Cooking with Oil

For Rachel Clayton, the chef responsible for each of those meals, the knowledge that her kitchen’s output is the highlight of 110 workers’ days is just one more problem. Rachel runs the galley on the Captain WPP oil platform. Working 12-hour shifts for two weeks without a break, she and her team prepare everything from scratch — they have to be bakers, butchers, patisserie chefs and salad washers. They do it all on one delivery a week. And, if the weather is bad, even that delivery may not arrive. “That happened on my last trip,” Rachel says. “We were due a boat on the Saturday and it didn’t arrive until Wednesday. We got by though.” Rachel, 31, has been doing this now for four years.

The Times.

Bisque Please

Mouthwatering lobster bisque recipe from the NYT. I had this once, at party in a marquee of a discreetly grand house in Sussex, most delicate dish I've ever consumed. Gorgeous.

Eating History

The Celts loved their ham and bacon," says Wood, who hopes her new book of historic recipes will inspire people "to hold themed dinner parties from history". "The first Celts came from the Hallstat region of Austria, where the salt mines are, and they spread a taste for salted pork and lamb. They liked simple foods, like hearty stews, although they didn't have too many herbs. They had a cinnamon-like herb called bog myrtle, but it was the Romans who introduced many of the herbs and vegetables that we now know and love."

Leo Hickman in The Guardian.

Thirsty Thrift

Cooking with leftover tea, coffee, cider, beer and wine. And you can always use Guinness to rinse your hair.

Peptic Rank

A fascinating run-down of the amount of time it takes to digest various vegetarian foodstuffs, and the process of digesting meats.

Oh, God, there's more.

Pudding Snub

Controversy rages in the comments at the Times when Lindsay Bareham tries to reinvent Spotted Dick.

Pudding ist Wichtig

Times masterclass on making steak and kidney pudding. God I want some now. A reader suggests substituting dried shiitakes for those who cannot stomach offal.

Squash

Drool-inducing page of squash and pumpkin recipes at the Times.

What Is It?

Click here to find out.

Retro Hell

Recipes from the 1950s, and from hell:

Title: Oven-Fried Corn Flake Chicken
Categories: Cereals Poultry Main dish 
Servings:  4

    3 lb Chicken; Cut Up, Fryer
    2 ea Eggs; Large, Slightly Beaten
    4 T  Milk
2 1/2 c  Corn Flakes; Crushed *
    2 t  Salt
  1/2 t  Pepper
    5 T  Butter; Melted

*    Crush but do not pulverize the corn flakes.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Wash chicken and pat dry.  Mix together
eggs and milk.  Separately mix corn flake crumbs, salt, and pepper.  Dip
chicken into milk and egg mixture then into the crumb mixture coating each
piece evenly.  Set in well-greased baking pan.  Drizzle with melted
butter.  Bake, uncovered, for 1 hour.

Title: Lemonade Fried Chicken
Categories: Poultry Main dish  
Servings:  4

    6 oz Frozen Lemonade Concentrate
    1 c  ;Water
2 1/2 lb Fryer; Cut up
  1/4 c  Flour; Unbleached
    1 t  Salt
  1/4 t  Black Pepper; Ground
    1 c  Vegetable Oil
    2 T  Butter; Melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Mix lemonade concentrate and water in a
small bowl.  Pour over chicken in larger bowl.  Refrigerate 2 hours or
longer.  Drain chicken and reserve liquid.  Mix together the flour, salt,
and pepper in a small paper bag.  Add well drained chicken, one piece at a
time, and shake to coat evenly.  Heat oil in large skillet over moderate
heat.  Add floured chicken; cook until evenly browned, turning pieces over
carefully.  Remove chicken and arrange in a single layer in a shallow
baking pan.  Brush chicken with melted butter.  Add reserved lemonade.
Bake uncovered about 1 hour, basting chicken with lemonade from pan every
15 minutes.  About 15 minutes befre chicken is done, drain off excess
juice from pan.  Serve hot.




Title: Pepsi-Cola Cake With Broiled Peanut Butter Frosting
Categories: Cakes Desserts Soda pop 
Servings:  8

------------------------------------CAKE------------------------------------
    2 c  Flour; Unbleached
    2 c  Sugar
  1/2 lb Butter
    2 T  Cocoa; Unsweetened
    1 c  Pepsi
  1/2 c  Buttermilk
    2 ea Eggs; Large, Beaten
    1 t  Baking Soda
    1 t  Vanilla Extract
1 1/2 c  Marshmallows; Miniature
----------------------------------FROSTING----------------------------------
    6 T  Butter
    1 c  Brown Sugar; Dark, Packed
  2/3 c  Peanut Butter
  1/4 c  Milk
  2/3 c  Peanuts; Chopped

CAKE:
 Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease and flour 9 X 13 X 2-inch pan.
Combine flour and sugar in large bowl.  Melt butter, add cocoa and Pepsi.
Pour over flour and sugar mixture, and stir until well blended.  Add
buttermilk, beaten eggs, soda, and vanilla.  Mix well.  Stir in
marshmallows. Pour into prepared pan.  Bake 40 minutes.  Remove cake
from oven and frost while still warm.
FROSTING:
Cream Butter, sugar, and peanut butter.  Add milk and stir well.  Add
nuts.  Spread over warm cake.  Place frosted cake under broiler about
4-inches from  heat source.  Broil just a few seconds, or until topping
starts to bubble.  DO NOT scorch!  Let cool at least 30 minutes before
serving.

Eighty Seven Flavours of Ice Cream

Heroic foot- (and palate-) work by an NYT reporter, who investigated the most astonishing ice creams in New York. Here's a few of the more outré flavours:

"Banana ice cream ... littered with buttery fragments of vanilla cake

garden-fresh mint chocolate cookie dough ... topped with micro-diced candied hazelnuts

Crumbling blocks of carrot cake ... swathed in a vanilla ice cream thick as frosting

Toppings, like saba (Italian grape syrup) and sriracha, are the draw. I was too timid for the tamari, but the marriage of ginger syrup and curry powder was magical

salted caramel pretzel and bitter chocolate mint"

Jamie and the Welfare State

If you ever wondered what happened to Jamie Oliver's school dinner plan, there's an update in the Independent, along with a brief history of British school nutrition, from 1880 on.

The journey of the school meals service from 1880 to today has been a difficult one. After a faltering start, the Liberal government in 1906 passed legislation allowing all local authorities to serve free school meals. Provision was patchy. Even by the start of the Second World War, only half the country's local education authorities were offering them.

In the 1940s, it became national policy to deliver a nutritionally balanced school meal to all children which gave them 40 per cent of their daily protein and 33 per cent of their energy needs. This was enshrined in legislation in 1944. A typical menu would be steak and two veg followed by rhubarb crumble.

This largely remained in force until 1980, when Margaret Thatcher – known as the "milk snatcher" when she withdrew free milk from all children over seven in 1971 – decided to remove the rest of the food as well.

Her 1980 Education Act ended the obligation of local authorities to provide school meals. And meals no longer had to have a fixed price. Many secondary schools introduced cash cafeterias and the day of the Turkey Twizzler dawned. For those entitled to free school meals in areas which abolished the service, a packed lunch was introduced.

Only after Jamie Oliver's intervention did ministers become serious about standards. On the day the television chef delivered a petition to the then prime minister, Tony Blair announced a £280m revamp for the service.

Initially, the drive for healthier eating proved disastrous, with a 5 per cent drop in take-up in the first year. The drop has now levelled off, though.

Soyful Sinner?

As a lactose intolerant I consume a lot of soya. Soya is, we're told, bad for the environment and bad for the indigenous peoples whose rain forest is grubbed up for its cultivation. But 90% of global soy-bean protein goes into animal food, not soya milk and tofu, and soya plants have a higher protein yield per acre than any other common crops.
This TLS review of The World of Soy, edited by Christine M. Du Bois, Chee-Beng Tan and Sidney Mintz reveals a fact or two, as well as mentioning some intriguing dishes ("pock-marked woman’s bean curd" anyone?) but nothing on the whole lady-hormones controversy (is it good or bad for women?). Of course, it sounds like the best essay in the collection is by an anthropologist, natürlich:

Among the outstanding contributions to this volume (which is part of the University of Illinois Press’s excellent Food Series) is Erino Ozeki’s “Fermented Soybean Products and Japanese Standard Taste”, an anthropologist’s approach to cultural differences in taste preferences. She gives a model of the Japanese “pattern of flavours repeated in many dishes” that represents “the favourite taste of that cuisine”. It is probably a little easier to specify the elements of this pattern for the Japanese “standard taste” because there are only two – the fish stock called dashi, an infusion of dried fish and seaweed, and fermented soy products, namely soy sauce and miso – than it would be for the less uniform French, Italian or, come to it, British taste. This approach could be very fruitful in exploring the differences between similar cultures – the American flavour pattern will have a sweet foundation that is not so apparent, for example, in British taste preferences.

Fear of Fat

Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking has rocketed to number one in the US bestsellers' list thanks to Julie and Julia. Of course, it's real French cooking and it's forty years old, so the recipes are coming as a shock to today's cooks:

Mindy Lockard, 34, of Eugene, Ore., made Poulet Sauté aux Herbes de Provence, which calls for a whole stick of butter, for a recent dinner party.

“I found the recipes, actually, much easier than I thought they were going to be, but the amount of butter was a bit overwhelming,” she said. “There’s a picture of me cooking, and I have this glow, and it’s from too much hot butter. I expected to break out the next day.

“My husband loved it and asked if we could have it again the next day. I actually said, we probably shouldn’t have this in the same month.”

Ms. Child, who died in 2004 at the age of 91, liked to say, “ ‘Oh, butter never hurts you,’ ” her editor, Judith Jones, recalls.

From the NYT.

Don't and DON'TS

The artist Aleksandra Mir asked 1,000 ordinary cooks — they’re all listed in the back — for their tips on how not to mess it up in the kitchen. The results are loosely collected under headings from “Burns” through to “Worms”; they range from the practical “Do not fry with hot oil when naked” and “Do not boil avocado. Turns to soap”, to the intriguing: “Do not wear your wife’s new dress while cooking spaghetti sauce.” And “Do not fry pasta with marmalade”.

Katharine Whitehorn on Cooking in a Bed-Rabbit Hutch

Dear Guardian,

You commission Katharine Whitehorn and Nancy Banks-Smith over and over again, and for that I love you and you are the best newspaper in Britain.

Anyhow, here's Whitehorn on tiny kitchens.

"Norman Tebbit has Written a Cookbook and Apparently it's Quite Good"

You could have knocked me down with a pheasant feather. In the Observer:

Norman Tebbit has been cooking up a storm – or at least a squall – of a different kind. Inspired by a trip to his favourite butcher's, during which he was informed that most people are too fearful of game to cook it, even though it is often so much less expensive than "rubber-boned" supermarket chicken, Lord Tebbit has written a slim cook book with the sole aim of persuading us to eat more of it. Partridge, grouse, woodcock: all your favourite birds are here, together with chapters on hare and rabbit, scallops and spider crabs.

Mrs T's old henchman makes for a surprisingly peaceful companion at the cooker, the odd dig at political correctness and metric measurements aside (he informs us, for instance, that his illustrator, Debbie, is a keen fisherman, "not, I am glad to say, a fisherperson"). His recipes are comforting and straightforward, his tone calm and encouraging, his reverence for his "gurus" Jane and Sophie Grigson positively sweet.

Most striking of all, though, is his inclusion of a recipe for pheasant with brown rice. Brown rice? Norman! Are you going soft in your old age, or what?

Thighs of the Nymphs of Dawn

A short history of frogs' legs, in the Guardian, and some depressing news about vanishing frogs' legs:

As elsewhere in the world, the amphibians' habitat in France – where frogs' legs have been a recognised and much remarked-upon part of the national diet for the best part of 1,000 years – is increasingly at risk, from pollution, pesticides and other man-made ills. Ponds have been drained and replaced with crops and cattle-troughs. Diseases have taken their toll, and the insects that frogs feed on are disappearing too. Alarmed by a rapid and dramatic fall in frog numbers, the French ministry of agriculture and fisheries began taking measures to protect the country's species in 1976; by 1980, commercial frog harvesting was banned.

Water of Life

Spotted this comment after a Telegraph piece by Rowan Pelling on whisky:

Take one bottle of moderately-priced Scots whiskey (nothing special) and add one small bottle each of Dr. Bach's "Rescue Remedy" and "Aspen" (for fear of things unknown), shake gently to mix and store in kitchen near the tea caddy.

Whenever you think about getting sick through influenza or any other illness, pour half and half the whisky mix and very strong hot tea (preferably Kenyan) with a slice of lemon. Drink in big sips at any time of day. After 5:00 PM do not add tea but fill cup to brim with mix and drink one every hour until bed (sooner rather than later). You will forget the fear of illness and live better through natural chemistry. I don't do the whisky part any more... but it still works.

Economy Gastronomy = Baloney

I like Allegra McEvedy, and I love her recipes, but I'm really not sure that she's the person to produce a credit crunch cookery book:

We plan to show you how to make one "bedrock recipe" - today it's warm poached salmon with hollandaise sauce, new potatoes and asparagus - and use up the leftover ingredients in two or three further "tumbledown" dishes. In terms of a set of bedrock and tumbledown recipes, what you can do with one whole fish is just amazing.

Sounds good, no? Except that the tumbledown dishes have what, to me, look like incredibly long ingredient dishes with much reliance on fresh herbs (which is of course great if you can grow them in your garden, but pricey if you get them from the supermarket like the time-poor readers McEvedy cites), white wine, asparagus, double cream, creme fraiche, assorted veg and two different types of potatoes.