobody else does.

My wife says it's because I have such low expectations. Because I like simple dals and tarkaris. But I do things properly, fresh spices - no pre-bought pastes, not because they are universally pricey, but because they are universally vile.

One issue is that you can only get these ingredients in "Indian" shops, not in the big supermarket that supply our basic weekly requirements. And those shops are a bit out of the way, designed for local users. Whenever we drive down, there's never anywhere to park. Problem.

Problem sorted. Tomorrow, while most of the world sits down to christmas lunch, I'll pop down then. They're always open. Thank god not everyone's a christian.

Cheesy Break

Not my usual style of blog post, just a little incident from lunchtime yesterday:

On seeing menu item: Chilli Con Queso
Me: I like chilli, but I'll decline that one because it has cheese in it
Oz colleague: Oh, so that dish has cheese in it?
(I honestly didn't say anything at this point)
Serving lady: I don't know. (Then shouts across to kitchen area) Does this dish have cheese in it?
Answer from kitchen: No.
I gave up and went to the sandwich counter.

I still don't know if the kitchen staff were making some kind of joke there. And I mention this not to show that I know some Spanish, that was obvious, but only because after the conversation this person said "you're bound to write it up on your blog". I wasn't, but I've done it now. Back to serious stuff tomorrow.

Restaurant Tips

I wrote a few weeks ago about the difficulty of finding a restaurant that does not have prices on the menu. Yet though I perhaps came from a more extreme angle, taking a famine-based twist to asking for more, I nevertheless believed that many others would share my opinion there, surely it is simply better to go for a meal if you know the complete price up front. Yet sadly not a single suggestion.

But though I expected to share common opinion on food prices, I think my opinion might be more individual on waiter tips. I mention it now because both Marginal Revolution and Freakonomics have raised the subject just in the few days since my note. One obvious idea is that the price of the meal should explicitly include service and the waiting staff should earn decent wages without relying on the whims of fickle customers. The same as shop sales staff. That's a common suggestion anyway. Many restaurants routinely add 15% to the bill as standard. But that is not the best way to relate how much value was added by the waiter.

As a slightly more original idea, I suggest that you could tip a standard hourly figure, for example minimum wage rate, or some fraction of it per customer. If the waiter is supplying x tables, then she will get at least x times minimum wage. Plus any basic salary. It reflects the time that she actually spent "working for you", the current practice of food bill plus 15 percent means that she is compensated less for delivering many bargain courses than for delivering a single overpriced bottle. Perhaps more importantly, the new suggestion means that a waiter in a cheap-food restaurant does not get paid less than a waiter in an expensive-food restaurant for exactly the same level of service.

I'm not saying that's what I do, I'm only suggesting that's what we could do.

A Few Good Menu

Slightly personal note, we got the new V+ box yesterday. And still seeing adverts everywhere implying that television is unimaginable without Sky+, I will say again that Sky are only selling the idea of time-shift TV; compared to others, their user interface is just rubbish.

But while we are on the subject of menu options, another personal recommendation. For anyone with direct family members who have lived through a famine, food is a very precious thing. Today I can afford to never be hungry. And my simple plea: restaurants, I just want to go to a place that does not have prices on the menu.

I do not ever want to, even unconsciously, be thinking of incremental costs when asking for more. Equally, when entertaining in a public place, I don't want my guests to feel even the slightest hint of guilt when ordering. I'm not talking about an all-you-can-eat help-yourself buffet, there are plenty of those, I am simply referring to a good quality reasonably priced restaurant (not a tapas bar) where you pay a set fee per person and order whatever you like from an extensive menu. Sounds so obvious. Yet I only know of one in all London. There must be many more, but where are they?

I'm sure there are loads. After all, I don't expect a "pay-whatever-you-wish" place that relies on the generosity of customers. And as for "moral hazard" concerns, that establishments would be bankrupted by system abusers, that argument is garbage. It would apply even more to the thriving buffets where the big eaters can tuck in to their hearts' content. In other places like Red Corner there is much more control; each item is ordered and served individually, so the restaurant has far more ability to prevent abuse. It is a good business idea. It should be copied.

Man goes bananas

Talking of fruit, the two best in the world …

There were once many kinds of bananas prevalent across the world. Today virtually all of those sold in the Western world are not just the same species but often the same individual. Almost all banana trees in commercial plantations are clones of one another, identical twins multiplied by millions, propagated by cuttings. This gives great consistency in size, texture and flavour for the supermarkets. It also means that they are identically susceptible to the same infections - if a virus can kill one, it can easily kill them all. Read Johann Hari for a history of the banana industry, how the CIA aided American multinationals in the suppression of nonconformist elements to construct banana hegemony.

The second instance where supermarket insistence on consistent shape, year round availability and resistance to blemish have bastardised the product is the case of the mango. Those big bland brazilian blobs we see in Sainsbury's are nothing like the delicate delectation of the traditional Indian fruit. The Guardian food supplement yesterday had a similar lament, though it did refer to horrible terms like "pulping" and "smoothies" - yuck, it's a fruit not a drink.

(sic note - yes I know that bananas don't really grow on trees, but neither does money)

Five Portions Per Day

I'm broadly healthy. I've never been a member of a gym, but I play football twice a week and a racket sport once a week. I rarely eat out so I tend to eat home cooked food or white bread sandwiches. I eat fruit almost every day too. But I'm naturally sceptical.

So I have never believed this five-a-day nonsense. I've done a little research, and I still can't find the very first recommendation for it. Let me know if you can point me there. Yet people, apparaently rational sensible people, swear by this rule.

In the absence of a confirmed original reference, I suggest a theory. I suggest that some well meaning government advisor decided that a simple "eat more fruit and veg" message would not work for the mindless sheep who need explicit holy instructions to guide their aimless lives. So he or she decided that five a day was the clear message. But amazingly, some fools took it literally, and the virus spread. Now it is "truth". A normal balanced diet, like an evolved world, is just too complicated for some people to understand. If they've been pigging out on burgers all day then five portions of fruit juice in the evening will "balance" it.

Except from libertarian slobs trying to justify their unhealthy lifestyles, we rarely see articles criticising this five-a-day rule. Yesterday the Guardian finally did. But it still doesn't come close to the derision I feel for those who treat the rule like religion.

How to Berry the Miracle Sweetener

I heard something odd on the radio today. They were doing some sort of weekly news round up, and they mentioned a story about a "miracle berry".

Now the word "miracle" usually indicates the presence of both a power-hungry charlatan to initiate the news and a gullible fool to spread it, but I wondered if this was something different. So I looked up the story.

The search is always on for replacements for those things that, eaten in excess, make us obese - fatty and sugary foods. In the 1960s, Robert Harvey, a biomedical postgraduate student, encountered the miracle berry, a fruit from west Africa which turns sour tastes to sweet.

This completely natural product "can be used to manufacture sweet tasting foods without sugar or sweeteners". In reported tests: "miracle berry ice lollies, in four different flavours, were compared to similar, sugar-sweetened versions by schoolchildren in Boston. The berry won every time."

But on the eve of launch in 1974, the US Food and Drugs Administration "effectively banned it". Or to be more precise, as I read it, they reclassified it from natural product to food additive, a ruling which which would require many more years of testing.

The worrying thing would be if a combination of big sugar and artificial sweetener manufacturers deliberately conspired to prevent its release. The former vice president of the miracle berry company certainly thinks so: "I honestly believe that we were done in by some industrial interest that did not want to see us survive because we were a threat. Somebody influenced somebody in the FDA to cause the regulatory action that was taken against us."

Unlike the BBC article, I'm not yet convinced.

Birds Beer Curry

When the lads go out for a curry after a few beers, it is often a challenge to see who can manage the hottest curry. I don't think I have a genetic advantage based on my DNA, but I should have a cultural advantage based on decades of tastebud desensitisation.

Unfortunately research proves that it is birds who can manage the hottest - chilis that would make not just my eyes but my whole head water are just tasteless vegetables for some.

Of course I'm not talking about my wife's habit of putting her coffee back into the microwave for a reheat before I even start drinking mine.

I've said before, the word hot is definitely misleading, arguably just wrong. The word should be jhal.

Branding Children

Just like last Sunday evening, I have been watching the next installment of how powders washed whiter back in the golden days of television advertising.

It was amusing to see the main advertising strategies in the post war years. The biggest selling point was usually to emphasize just how much energy was contained (the more calories in anything, the better for you).

The other common approach was to attribute medicinal qualities to the foodstuff on display. Thankfully these claims now need to be tested before being advertised. And today we know that many supposed nutritional supplements are useless anyway.

But the main story of this week's show was about the dubious practice of directly targeting innocent children. Other groups do that too.

Olla

At lunch today the subject turned to food. The rice was undercooked, but that was just normal for the client office restaurant. But I was reminded of two basic marketing areas, and another one has just occurred to me now.

1. Brand value:

One person commented that he had eaten a particular brand of pie only once and had fallen spectacularly ill immediately afterwards. He had never touched that brand again. Now that brand is well-known and respected, and I would have thought that if you must have a pie, then at least choose a well-branded product. But first impressions count and the guy's reaction was perfectly understandable.

2. Product Currency:

A second person at the table recently got married. Between the reception last Saturday and the vultures in the office, we have polished off most of the wedding cake. However, pre-deep-freeze tradition dictates that a piece of cake is saved for a year. But I really don't think a year-old cake would be too healthy.

Yet sometimes the "maturing" of a dish is what provides its special flavour. We can create a new more valuable product in the eyes of the consumer by appealing to grounds of tradition and maturity, regardless of its intrinsic value.

3. Lying in advertising:

And coincidentally Bill Poser at Language Log brought up exactly the same subject only yesterday. He provides an excellent analysis of how deteriorating food sometimes becomes valuable delicacy. He started his analysis with a recipe printed in the New York Times, the dish was called "Olla Podrida", that means "Rotten Pot", the etyomology has been verified.

Yet the author of the Times article admits: she and her consultants and editors were aware of the correct name and etymology but thought that some readers might be put off by the notion of rotten food, so they changed the name a little and made up a fake etymology.

So the restaurant owner is quoted as saying: "Olla means pot, and the original name was olla poderida, which comes from poder, which means strength"

But if the newspaper editors were the people who changed the name, then how did the restaurant owner who sourced the dish provide that quotation?

Eight polo teams

A rather horrific story was front page news in England yesterday. Thirty two dead horses were found at a farm in the home counties not far from London.

English people love horses. They are pets and also working animals. The idea that some people breed them for food is considered fairly repulsive. Yet, in some parts of the world, horse meat is just meat.

It is not just the fact that it was horses that is so disturbing. But that number. Except around royal palaces, the south of England is an expensive congested area. Even when underfed and mistreated, these are big beasts. Did people really not realise that that all these animals were disappearing? Did nobody notice thirty two dead horses?

The Hannibal Lecture

I maintain that this blog is holistic - however, all roads lead to roam. So prompted by a recent comment about animal rights, this note is going to return to the theme started in the horrific accident.

Obviously I am not a cannibal. In fact, I share with the rest of humanity an instinctive, almost inexplicable, disgust at the very idea.

However, back to other animals, I said before that we should be perfectly happy to eat animal protein if it were harvested and eaten safely. This could basically be like farming animal cells instead of farming plant cells. But if we were growing cells that were unconnected to any nervous system, let alone to any seat of consciousness, then would there be any moral issue if the DNA in those cells had been derived from humans instead of from sheep?

I think that only religious fundamentalists and those who want a regression to a hunter-gatherer society should answer yes to that.

DNR

It would be too easy for me to take apart the leaders from the tabloid press, still easier for me to echo their populist outrage ... but maybe I can start from there to make a more sophisticated yet even more controversial suggestion.

A sick murderous cruel brute tried to kill himself in jail. And like most people I think we should have let him do it instead of spending a fortune on eternal "suicide watch". So does that make me like the red top editors?

In fact it's probably the sickest most vengeful members of the public who want him alive, just so they can drag out his torment.

Back to the villain of the piece, he was not even allowed to starve himself to death. Even though starvation is surely a horrible slow painful miserable tortuous way to die.

So why do we let our dying loved ones go that terrible way instead of hastening the end?

RICE

The doctor told me that rice is meant to be good for mild ruptures to the anterior talo-fibular ligaments, so when I got home today I had a traditional bengali lunch then put my feet up to wait for the basmati to take effect.

The human body is not well designed for running with rapid changes of direction on uneven ground. It's almost as if the supporting structures of the knee and ankle joints were fairly incidental adaptations associated with a more fundamental driver, for example if the benefits from freeing forelimbs from the requirement to transport the body were associated with corresponding costs in other areas. Because evolution cannot plan ahead, it sometimes appears to make some fairly dumb decisions.

Alternatively, it could be God telling us that He did not want us to play football.

Jhal

A lot of curry is eaten in the English-speaking world.

Completely obvious - English is adept at incorporating words from other languages, a fact that is splashed all over every one of the books listed here and surely in many more besides.

Slightly obvious - even if English is your mother tongue, there are moments when a word or phrase that is still technically "foreign" is the most obvious and most precise label for a particular thought. The more other languages you know, and the better you know them, the more often this happens.

So this is my suggestion for the OED. We really need this word. The word hot is the one usually used. But it is open to confusion almost every time it is spoken. Chilli is the other common adjective. But that doesn't seem right either. It's a very broad category of vegetable, and the sensation from a jalapeno is very different to that from an Indian pepper (perhaps only to the native, but I think it's fact).

The word should be used on restaurant menus. Then it would take off. It's the particular kind of hot caused by a particular kind of chilli. A madras is more jhal than a korma. It's a Bengali word, but most "Indian" restaurants are owned by people who speak a derivative of Bengali anyway. If tikka masala can enter the English dictionary, why not jhal?

Ha ha lal

It does not happen often, but I'm going out for a meal this evening, hence an early posting. When choosing somewhere to go, if the menu proudly displayes a "halal" message, should that affect your decision to eat there?

Most of us care about the welfare of animals, how they live and how they die. Halal meat is not killed according to the latest things that we have learned about pain and consciousness, but instead killed according to an old superstition.

Would a cut to the throat, however clean, stop pain as quickly as a bolt to the head? Think about it. Can cells continue to function for at least a few seconds without a blood supply? Use your brain.

A one page blog is not evidence. But even if all scientific and medical officers said there was evidence of less suffering to the animal if it was stunned before cutting, would you believe them, or would you wait for a mullah to give you his new enlightenment first?