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Cinnamon Rolls

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In Praise of the Knife

                   It's 7.30am and I'm thinking about using a knife. Your murderous assumptions aside, cutlery is really what's on my mind (which I’m sure is clearly normal at this time of the morning). I used to consider my knife as merely a piece to be used on the periphery of the meal. It was more of a “swap fork for  knife, cut with stronger hand, put knife down, use fork, repeat as necessary, if necessary” kind of process. Now, of course, you Brits have shown me the light.

Our parents or guardians tend to be the main teachers of these skills. They instruct, they guide, we watch and we do. Mine use their knife and fork as the above, so of course I followed suit and spent the next 22 years ineptly wandering around my plate, unbeknownst as to what I was missing out on. In fact, this way of eating is more obvious to me now when they come to visit as a fair portion of our activities revolve around food. But I have seen them go through entire meals without using their knives and now, with my baptism into British culture basically complete, I find it rather curious.

Of course, it may seem ridiculous to comment on this; maybe it’s a West Coast thing. Maybe in Denver, Baton Rouge and New York they are as ambidextrous as the English, but I don’t know; I kind of doubt it. I’ve seen a fair amount of my compatriots eat in this manner. In any case, the thing I’ve not been able to impart to my parents is how much they are missing out by feeding themselves this way. Don't get me wrong; it was a slow process learning to use my knife properly. And even when I did, with my fork in my right hand and knife in my left, I'm still arse backwards, but at least a lot closer than many others from the homeland.

Of course, eating without a knife is inefficient. It creates an additional unnecessary step that could be avoided and thus keeping the flow of one’s meal intact and as the cook intended. But most importantly, without it actual tasting becomes disjointed. It is impossible to try all the flavours of a dish, be it a roast dinner, spaghetti Bolognese, or poached eggs on toast, if you are just stabbing at it with your fork. A little bit of roast potato loses its impact when eaten separately to its neighbouring slice of beef, where it only receives a token drenching of gravy. The meat in your ragú goes from being the star of the show to playing second fiddle, and my god, don’t get me started on missing every little bit of the precious runny egg yolk which saturates your sourdough. That damn knife needs to be there. It is essential.  

Perhaps I am overanalysing this. Maybe I should just assume everyone eats the best way they know how. Surely Asians are not frustrated by runny egg yolks and their futile attempts to eat them with chopsticks. But then again….they very well might be.

Arm yourselves, people. Use that knife for a purpose higher than just cutting and don't miss out on getting the very best out of a meal. You've been supplied with the easiest of tools to make it possible and your palate will be forever grateful.

Post script: My mom emailed me earlier this week. Turns out she is converted. Now, only to get my dad on board....

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Prima Donna, Brixton: A review

It must be hard running your own restaurant. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to try to please a huge variety of people, all with different likes and dislikes. With all the competition around, you must essentially be at the forefront of people’s minds when their stomachs begin to rumble and cravings ensue. Surely that is some serious pressure.  What must be even harder is being surrounded by lots of great places in the concentration of 500m, which has occurred in the recent regeneration of Granville Aracade, now more widely known as Brixton Village, and Market Row.  There are now many local places who are in fierce but friendly competition to be the de facto choice for local punters and as such, much to many a local’s pleasure, a great mix of really wonderful and simple food, all cooked in teeny kitchens and served in mismatched dining rooms means Joe Brixton can enjoy himself relatively inexpensively, in a truly unique and quirky environment. 

And now, the owners of the Tulse Hill restaurant, Brazas, have stepped into the ring and recently opened Prima Donna in Market Row.  The name suggests Italian, or maybe even tapas, but I found out later it is in fact a new grilled meat restaurant. An interesting choice considering a place like Brixton Grill has established itself, quite rightly, by consistently serving pretty bomb grilled meats and fish, served with their even more atomic homemade piri piri sauce. And also, there is the better-known piri piri place that shall not be named which serves many a reveller, pre- and post-Academy gigs.

The menu is limited to a few little starters like bread and olives, and the mains are focussed on piri piri chicken and soy glazed ribs, with a couple vegetarian options for those less into the atavistic delight inspired by eating meat off the bone with their teeth.  The wine list is equally limited but I enjoyed a nice Tempranillo/Syrah blend and they do have Sagres lager on tap, which seemed to go down well with some fellow diners, who seemed more interested in getting wasted than the food. 

                              We split the courgette fritters, one of the vegetarian mains, as a starter. A large portion of eggy tortilla-like slabs appeared, covered in spinach, cherry tomatoes, feta and a balsamic dressing. They were not as light as I had hoped, but had a nice hint of mint, which heightened the courgette flavours and melded quite nicely with the rest of its accompaniments. I would have preferred the fritters to have a bit of a crunch on the outside to give them more texture against the freshness of the spinach and tomatoes. They were a touch too soggy to stand up to the dressing.

                             Next we had chicken and ribs for mains. I had mine piri piri style (you can have plain if you’re not into the heat) with salad and new potatoes and my other half went for ribs and chunky chips, which also came with a bit of sweet corn.  The chicken had decent heat and flavour, but the breast meat was on the dry side. The legs and thighs were a little juicier than the breast, and overall the skin was crisp and nicely salty. With the chicken came a small portion of avocado salsa, which turned out to be the highlight of the dish. Light with wonderfully fresh flavours of coriander and onion and tomato really cut through the creamy avocado and it gave some much-needed moisture to the chicken.                              

                             The ribs were a disappointment. Dry, over-roasted, tough. The soy glaze seemed to have been charred to an inch of its life and what was left was a slightly soy-carbon taste, which isn’t exactly bad if you’re into that, but if they were going to grill the ribs like this, an accompanying sauce would have been welcomed.

For both dishes, the sides of new potatoes and chips were undercooked. To me, this seems more teething problems than anything else. Often the seemingly less important vegetables get forgotten in an attempt to master the main event, so I’d let them off for this, but it is something that can drain the diner of confidence in the kitchen. The sweet corn that came with the ribs was decent, but it is not in season locally, so I would have preferred something that hadn’t been flown in from some far flung country.

                              We finished with a slice of raspberry and blueberry amaretto cake, brought in from Maurillio which was, frankly, the nicest thing we ate during our visit. The cake had fat chunks of amaretti biscuits nestled in its lovely crumbly topping. A berry ripple gave it slightly light tangy hit; a moist and quite delightful little treat it turned out to be.

I was hoping for the best when I stepped into Prima Donna. I went in not knowing what to expect food-wise and emerged a couple hours later a little wiser and a little disappointed. Not that the food was completely terrible. It really wasn’t. But it just seemed to be really lacking that extra element which would make it more the obvious choice over its neighbouring restaurants. Perhaps it is the inattention to detail – slightly overcooked meat and slightly undercooked vegetables – that stood out to me. A little more thought and care in the kitchen would not go amiss. Perhaps it is early days yet and in time, they will have mastered both meat and vegetables, but it may have been advisable to do that prior to opening a restaurant.

Meal for two including drinks £41.85 excluding service

An edited version of this review can be found on http://www.brixtonblog.com/restaurant-review-prima-donna/5259

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Letter

Spoiler alert. This post relates nothing to food whatsoever. It is more romantic reflection, shall we say, but I thought I'd write about it anyway because what happened made such an impression on me.

Yesterday, I nabbed a seat next to a woman on the Tube, probably in her early 70s, her kind and wrinkled face staring out patiently as she made her way to her destination, wherever it was. Of course, I thought nothing of it as she sat there, but as the train pulled away, she pulled out a letter and gently started to read it, seeming to savour every word. This instantly grabbed me. First, I thought, how lovely; someone still writes letters, even in this day and age. But then I noticed the yellowed quality of the paper and its scratched handwriting and realised this must be something else entirely. This woman and this letter, on this crowded Tube train, was so out of the ordinary, my interest piqued and I pretended to read my book but all the while tried to steal glances over her shoulder to see what letter said.

I caught descriptions of a driver and surroundings and words like 'my darling' and 'I miss you' and instantly I was ashamed of my invasion on this woman's personal history. She finished the letter; I saw it end with 'your lover'. She gently folded the letter into a similarly yellowed envelope, covered in stamps I didn't recognise, and put it back in her bag. In it, I caught sight of other envelopes in similar states of age. She got off at Oval and of course I won't see her again.

In situations like this, my imagination runs away with me and instantly, I imagine her, young and full of life, wistfully missing this lover, who was so far away from her. I imagine the longing they must have had for each other, the total emptiness that can only be filled by the proximity of the other person; these letters their only lifeline back to the other. I imagine that she married this lover when he came back from wherever he was and they were happy and shared a life together for many years until he died, maybe a year ago, maybe 10 years ago, I don't know, but she misses him daily, sometimes to the point where she can't breathe. And she carries his letters as a reminder of their love and their history.

Or perhaps it was documentation of a clandestine affair she had many years ago, which made an unhappy marriage slightly more bearable, and she reads them now just to remember how, for that period of time, she felt desired and longed for.

Or it could be nothing like that.

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Memory and Taste

I have been happily making my way through MFK Fisher's tome The Art of Eating and came across a small and delightful essay in Serve It Forth called "The Pale Yellow Glove", which are anecdotal musings about memories ensconced with food. In it, she mentions that people are often loth to divulge stories of pure unadulterated gastronomic pleasure and only two or three times has she been successful in harvesting these stories. This I do not understand. Maybe it was the era she was living in, but in this day and age, with the immediacy of Twitter, every time I look at my feed there is someone talking about something amazing they had at some amazing restaurant. Even so, she rightly believes that "[o]nce in the life of every human, whether he be brute or trembling daffodil, comes a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction." For me, the many occurrences of gastronomic satisfaction, circumstantial and unforgettable, but impossible to recreate without transporting myself back in time. I now see this as the beginnings of my own food obsession.

I always had a fascination with taste, even as a child, when our palates are rudimentary and untrusting. At the age of 8, I used to take dried pasta from our larder, pour hot water over it to soften it, then I would chew it. It had a faint nutty taste and I genuinely liked it; in fact writing about it now I can distinctly remember the flavour (though I have no desire to recreate it, you'll be happy to hear). Or when I used to take bitter chocolate and dip it in sugar. If I grew tired of it, I'd leave it to dry out in a cup under my bed for my health-obsessed mother to discover several days later, much to her horror.

These are not things I remember with the same golden memory as, say, the time I first tried grilled portobello mushrooms at my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary party in Napa. For the first time, surrounded by my family, the sunshine and the grape vines, I had the realisation that a fungus could take on the guise of sirloin and it totally blew my mind. But this memory is nothing without the clinking of glasses, my aunt's laugh and the surrounding California countryside.

Memory and food are clearly emotional. Think of the silent meals with soon-to-be ex-lovers, the distressing green vegetables your mothers made you eat before you were allowed to get down from the table to go play, or even the late night kebabs which we remember with headachey shame. We feel the meal; we remember it because we are emotionally tied to it. Well, maybe not the kebab as we normally don't remember it and are only reminded that it existed by the discovery of its remains the next morning.

MFK Fisher was a devoted follower of Brillat-Savarin and his writings are often intertwined with anecdotal musings about meals he had and the circumstances around them, so I am not surprised this little chapter made it in to Serve It Forth. However, in my experience, much of today's food writing and blogging is more about making things and telling people how to do it. Or, taking photos of food on one's dining experiences and talking about what it tasted like. To me, this is a waste. How do these writers feel about what they were making and why did they choose to blog about it? Why do these bloggers choose to take a photo of their meal instead of describing how it made them feel to eat what they did, where they did? Perhaps that is not what the masses like. 

These 'souvenirs of eating' should be relished and remembered, if only for our own pleasure. Just as Keats did a letter to his friend from 1819, quoted in Fisher's essay. "Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - good God how fine. It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy - all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed."

Now there's a memory in the making, surely.

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Madeleines

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Guerrilla Dining: New Date Announced

            The lovely ladies at the Keston Kitchen and I will be throwing another supper club! If you're interested in attending, please click through to Guerilla Dining for more details.

Menu

Starter

Mozzarella with smashed broad beans and pecorino, served on a sourdough bruschetta

Main

Ceri's special fish pie

or

Fennel and tomato gratin

served with seasonal veg

Dessert

Cherry Clafoutis

Coffee and madeleines