Category: Food & Cooking

Eating to extinction

I have just finished reading Eating to Extinction, by Dan Saladino. It’s an ambitious, immersive and important book. Saladino has made a tour of the world’s vanishing foods – its animals, vegetables, crops, and shown us why retaining diversity in the food chain matters so much.

This engaging and readable book takes us with Dan Saladino as he visits Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania in quest of wild honeys – they’re the very last people to be constantly on the move, with no settled place to call home – they have lived successfully with no possessions, no money and no leaders. In Australia, he’s shown murnong, a radish like root once prized by the aboriginal people, and all but obliterated by introduced over-grazing sheep. Bere is an ancient barley adapted to the harsh conditions in Orkneyn Orkney. There are Swabian lentil growers; apple growers in Kazakhstan; Skerpikjøt, the wind-dried mutton of the Faroes …. and so many more. Each adventure, to areas where local custom and traditional ways of life remain strong is full of interest, and leaves me with a desire to try the foods and drink he sampled. It also leaves me with a determination to do what I can to support the remaining foods being saved by passionate and committed producers.

Disease can rampage through a single variety at horrifying speed, and if that variety is all we have, the consequences are obvious. Too many of our foodstuffs are in too few hands. The cultures that are injected into our cheeses worldwide to make them what they are are in the hands of some 5 suppliers. The cattle we breed are – worldwide – largely a single breed. Seeds in every continent are in the hands of just four corporations,. Thousands upon thousands of local varieties, bred over the centuries to suit local conditions have been lost forever. So many of the foods we rely on – animal and vegetable – once developed to suit particular soils and climate have been wiped out or, if lucky, painstakingly recovered from a vanishingly small stock pile by some single-minded enthusiast. Now, most foods are grown as a one-size-fits-all.

Whereas foodstuffs used to be so different and varied from one country and region to the next, now the entire world derives 50 % of its calorie-intake from just three foods: wheat, corn and rice. The fast-food burger is becoming a world-wide phenomenon. Saladino shows us that besides this being so dangerous – an epidemic could wipe away a foodstuff completely – it’s also impoverishing our diets, and the rich variety of local foods. He discusses globalisation, the crippling effects of war and climate change. The good news is: with a lot of hard work and good will, it’s not quite too late to stop the rot.

The most important book I’ll read this year. And one of the most interesting.

For Gumtrees and Galaxies: Gaia Nature Reading Challenge

Give us this day our daily bread revisited

I often used to make our own bread. These days, with the cost of fuel, and because we have a fabulous two-person-band bakery in town, not so much. And back when we lived in France, we certainly never bothered. Here’s a post from our days when we lived there which may explain why.

Give us this day our daily bread

February 25th 2010

Mme. Fonquernie, Mater Familias

How could they?  I mean, what ARE they playing at?  All last week, and most of this, the baker’s shop down the road has been closed.  Instead of rising at 2.00 a.m. to get busy making baguettes, flutes, ficelles, baguettes a l’ancienne, flutes tradition, pain noir, chocolatines, croissants and so on and so on, our bakers have chosen to lie in till – ooh, 7 o’clock perhaps – and then spend the day catching up with their families – the children are on half term.

It’s a family business, our baker’s shop.  M & Mme Fonquernie owned it, and now, although officially they’ve retired, they help out all the time .M. Fonquernie is the one who drives his little white van round the local villages which have no shops, selling bread. Their two sons have now taken over the day-to-day baking.  One is responsible for all those loaves, while the other specialises in patisserie.  Their wives divide the work of running the shop between them with Mme Fonquernie Senior’s help.

So our morning routine has been disrupted.  First thing each day, one of us usually walks down the road to get our favourite pain noir, hot and crisp still from the oven.  The other day, the baker forgot the salt.  The bread wasn’t half so nice, but I rather liked this very human error.  It proved that our loaves are still ‘artisanale’, rather than being churned out by some computer-assisted machine.  There’s usually someone in the shop to chat to, or to walk back along the street with, and so neither of us looks on getting the bread in as a chore.

We’re lucky, I suppose, that there are three bakers in town.  Last week, we went to the shops at Castellanes to the baker there.  No pain noir at this shop, so we chose their unbleached white.  The small one’s a slender baguette shape – an Ariegeoise – but buy the larger butch version, and you must ask for an Ariegeois.

But then what happened?  A notice appeared in the shop: from Sunday, they too would be closed for a holiday. So for a few days this week, we have to patronise shop number three. Everybody moans ‘C’est pain industriel ça’.  It’s true. It comes all the way from Lavelanet, from a bakery which has three shops.  That’s mass production, and it shows.  Roll on Thursday, when the Fonquernie family re-opens its shop doors.

Sergio Arze, Unsplash. The featured photo is also courtesy of Unsplash, Tomasso Urli

For Fandango’s Flashback Friday

Nature’s Serving Suggestions

As a young child, I was sometimes woken up when it was barely light, to go off with my mother mushrooming on the decommissioned RAF airfield near our house. Blackberrying was for late summer, always, and rosehips for autumn, when the entire village school would spend afternoons gathering rosehips for Delrosa to turn into rosehip syrup (‘Whaddya mean, slave labour? The best pickers got a tin badge to keep!’). Later, in France, we added wild asparagus, wild cherries, mushrooms, walnuts, chestnuts and sloes to our Free Food bonanza. It’s made me a seasonal eater. I love it when the seasons announce that we have a different food to add to our diet, for a few weeks only. Fresh peas straight from the pod! The newest and smallest potatoes! Discovery apples in August! And in winter, these same foods, bottled and preserved give us a different pleasure – a memory of summer, but presented in a comforting, warming way: plum jam to spread on toast after a brisk winter walk; walnuts stirred into the soon-to-be steamed Christmas pudding; a nip of sloe gin on the coldest of days.

Nature’s had a habit of giving us the right foods for the right season. It’s a modern idea to expect strawberries in November. asparagus in September. All that anticipation, all that enjoyment of a food made special, distinctive by its very limited season has gone. If we listen, we can hear Nature telling us to get back in touch with the way things always used to be. Then we can get rid of all those unnecessary Air Miles too.

This week’s Tanka Tuesday asks us to write on the theme of Lessons from Nature. I’ve chosen the Shadorma form to illustrate what I’ve just been talking about. Mirabelles by the way are rarely seen in the shops. They’re small plums, yellow or rosy pink.

So …






And Nature said … 
















	


	





	

		
		
A Flashback to the Orange Man
	


	
	
	

		
	

		






Here’s a blast from the past:  from November 2012 in fact, when we were hunkering down for winter in France.  It was round about now that The Orange Man arrived …





THE ORANGE MAN





Winter has arrived.  How do I know?  Although the nights are cold, the afternoons are still for going walking or tidying up the garden wearing a tee-shirt, beneath a duck-egg blue sky. So until the other day, I thought we were clinging on to autumn.





But on Thursday, the Orange Man arrived.  This is exciting enough news for it to be worth phoning a friend.  Every year, once winter kicks in and the orange harvest is well under way in southern Spain, a huge container lorry arrives in Lavelanet. It parks up at a disused petrol station on the main road into town and becomes an impromptu shop.










The man with the lorry, the Orange Man,  speaks only Spanish, and sells only oranges.  Not singly or by the half-dozen, but in large 10 kilo boxes.  10 kilos, 10 euros.  What a bargain.  These oranges, though sometimes a little knobbly and in irregular sizes, are the juiciest and tastiest you’ll ever eat, and it’s no wonder that whenever you pass, you’ll see someone pulling up their car and opening the boot for a case or two.  Our Spanish friend won’t have to stay long.  In a few days the entire container-load will be sold, he’ll return to Spain …. only to return when he’s loaded up again.










When he departs for the last time at the end of the season, we’ll know for sure that spring has arrived.





For Fandango’s Flashback Friday:  a chance to go down Memory Lane and give an older post an airing.

	


	





	

		
		
Tomorrow’s Stir Up Sunday. Get cooking
	


	
	
	

		
	

		

I blame the Church of England.  Tomorrow is Stir Up Sunday, the day when all right-thinking people in Britain will dig out their dried fruits and candied peels, their sticky, treacly dark sugars, eggs, butter, spices, zesty lemons, brandy, weigh them out and mix them all together.  They’ll bring the family into the kitchen, get everyone to stir the mixture, making a wish as they do so.





And why?  Because as they kneel at their devotions in church at Morning Service, those Good Ladies of the Parish will hear the priest intone the Collect for the Sunday Next Before Advent ….





Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people….





‘Stir up?  Stir up?  I haven’t made the pudding yet!  Best go home and make the Christmas pudding’





You might not be a Good Lady of the Parish.  You might not even be a Good Lady.  But you’d better get on with making that pudding tomorrow.  I’m telling you today so you can nip out and buy anything you might not have to hand.  Go to.  Stir Up Sunday is the day. Your Christmas depends on it.



















William’s actually making this year’s Christmas cake.  But the ingredients for both cake and pudding are virtually identical, 





For Debbie at Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday

	


	





	

		
		
An inveterate food forager
	


	
	
	

		
	

		

I was brought up foraging.  At four years old, I’d get up with my mother at half past five in the morning and go scouting for mushrooms on the now-deserted wartime air-strips near our house.  At five years old, I went as part of the autumn school day to gather rosehips for Delrosa. Expert pickers got a tin badge.  Smaller fry like me got nothing.  Blackberrying of course we took for granted.





Later, much later, Malcolm and I moved to France.  There, foraging is a way of life.  Nobody leaves the house without their ‘Au cas où’ bag – ‘just in case‘ they find something for the cooking pot.  It might be wild asparagus, wild garlic or Alpine strawberries in spring, cherries later, then blackberries of course.  Autumn was bonanza time.  This was the time to stagger home with sacks full of walnuts, of chestnuts, of sloes, of mushrooms of every kind.  Autumn hikes were constantly interrupted by the need to squat down and fill a bag with yet more free food.  You can read all about it here, for Fandango’s Flashback Friday, when I described how ‘all is safely gathered in’.





Sweet chestnuts





Now we’re back in England, the custom continues.  I’ve discovered that locally, we’re regarded with good-humoured curiosity because of our inability to pass free food by without snaffling it. It starts with wild garlic, sometimes dandelion and nettle leaves in spring.  During the last month we’ve picked several kilos of bullaces (wild plums) from Nosterfield; ditto blackberries from wherever there have been good supplies; windfall apples and crab apples from beneath village trees; a magnificent puffball weighing in at more than a kilo, which – thickly sliced and dredged first in beaten egg, then breadcrumbs and grated parmesan and fried in butter – made splendidly tasty steaks. Finally, this weekend, I glanced upwards on a familiar woodland path, and spotted golden mirabelles winking down at me.  I summoned reinforcements (Malcolm, with bags, boxes and a useful stick) and now there are jars of tart but tasty mirabelle jam to see us through the winter, as well as plenty more waiting to be made into tarts and puddings.










Simple, but very real pleasures to add interest to our daily walks.

	


	









	

		
		
A Virtual Tea Party, anybody?
	


	
	
	

		
	

		

Oh … er … I’m quite out of the habit.  Nobody’s been round for tea of coffee for a year now.  Haven’t you heard that there’s a pandemic on?  Still, a Virtual Gathering, to which all of my blogging pals are cordially invited: could I manage that?  Let’s see.  An old favourite might be best for a cake.  Lemon drizzle maybe. It’s one of those cakes we all seem to have a recipe for if we bake at all.  These days I use about half the recommended amount of sugar both in the cake itself, and in the lemon drizzle topping.  Nobody seems to notice.  I also usually bake with wholemeal spelt flour rather than with common-or-garden plain white.  So you could even pretend this cake is the healthy option. I’ll pop it on a  plate in a minute.  Or maybe you’d like a cashew-nut butter cookie? Would you prefer tea or coffee?  I warn you now, everyone says my tea’s dreadful. Since I rarely drink the stuff, I can’t tell the difference between gnat’s pee and Builder’s Brew.





Um.  Where could I sit you all?  Luckily it’s a nice day, so let’s go into the garden, where we can do Social Distancing. Could you carry a tray out for me please?










Virtual Afternoon Tea: March 2021

	


	





	

		
		
Zest up your day with toast and marmalade!
	


	
	
	

		
	

		

It’s that time of year when the house is permeated by the bitter, bright, clean and honeysweet smell of marmalade-in-the-making, as a pan of carefully cut up peels, juice and sugar bubble away enticingly in the kitchen to make this year’s supply of Seville Orange Marmalade.  Is anything more guaranteed to wake you up and start your day with a zing than a couple of slices of toast and home-made marmalade? 










I first wrote about it here, on this day in 2011. I wrote about it often.  But our most memorable marmalade year was two years ago, when I wrote about it again, on almost this day.





Up above your head, in many a Spanish street, are oranges, glowing orbs of colour that brighten the cityscape. And two years ago we were in Valencia, home of the orange.  Finding windfalls abandoned in the Turia Gardens, we gathered them and brought them home.  What could be better than marmalade made, by you,  from oranges you’ve harvested yourselves? 





Oranges growing in Valencia





Flashback Friday





Square Up




















It turns out that my first marmalade post was written on 21st January.  Today is the 22nd.  I hope this isn’t a hanging offence, in the world of Flashback Friday.