Cookie's crab celebration

 

Derek Essex: Cookie's of Salthouse, watercolour

 

Crab Royal Salad

The highs and lows of any trip are usually accentuated by the successes and failures of the food enjoyed. Norfolk, like Cornwall, profits from its geographical remoteness and the propensity of its own locally produced fresh food. Serendipity can play some part in hitting upon a particularly pleasurable meal but recommendation is usually your best bet. This was the case with a recent visit to the North Norfolk coast. A friend and long time Norfolk resident had pointed me in the direction of Cookie's Crab Shop at Salthouse near Holt.

Cookie's opens 9am-7pm every day except Christmas day and has been doing so for more than fifty years. This monumental undertaking is truly a labour of love on the part Suzanne and Peter McKnespiey, the third generation to run the shop, and guarantees for any visitor the freshest of ingredients. 

The intimacy of the surroundings is summed up in Derek Essex's watercolour - tables and chairs spilling out for those who want to take in the spectacular view of the salt marshes, a small garden gate separating diners from the back of the McKnespiey's house, local vegetables and of course a full selection of all that is on offer for those who wish to relive something of the pleasure of lunch at Cookie's on their return home.

Cookie's Crab Shop

I Camisa & Son

I Camisa on Old Compton Street in Soho is the place to get the tastiest sandwiches in London. 

Fresh bread, meat and cheese cut to order, all you have to do is choose - focaccia or ciabatta, mortadella or prosciutto, provolone or mozzarella, the list goes on. 

In a city where time is a premium the pace is positively southern Mediterranean - with an easy banter and leisurely pace, ten minutes wait gives opportunity for a perusal of the prodigious stock, and a delicious lunch for two at only £6.30 - truly, time well spent.

Fish cakes with bite

Smoked mackerel and sardine fish cakes with beetroot, carrot and blood orange salad and a caper and cornichon tartare sauce.

This is an easy option if you've got some smoked mackerel lurking in the fridge.

4 potatoes boiled and mashed

1 packet of smoked mackerel remove skins and flake

1 tin of sardines in olive oil

a cup of fresh breadcrumbs

a good teaspoon of smoked paprika

1 tablespoon of capers and 4 cornichons roughly chopped

juice of 1 lemon

bunch of parsley finely chopped

black pepper to taste

Mix all together well and then make into 8 balls and flatten down a bit.

Breadcrumbs help bind the mixture together and keep the fish cakes nice and light, the smoked paprika goes particularly well with mackerel and adds a bit of bite, while the capers and cornichons give texture.

Chill in the fridge until ready to cook - cover a grill pan with foil, lightly oil with olive oil and pop under hot grill until brown.

The beetroot, carrot and orange salad with a lemon and olive oil dressing makes a refreshing accompaniment.

The tartare sauce

2 egg yolks with 1/2 a teaspoon of English mustard powder blended together and olive oil slowly added until required consistency. Juice of half a lemon and 1 heaped teaspoon of capers and 2 cornichons finely chopped.

www.feedingtheeye.com 

Wrapped

Once again you hide your secrets.

Enclosed in the discarded and unread sports section -

Sunday supplement supplying a loving shroud in print. 

Your cork indicates your readiness to avail your contents.

You are a manifestation of the loving hand that replenished you, 

wrapped you, gifted you, secured your safe passage -

from one kitchen to another.

Three of a kind

                                Burpees Golden, Candy Stripe and purple Beta Vulgaris

Breakfast, lunch or dinner

Edo eggs, watercress, rocket and tomato salad with a slice of 

The Old Post Office Bakery's Three Seed bread.

oldpostofficebakery.co.uk 
Anne Loriot on Vimeo 

V&A Connects - The Past and Future of Food and Experimentation

Chanel Pop: Pop Bakery www.popbakery.co.uk/gallery

V&A Connects is billed as "an exciting new programme for practitioners and professionals  working in the Creative Sector", an opportunity for inspiration, networking and discussion. Under the lofty auspices of the Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre, the mood was set for some serious debating on "The Past and Future of Food and Experimentation" as presented by the Experimental Food Society.

Lots of branding so far. Layers of reference through association - surface highly glossed reflecting back on the audience their own cultural capital. The speakers would cover the history of food since 9,000 BC to the future, which is apparently, according to food futurologist Dr Morgaine Gaye and her crystal ball (yes really), about eighteen months from now.

Our obsessive compulsion with fashion and trends makes the British highly suggestible in their capacity for food experimentation, especially in comparison to our more traditional European neighbours. Professor Roland Rotherham's double act with Simon Smith, butter sculptor and Master Chef, was more a live illustration of their collaborative book Simmering through the Ages, than an historical tour de force. Rotherham, although knowledgeable, lampooned himself as well as every other racial, social and national stereotype you would care to think of and in so doing detracted the focus from expertise to farce.

The recipes prepared by Smith lacked any real surprises and considering they were meant to demonstrate the diversity and modernity of ancient cuisine they failed to thrill. Limp parsley, coriander and pine nut salad and cold poached chicken with orange, lemon, capers and marinated anchovies. Admittedly Smith was limited by the health and safety regulations of the V&A but nonetheless, in such an arena one expects the food being prepared to at least look fresh and appetising.

Following on from them was Morgaine Gaye, food futurologist and senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. Her talk concentrated less upon the future of food and more upon the development of branded products and marketing. Food as commercial consumption as opposed to sustenance and pleasure, with a dose of Big Society ideology thrown in. Communal farming projects were seen as a reflection of our need for some form of ceremony in a deeply isolated and alienated world, this may be true but what about the genuine desire for provenance and authenticity spurred on by the suspicion of food manufacturing and its questionable processes?

By reducing her talk to a series of captions which appeared in a crystal ball on the video screen, the future Gaye predicted was more about trend forecasting, than any serious debate on the implications of future food security and sustaining levels of production for an ever increasing global population. Citing the demise of the cupcake with the imminent rise of the Alfajores, a processed biscuit from South America, could have been used as a metaphor for the demise in US global hegemony but economics and politics were the missing ingredients.

The speakers complimented each other and perhaps this is the remit of the Experimental Food Society, to keep it all content light, a ready meal of fast ideas intent on providing easily digestible entertainment as opposed to a slow, thought provoking, ideological critique of the past and future of food experimentation.

By ignoring the wider cultural and social implications of food history past and future - food remains, like fashion which it is so often compared to, ephemeral, superficial, and subject to the vagaries of our neomaniacal desires - that is our seemingly insatiable appetite for commodified novelty. The consumer is rendered as little more than a passive dupe, seduced by the powers of capitalism and unable to initiate any individual thought or action. 

The paying audience at the V&A were no dupes but articulate thinkers with an avid interest in food - this was a wasted opportunity to tantalise their thoughts and stimulate debate. Ideology may be unappetising but over statement just as over sweetening leaves one feeling unfulfilled.

Umami?

Is it umami or just weird? 

My sister introduced me to this curious combination many moons ago - few have been converted.

Take a piece of buttered toast, spread with a thin layer of Marmite and then top off with marmalade.

It satisfies that need for both sweet and savoury in one neat hit.

Try it...if you dare.

Saucy Sicilian

I made this sauce to go with the homemade pasta. The Sicilian influence is strong - with the agrodolce, sweet and sour of the sultanas, capers, anchovies and pine nuts giving a three dimensional flavour to the sauce.

Slice 4 cloves of garlic gently fry in olive oil with 4 anchovy fillets 

Add 4 small dried, crushed chillies (as hot as you like)

Add a heaped tablespoon of golden sultanas + capers - chopped

Add a tablespoon of pine nuts - toast lightly

Add 2 cans of plum tomatoes - chop them up, simmer down until thick and tasty -

Meanwhile whilst the sauce is cooking...

Cut 1 large aubergine into 10mm slices

Place on a foil covered grill pan, brush aubergine with olive oil and put under the hot grill, turn when brown and cook other side.

Chop a generous handful of flat leaf parsley + fresh basil, cut up grilled aubergine into bite size pieces and add to cooked sauce.

The heart of Italy - homemade pasta

Homemade pasta is a slow food process. The making of it is methodical and time consuming. But like most repetitive actions it allows the mind the luxury of unfettered imagineering. From kneading the dough into a smooth, fragrant mass to the seven stages of rolling, each of which tempers and softens to create a silky, gossamer pasta - to the final cutting and laying out to dry. Homemade pasta is the embodiment of a labour of love, and a fitting gift for those who are hardest of all to please - parents.

5 eggs

500g grano tenero - literally "tender grain" meaning very finely ground flour 00 grade

pinch of salt

Shortbread - meltingly yours

Slightly salty and utterly buttery, thin and meltingly light, sprinkled with demerara sugar.

Shortbread is a delight and homemade biscuits are a well kept secret.

No one could be disappointed to be served one of these with a nice cup of tea.

The recipe is a version of Felicity Cloake's in the Guardian but taste is definitely aided by a really good quality butter and sea salt.

115g of room temperature butter beaten with a wooden spoon until really creamy.

Add 55g of caster sugar and a good pinch of sea salt, beat in.

Sieve in 130g of plain flour and 40g of ground rice.

Draw together with the spoon and then dive in a make into a lovely smooth ball of dough.

Roll out to about 5mm and cut. Lay on a greased tray lined with baking parchment. Cook at 150 celsius for 25-30 minutes - turning the tray half way through.

Cool slightly, sprinkle with demerara, transfer to a cake rack, leave to cool and then store in a biscuit tin.

Tool box

There is no irony in Karen Price's work. For her the question of form and use of designed objects is one that can be played out with domestic tools. Objects need not be restricted to what they were orginally designed or intended. The performativity of a tool is not fixed but alters according to the time and space it is used in, thereby rendering users as authors/designers, function is fluid - repositioned by a particular use. Tools that sit redundant can be reappropriated and thus consumption curtailed.

www.karenprice.co.uk

Love in a lunch box

Making packed lunch every day and keeping it interesting, healthy and hearty requires a little forethought.

Lentil, cumin, carrot and coconut milk soup is a welcome addition to any lunch box and helps spice up a sandwich no end.

Toast 2 teaspoons of cumin and a pinch of chilli flakes in a dry pan until they become aromatic.

Add 500g of grated carrots, 150g of dry red lentils, 1 litre of vegetable stock, 1 can of coconut milk.

Bring to the boil and simmer gently until lentils are cooked.

Whizz in a blender, season.

Makes about 1.8 litres - divide into servings for your thermos - this chap takes 250ml, cool and freeze.

Drink pink

Something pink to drink?

The cooking juices from rhubarb, sanguinello and sugar, 
a dash of elderflower cordial and top up with cold water.
Think pink, drink pink. 

See previous blog: rhubarb fresh but no fool http://www.feedingtheeye.com

Bakery

Visual Athletics Club: S.H. Ferrell & Son,  St Ives, Cornwall, 2011

Edward Barber: E. T. Baker, Islington, London, 1985

Berenice Abbott: Greenwich Village 10, Brotladen, 259 Bleecker Street, 1937
Berenice Abbott Changing New York, Schirmer/Mosel, 1997

It is no accident that bakers choose to stuff their windows to brimming point - ostentatiously displaying the variety and abundance of their product. Such bountifulness is fleeting and the window becomes little more than a spectre with a disembodied hand removing yet another tasty morsel. As the hungry look on, wise in the knowledge that with further procrastination, that particular bun, cake, or loaf that has been singled out, will be lost forever.

Now, I'm going to eat you

Image: Elena Inga

Hypnotised by your sweetness, the mesmeric appeal of ice cream enchants my mind and transports my soul. A delicacy for those who cannot afford the calories, that sweet, unctuous construct of sugar, fat, and colouring. A focused fantasy of subliminal delight. Rapture in a time before chaos, I gaze upon you and now I'm going to eat you.

Tea - apparently?

A gift from Paris - tea apparently?

A shame to break its integrity.

Sheathed and cocooned, knotted and lashed.

This cosseted concoction will stay intact.

A non-box egg-box

Visual Athletics Club: Tom's box

With no egg box for my eggs Tom, in the Ginger Pig, with his usual ease and nonchalance set to the egg tray. He used his knife on card and twine just as he would on meat and bone.

The string was crisscrossed and knotted to secure the eggs. His fluid, confident gestures transmuted from butchery to this objet trouve. To observe instinct and the transference of skills create a thing of beauty is a moment to behold and share.

Cornish crab pots - artisan and artifact

Photo story: Edward Barber

Richard Ede knows when the willow season is drawing to a close - by the piercing scream of the first swifts - usually around the beginning of May. By then the willow, mature and hard, will need soaking but in March it is a compliant sapling. 

Green enough to cut one day and the next aided by marlin spike, long handled mallet, wooden stake, rope and former, Ede with his customised fingerless rubber gloves (this stops the ends getting pinched in the woven willow) - twists, turns, weaves and coaxes the willow into his desired form.

The diagram was fashioned by his teacher, a fisherman, who instructed him over 50 years ago in the art of making willow crab pots. Ede keen to emphasise his own adopted and adapted style drew special attention to the bottom of the pot where he had used thicker willow at the outer edge to give more strength.

The crab pots longevity is dependent upon the weather conditions out at sea. But the toils of Ede's labour, five hours to make at £130 is a small price to pay. His artisan skills have a value beyond the monetary and with no apprentice risk being lost in the sands of time.

For those who are keen to pay more than lip service to our cultural food heritage - Ede should be declared a Cornish food hero. For he provides a sustainable beautifully crafted natural product, made from locally sourced and readily available materials. To truly celebrate British food Ede, and his like with their rapidly disappearing skills, should be perpetuated not just in the photographs of passing tourists as some sort of spectacle of a bygone time but as a invaluable and irreplaceable source of knowledge with a true connection to their environment and the food produced  it.

If I was a crab I would be happy to wonder into one of his pots.