SYDNEY COOKS

When your restaurant at home rules, here are some classy cookbooks and Sydney's best cooking classes...

<<< Previous               1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9               Next >>>

The Simple Art of Marrying Food & Wine: Malcolm Gluck & Mark Hix. Balance, Matching Food & Wine: Lyndey Milan & Colin Corney Balance. Matching food and wine: what works and why Lyndey Milan & Colin Corney Lothian 132pp $34.95 & The Simple Art of Marrying Food and Wine Malcolm Gluck and Mark Hix Cameron House 191pp $39.95 What To Drink When You’re Eating A Hamburger One of two sagacious pieces of wine and food matching advice came to me via the terse and (usually correctly) opinionated mouth of Australian Financial Review wine writer, Tim White. Voicing scepticism about the more intense advocates of careful matches (always “marriages”) of wine and food, he said: “If the wine doesn’t match the food – drink water until you’ve finished the food. It won’t bloody kill you.” I have just got around to looking at two books that appeared in 2005 on the subject: the Australian published (and written) Balance: matching food and wine: what works and why? by Lyndey Milan and Colin Corney. And the English version, The Simple Art of Marrying (told you) Food and Wine by Malcolm Gluck and Mark Hix. I find both these books fascinating for the way they display the cultural differences of their origins. Let me deal first with the English book. Malcolm Gluck is an ex-advertising writer, now a highly successful wine writer with his own triply eponymous series on the BBC, Gluck Gluck Gluck, and the author of the annual guide Superplonk, among other publications. Mark Hix is chef director of three London restaurants, best known of which is The Ivy. Gluck is an amusing, racy and literate writer on wine. The book begins with the words: “So two divorced men should reveal how to achieve the perfect marriage?” Yuck Yuck Yuck. The book is divided into food groups, beginning with Vegetables and ending with Cheese – sort of like a meal. It follows a simple plan. The white paper is written on by Hix, the slightly grey by Gluck. There are introductions to each section by each writer, recipes with discussion by the chef and suggestions (I almost wrote rules – there are none here) for wines from the wine writer. The advice given is sage and from experienced and sophisticated palates. It is also very European. Wines offered are often from Australia and New Zealand, but more often from France, Spain and Italy. A Manzanilla from Sanlucar de Barrameda is (quite rightly) suggested to accompany a clear jellied gazpacho soup, and, with the recommendation, a little background on the Manzanilla. I tried this combination at a dinner cooked by Hix and attended by Gluck and it was sensational – I hesitate to say a marriage made in heaven. The writing is delightful, the book reading like a competitive dialogue between chef and customer, often as though Hix drops on the table a dish difficult to match with a satisfied, “Go for it, smartypants.” Take the Braised Rabbit with Mustard Sauce, to which Gluck’s response is “What a bitch of a dish! Dijon and grain mustard! Well-known friends of wine. Ah, well, down to the cellar we go.” He emerges with a German Spatlese, a rich, sweet late-picked Riesling, but concedes that “this is the real world” and offers French Cabernet Franc, a Californian Cabernet Sauvignon and a ditto Zinfandel – with reasons outlined. Another “Match that, Motherdrinker!” challenge is with the Steak Tartare. “Many a dish is a minefield,” Gluck opines, “…the wine waiter must tread warily lest the proffered wine does not die a death once it clashes with the dish’s hidden, spicy ingredients.” He means the accompanying Worcestershire and Tabasco sauces, capers and gherkins. We are offered a South African Pinotage (a cross between Pinto Noir and Cinsault) or a South Australian Shiraz (Mount Ida Heathcote, if you’re interested) and a Chilean Chardonnay. This book is a series of entertaining stories from an excellent chef and a fine and well-read wine writer. I would recommend it to anyone deeply interested in the subject, or to a budding sommelier. I have only one beef with it. A strange and ill-informed directive to avoid beer with Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistani food. Which beer? Which Indian Bangladeshi or Pakistani food? I can only assume this is a little joke on Gluck’s part, a sly reference to the Pom yobbo habit of getting monstrously pissed then eating what the English laughingly call Indian food. The book by Australian Women’s Weekly Food Editor and indefatigable writer on food and wine matching, Lyndey Milan, and her co-author, the not so well-known Tasmanian-based wine educator Colin Corney could not be more different. It attempts to lay down the principles of food and wine matching in a scientific manner. It takes us through the five primary tastes (saltiness, acidity, bitterness, umami and sweet) and then lays out the basis of their theory, which they liken to medical inoculation. It is, unlike the English offering, written more for the novice than the advanced student, offering a chapter on What is Australian Food and Wine? and a section headed How To Taste Wine, with a little chart that shows the weight of the wine, and another — which appears with every variety discussed — that gives a flavour profile. If all this sounds confusing, it isn’t. It is very clearly and logically explained and will be of use to not only the novice but also the mug punter — like me — who smugly thinks he or she knows it all. The book then takes us through each grape variety, giving the flavour profile chart, a short dissertation on the grape, a number of food matches, then a recipe. At the end of the recipe is a little list headed At-a-glance of flavour/aromas; preferred climate/Best Australian regions/winemaking techniques/Best drinking time/Food styles. Very efficient. These two books epitomise the gap between New World and Old World attitudes to wine, differences beautifully discussed in a piece in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik entitled Through a Glass Darkly: what do we talk about when we talk about wine. The story is a potted history of wine writing and concentrates heavily on the American wine writer Robert Parker, whose scoring in his newsletter The Wine Advocate carries as much weight in the wine world as a good rap from Oprah does in the world of books. A 95 (out of 100) from Parker means sell-out for the vineyard — and at a Parker-inflated price. The problem with this for French and other Old World wine lovers is that Parker reduces wine to numbers. As Gopnik writes: “Everyone agrees that Parker is … A completely honest scorer; but by scoring he intends to serve the consumer … what consumers want is reliable beverage products, and once wine is a reliable beverage product, it isn’t quite wine.” Wine, Gopnik concludes, is not about numbers but about happiness and stories. I happen to agree with him. And that is why, of these two books, I prefer the English one. But I will keep them both on my shelf. Because, although I prefer romance and stories to numbers and charts, I want to know what Milan and Corney tell me. Just because I like to know everything. Let me finish with the second of the sagacious pieces of food and wine matching advice mentioned at the beginning of this piece. I once took the venerable winemaker, wine judge and author of a series of books on flavour, Max Lake, to review, with me, a hamburger joint in Manly. He arrived with a bottle of fine Burgundy from a very good year. We ate our hamburgers and drank the Burgundy. Never have I enjoyed hamburgers more. As we left, he said to me, “You’ll have noticed that the wine improved the food, Newton. It is never the other way around.” (With Hix’s Ultimate Hamburger, Gluck recommends a Californian Zinfandel, a Montepulciano or a Chianti from Tuscany or a Shiraz from Sicily). J.N.

0 Movida: Spanish Culinary Adventures Frank Camorra & Richard Cornish Murdoch Books, RRP $45.00 In a category not noted for good books — Spanish cooking — this is a very fine book indeed. Chef and owner of La Movida, Frank Camorra, is first of all a Spaniard who has cooked in Spain, England and now Melbourne, and is well served by his ‘&’, one Richard Cornish, a role (‘&’ that is, not Cornish) I’ve played a few times, so I understand its importance in shaping a book like this. What is for me, a Spanish food tragic, most exceptional about Camorra’s book is that he has got the atmosphere right. The Spanish do not have broomsticks up their bums about their food. Even the modern masters — people like Ferran Adriá, Juan Mari Arzak and Jose Antonio Campoviejos — are pretty relaxed about what they do. When asked why he cooks such experimental food, Campoviejos said, “My mother is such a wonderful cook I wouldn’t dare try cooking like her.” Ba-boom. Serious and relaxed at the same time. They are good at such dichotomies. In explaining why he mixes ground-breaking modern dishes (cherry gazpacho, olives nuts and caper buds served in sardine tins) with the traditional (arroz negro, cuttlefish ink rice) Carles Abellan from Comerç 24, a super-cool tapas bar in Barcelona says (talking to Paul Richardson in A Late Dinner, reviewed soon), “We have taken to creative cooking with tremendous speed. And now we’re missing a different kind of food … anyway, if everything was modern, it’d be boring, wouldn’t it?” Camorra recognises this and also the truth that “…There are 40 million Spaniards and each one cooks differently.” The only rule followed at his restaurant, La Movida, is one that, more and more, I believe underpins all food cooked in Spain, from Galicia to Getaria, from Barcelona to Úbeda: “Be led by the season and let the produce create the menu.” Amen to that, as long as there is garlic and perhaps pimentón (and, no, it’s not Spanish paprika any more than paprika is Hungarian pimentón). So here you’ll find Spanish traditional dishes treated with great respect — for instance, the one he calls in English Córdoba’s Thick Tomato & Bread Soup, which many of you will know as salmorejo, one of the great cold soups of the country, a soup from his mother’s home town, which is, he says, “another reason to treat this soup with great respect”. And then there are Spanish modern dishes. For example, a truly sensational-sounding (haven’t done it yet) Roast Pork Belly With Quince Alioli, a meeting of two quintessentially Spanish ingredients — Catalan alioli and membrillo, quince paste, which, if it comes from anywhere (it’s probably another legacy from Moorish times) is seen all over. They are two things I’ve never seen in tandem before, anywhere. His Spanish modern, or nueva cocina is, like so much nueva cocina, a twist on cocina tradicional. It’s the stories as well as the recipes that make this book, though — stories that shed light on the food and the people who cook it. Like many migrant families, the Camorras, faced with a lack of their favourite sausages, chorizo and morcilla, made them. Frank tells us his dad is very serious about his sausage making and “makes some of the best jamón I have tried outside Spain.” And then there’s the story of his being taken by his Great Aunt Chi Chi to a convent to buy some biscuits from the nuns, who make the best traditional cakes and pastries in Spain. (On a recent trip, I visited such a monastery where you had to ring a bell and were confronted by a nun who would say, very quickly, “Purissima Santa Maria”, the purest Saint Mary. In order to score your bikkies, you had to respond, quick as a flash, “Sin peccado concebido”, conceived without sin). Camorra remembers, quite correctly, a “slightly clandestine air to the way we had to leave the money in a rotating door in the convent wall” more like, he writes, “leaving a baby there than buying biscuits”. It’s these fond and accurate memories of home and childhood that infuse the book and its food. But wouldn’t you know it, I have a quibble (a word for which there is no real equivalent in Spanish). One of the simplest dishes in the repertoire, barely known outside of Spain, is a revuelto, inadequately described as scrambled eggs. A revuelto is to scrambled eggs what that red stuff they sell in supermarkets called caviar is to beluga. A revuelto¸ usually eaten as an entrée, is a combination of creamy, barely set eggs with, most famously, wild asparagus (trigueros) or wild mushrooms, or anything that will work with eggs. And the secret of a revuelto is speed. I’ve watched them being cooked in a Spanish kitchen with a professional and, on my most recent trip, quizzed home cooks. You fry the ingredient which is not eggs until it is cooked, turn up the flame, add the beaten egg and turn it constantly with a spoon until it is just short of set, no more than two minutes — and serve it immediately. That’s the secret. In the restaurant kitchen in northern Spain where I watched the revueltos moving from the kitchen to the table, that is how it worked: individually, instantly and immediately. For some reason, Señor Camorra, like many Australian cookbook recipe editors I have worked with, insists on the eggs being cooked for “five minutes.” Five minutes! Even at low heat (as recommended), after five minutes, the eggs will be leather. In one, the revuelto with mushrooms, he goes as far as 6–8 minutes. As they say in Spain, joder. But to hell with the quibble. This is a very fine book and could well be the first published in Australia on the topic. It goes straight onto my kitchen shelf alongside my all-time favourite Spanish food books, the Catalan Xavier Domingo’s El Sabor de España (The Taste of Spain), and the American Colman Andrews’ Catalan Cuisine. Good company indeed. — J.N.

00 Piri Piri Starfish Tessa Kiros Murdoch Books Just when you think the cookbooks from this publisher couldn’t be more beautifully designed, along comes another one to knock your socks off: stunning typography, gorgeous photographs and classy illustrations. It just looks so good. But do the recipes work and can someone from a Finnish/Greek Cypriot background, who grew up in South Africa, get Portuguese food right? We’ve liked Tessa Kiros’s other cookbooks, Twelve and Falling Cloudberries, so we were keen to give these recipes a go. Besides, as she says in her introduction, her appreciation of Portuguese food started in South Africa, “where it seeped through from Mozambique to the many restaurants and homes”. She was fascinated, too, by the cross-pollination of culture and ways of cooking and eating exchanged between Portugal and its outposts, including Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, Goa, Macau, Brazil, Guinea, the Azores and Madeira. It has led to “surprise elements and ingredients in the food with interesting combinations”. The ubiquitous piri piri sauce, which originated in Angola, is perhaps one of the best examples of this, but there are some lesser known and more surprising combinations such as coffee with steak, which the author had in Lisbon and which I have already cooked a few times. It’s a good dish to serve guests when you want them to stay awake for your jokes and stories. In the cooking, the flavour of the strong espresso coffee turns smoky and rich and complements the steak perfectly; in fact, if you didn’t know the secret ingredient you might not guess it. Plums in syrup is an easy, fragrant dessert. I took the advice of the writer and served the warm plums with a wedge of sericaia, a light eggy pudding dusted with cinnamon that tastes like a baked custard and has an airy texture somewhere between omelette and cake. It’s exotic comfort food that’s perfect for any time of year if you substitute the plums with whatever is in season. Sardines with escabeche is next on the menu or maybe prawns with beer. Then there are all the bacalhau dishes — though for some reason I am always a bit daunted by bacalhau — and the soups. Portuguese cuisine is known for its hearty soups and there are several in this book. Plus, it is coming into that time of year ... yes, I think the fennel soup. — K.B.

1 Secrets of the Red Lantern Pauline Nguyen Murdoch Books, SRP $59.95 Those brave souls we admire so much who make the decision to go into the food game (we like to think of them as professional nurturers) invest so much heart and soul in it that it’s not surprising they would take the same approach to going into print. In what is simply one of the most beautiful cookbooks (oh, but it’s so much more) we’ve seen in years, author Pauline Nguyen doesn’t hold back. Her labour of love is a sometimes painfully frank but loving family history, a collection of wonderful social snapshots that range from Vietnam to Cabramatta to Surry Hills, and a compendium of treasured recipes that ultimately account for the success of both generations of Nguyen family restaurants. Red Lantern in Surry Hills, which Nguyen runs along with chef and life partner Mark Jensen and brother Luke, has been a Sydney Eats favourite virtually from the day it opened. So to now be able to have a shot at cooking dishes such as tamarind and pineapple broth with silver perch and caramelised pork leg is exciting. The recipes encompass slow-cooked melt-in-the-mouth dishes, those you cook at the table and quick stirfries; they range from simple and fast to finicky but worth it. But even if you never cook one dish, the book is a riveting read, illustrated with lovely photos of four generations of a fascinating family. It would make a superb gift and is a must for any serious collector of good cookbooks. — KB

2 One Continuous Picnic: a gastonomic history of Australia Michael Symons Melbourne University Press, SRP $32.95 The Never Ending Picnic 1982 was a big year for Australian food writing. The Sydney Morning Herald began publishing the Good Living section in that year (Cheap Eats, always ahead of the game, had kicked off the year before). And Michael Symons published One Continuous Picnic. A history of eating in Australia. And publish it he did under the Duck Press imprint, with help from his friends chef Gabriel Gaté and Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Dale, who also edited the book. Angus & Robertson had rejected it – or rather wanted to cut it in half – and Penguin dilly-dallied. That first edition sold around 3000 copies and a subsequent edition, by Penguin, another 2500. Writing about food or food history was unheard of at that time in Australia. Indeed, much later, I rang a university and asked to speak to a historian who specialised in the history of food and was asked what food had to do with history. As Symons proves in this book – plenty. And now, 25 years down the track, his intriguing, contentious but ultimately indispensable history of why we eat the way we eat and how we came to eat that way has been reprinted by Melbourne University Press with a foreword by Gay Bilson. A new section – The Widening Gap – brings it up to date and a subtle subtitle change makes it now One Continuous Picnic: a gastronomic history of Australia. The ‘g’ word would not have played in 1982. For those of you who haven’t read the book, here’s a quick rundown of the original 300-odd pages. Symons’ major contention is that the history of Australian cooking – and eating – has been shaped by the occupation of Australia by white settlers at the height of the Industrial Revolution (usually given as 1740-1840, although the term was first used by Arnold Toynbee in 1884). And so, from the outset, European Australian food was grown by large, industrial (broadacre) farmers for domestic and export markets rather than by small-scale individual landholders for local consumption. “There has never been the creative interplay between society and the soil,” he writes, “…almost no food has ever been grown by the person who eats it, almost no food preserved in the home and, indeed, very little preparation by a family cook. This is the uncultivated continent. Our history is without peasants.” Symons goes on to say “…the lack of peasant experience – or, conversely our total history of industrialisation – explains why we have traditionally cared less about food than any other people in history.” Not to mention our beginnings as a penal colony (prison food) with the English as jailers and, in the main, the Irish as prisoners: neither of whose homelands were celebrated, at the time at least, for the bounty and interest of their tables. Towards the end of the original book, he notes we were, at the time of his writing, passing through what he called a “gourmet boom” but wondered “could such a revolution be permanent without an agricultural base?” The first edition ends on a note of romantic optimism, quoting Brillat Savarin’s much-quoted and misquoted maxim, “Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you who you are”, and concludes: “When we enjoy a healthy diet of fresh, local produce treated with proper respect, when we learn from peasants, Brillat-Savarin might venture that we have at last found a national cuisine and cultivated a continent.” Yeah, right. There’s only one problem. The idea of such a cuisine died, Like Brillat-Savarin, with the last peasant. While the industrial genesis of Australian food is the core issue of the book, it takes the reader on a journey that covers so much more, from our reliance on food imported by ship – while largely ignoring the food growing all around us – that included salt meat, flour, sugar and tea to the monotonous meat-based diet of the bushman. A chapter discusses the first Australian cookbook The English and Australian cookbook: cookery for the Many as well as the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’, published in 1864 and written by “an Australian Aristologist”, in reality one Edward Abbott. There’s a fascinating and, as far as I’m aware, unique history of the early restaurants of Sydney and Melbourne and much more. The final chapter, The Art of Eating in Australia, concludes that at the time we had “the world’s worst cuisine”. He wasn’t far wrong. Generally, the quality of what we ate was woeful. Tomatoes were hard and pale and tasteless; beef was stringy yearling, invariably overcooked; salads were dressed, if at all, with “salad cream”, a concoction of vinegar and condensed milk. Sure, there was good food in a handful of restaurants and in a few private houses: there will always be good food. But it was about this time (1982) that we started to head out and see the rest of the world. And we found it tasted very good indeed. Coming back from a holiday in Italy or France or Indonesia, we decided we deserved better than what my wife remembers as “charcoal chops and mushy vegies”. So what does Mr Symons think has happened in the past 25 years? “Australians now eat much better and much worse than when this book first appeared ... It has become easier to do both with so much good food around and so much bad.” As have many writers before him, Symons blames the hijacking of the market – that place where food is sold by growers and producers to those who will take it home and cook it –that has done a sort of a reverse butterfly and turned into a grub known as “marketing”. In other words, the glorification of non-food by overpaid spruikers. A fresh, juicy apple needs no television commercial; an ApLaDay snack bar does. “And,” he writes, “we should be wary of super-markets, recognising them as marketplaces held captive by the corporations.” Indeed. As American nutritionist Marion Nestle, another trenchant critic of these institutions, wrote in What to Eat (North Point Press 2006), “The center aisles are filled with miracles of food technology that bear little or no resemblance in nutritional content or taste to their starting ingredients.’ In other words, these are non-foods and many Australians are seduced by them (my younger daughter, in spite of or because of her father’s profession, rarely eats anything my grandmothers would have recognised as food). And after a far too condensed (I’d like to have seen another 50 pages at least in the new section) rundown of what Australians are eating for better or for worse today, he cleverly recaptures the word “market” and exhorts us to “Trust the market!” Not the one in O’Connell Street that deals in ephemerally valued shares that leap and swoon in price for no apparent reason, but the market you may be lucky enough to have in your suburb where you can buy food from a farmer, talk about the weather and meet the man who raised the meat. That, Symons concludes (again, as he did at the end of the first edition, this time without the intercession of peasants), will be our saviour. I’ve got a slightly different take on this best food/worst food business. I see Australia being locked in mortal cultural combat. In one corner, the fresh, seasonal and local food, carefully prepared, cooked and eaten with love and enjoyment of our European heritage. In the other corner, the speed-obsessed jittery microwave junk guzzling Krispy Kreme culture we suck through our eyeballs every night as we’re glued to the plasma screen and stuck to our comfy couches. Yes indeedy, it’s America vs Europe. And I know where I’d rather eat. Two small points before I finish. The book tells the sadly ironic story of Charlie Bell, the man who started cleaning toilets at McDonald’s at the age of 15 and rose to become the boss of McDonald’s worldwide, only to die of colorectal cancer at the age of 44. According to Business Review Weekly, poor old Charlie “ate a McDonald’s product most days”. It abounds with these insightful titbits of food history. And, finally, one rotten egg thrown across the Tasman (Symons currently lives and works in new Zealand, studying New Zealand cookbooks. On page 331, he states, “The olive oil industry was flying opinion leaders to numerous ‘conferences’ (his inverted commas) mainly in Mediterranean centres to discuss the Mediterranean diet.” These trips were financed by the International Olive Oil Council which, Symons contends in a parenthetical sentence after its name was “(dominated by margarine interests)”. While it is true that Unilever, a multinational margarine maker, did buy the Italian olive oil company Bertolli some time in the 90s, and Vetta brand oil belongs to Goodman Fielder, which also makes and sells Meadlowlea margarine (among other things), to claim that a UN-affiliated organisation whose members comprise over 20 olive growing nations and whose charter is to promote olive oil and table olives internationally was controlled by “margarine interests” is bollocks. Now, I went on one of those trips and when I wrote about it, always declared that my trip had been paid for by the IOOC. At no time were we served margarine, asked to write anything about margarine or did the word margarine appear in any of the literature. This is a serious and silly assertion and one that really lets down the admirable scholarship of the rest of the book. Personally, I think the purchase of olive oil makers by the margarine companies is interesting rather than sinister. Obviously, they can see the writing on the bread: how long will people eat such an unpleasant and artificial non-food as margarine? We’d better have a Plan B. In her foreword, Gay Bilson quotes the journalist Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, “There’s too much food in food writing now – and too little that goes much further.” One Continuous Picnic goes much further and I do hope it continues its 25-year project of raising ire, counter-arguments and ongoing discussion of all that goes much further. One Continuous Picnic: A gastronomic history of Australia Michael Symons, foreword by Gay Bilson Melbourne University Press 366 pages, SRP $32.95 — J.N.

<<< Previous                1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9              Next >>>