Nothing worse than a woman in a cheap dress

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Classic Marco Pierre White

Bad food is better than bad sex

It is difficult to unravel the link between food and sex. If it didn’t lead to sex, I probably never would have botehred becoming a good cook or an exprt at eating out while in London. In The Observer Kathryn Flett and Alex James discuss “the joys of nude bubble and squeak, desert sex and why Last Tango in Paris should be full-fat only”.

James:

“Food and sex are close cousins. Our enjoyment of both depends upon who else comes to the table. Food shopping for one is more depressing than masturbation.”

Flett:

“Well, bad food is often worse than bad sex because women are quite often primed for bad sex but remain terribly disappointed by a crappy meal. And bad food cooked for you by the person who is also responsible for the bad sex is, probably, inevitable.

Good food, meanwhile, is obviously much better than bad sex, though good food is sometimes even better than good sex, especially while pregnant. And of course it goes without saying, though I shall say it anyway, that fabulous sex is better than almost everything… except great food cooked for you by someone with whom there is also the prospect of having fabulous sex.”

Return of the shagging chef

Who’d have thought? First Rick Stein with a Sydney food glossy’s (Okay Gourmet Traveller) publicist. Now John Burton-Race, the man who had a profound influence on our own star Shannon Bennett turns out to be pretty obnoxious and a potent shagger. Many of us remember Burton-Race on TV from the engaging shows French Leave and the Return of the Chef. As Jay Rayner says in The Observer:

“With Burton-Race it’s always best to check. He attracts dramas and intrigues the way dogs attract fleas. Although he came to public prominence as the devoted family man on the series French Leave and the sequel, Return of the Chef, in which his wife Kim and six of the eight kids they have between them featured heavily, he turned out to be rather less devoted to that particular family than many thought. In March 2007 he left for his lover Suzi Ward, his agent’s one-time personal assistant, and their then two-year-old son Pip, his fifth child, of whom Kim knew nothing.

A long and very public battle over assets between ex-husband and wife ensued which culminated with Kim closing their restaurant, the New Angel in Dartmouth, while Burton-Race was deep in the Australian jungle as a contestant on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. He knew nothing of it until he was evicted by public vote.”

If you had the chance, would you punch chef Anthony Bourdain?

Real chefs cook in groundnut (peanut) oil. Bubbly chef Rachael Ray - indeed her entire family - cook in olive oil. This alone makes me suspect her. She ducks and dives and doesn’t really answer the questiions, including the one above, in Time:

“If you were stranded on an island but miraculously it had a refrigerator, what 10 ingredients could you absolutely not do without? Matthew LeMay PHILADELPHIA

I’d have to have olive oil, garlic, pasta, canned fish–anchovies if I had to pick just one–cheese. If my husband were on the island with me, then I have to have salami. I’ve got to have some prosecco and some other wine, and you need your roughage, so escarole–and I have to have some beans, so I’d pick white.”

Sorry about this one.

Do cookbooks work?

I didn’t realise there was such a large difference between American cookbooks and European ones. According to Slate in its review of G, Americans don’t have scales so I presume they measure everything by volume. It doesn’t really matter as most cookbooks apparently don’t work, as Laura Shapiro says:

“Cookbook writers are different from you and me, even the ones who look oh so domestic on their book covers. They’re professionals, which means they’re in the habit of working efficiently. Speed is part of their batterie de cuisine, just like sharp knives. And while they’re constantly telling you the best way to chop an onion, or why you should always keep canned tomatoes around, the ones who write 15-minute recipes are never going to tell you the single most crucial thing about quick cooking, which is that 15-minute recipes are irrelevant.”

I must admit I have more than a few books with recipes that don’t work and Ramsay’s is one of them.

Bourdain proves Foie Gras not cruel

Marco Pierre White at the Googleplex

If you don’t know him, Marco Pierre White, born on the same day of the same year as myself, was the first media celebrity chef. The first English chef to win three Michelin stars. He’s the man who made Gordon Ramsay and a couple of local chefs cry, well almost. Here he talks to chefs at the Googleplex and I should warn you its 47 minutes long. It’s from last year but worth a revisit, especially for his Knorr stock cube seasoning tip.

New model for cookbook publishers

The internet has changed publishing for ever. even if you are addicted to paper and binding, you can now produce your book on demand with very little effort at all. Michael Ruhlman, whose Elements of Cooking was recently published in Australia, looks at some of the new models adopted with Alinea in chicago taking a sensible DIY approach:

“Nick Kokonas, the restaurateur who, with Grant Achatz has created the restaurant Alinea in Chicago (pictured above), was unhappy with the conventional deals publishers were offering Grant for his cookbook. Kokonas figured, given that they have an in-house designer and photographer, they could do it themselves. They have hired several writers to handle various aspects of the text (myself included—I’m doing the intro and I also comment on the essays Nick and Grant are writing). The Alinea Cookbook is scheduled for a fall publication, and they are creating an intriguing website with demos and recipes and techinques to go with it.”

He also notes the new model adopted by Harper Collins in cutting the advance but increasing the payment per copy sold:

“Without these advances, I’d wouldn’t have been able to write the book. But that means I’ll have to sell a lot of copies in order for the book to earn out—that is, make back that advance at about $3 per book.

What this new group intends to do is to get rid of the advance but give the author a greater share of the profits.”

Peru for F–dies

I’d never thought of visiting Peru for anything other than Machu Picchu but have avoided it because I’m allergic to tourist swarms:

Dare I say that Peru could become a F–die destination. As James Doran discovers in The Observer:

“The real reason to visit Peru is the food. While more athletic types huff and puff their way to high altitude I would rather be sitting in a darkened picantería with a steaming plate of chicharrones (the original hot pork scratchings) and a frothing glass of chicha de jora (fermented corn beer).”

More:

“Here groups of middle-aged women expertly carve the fish, prepare the marinades and hawk their wares with formidable voices all day long. ‘Come inside, come inside, enjoy the heating and the fine table settings of our magnificent restaurant my big strong king with your beautiful queen,’ is a rough translation of the greeting we received. The ceviche women of Ancon are the Latina equivalent of Cockney market traders, and have a patter to match.

The restaurant, of course, has no heating, no fine table settings and indeed no walls. It is merely a series of tables and chairs set out along the jetty under a tarpaulin roof. But the food is sublime. Here you can feast on ceviche mixto - a mix of conchitas negras (black cockles), shrimps, octopus, flat fish, and pejerrey, a sort of anchovy.”

On pubs and drunks

Where I grew up the beer was warm and the landlord cold. The beer was also flat and very bitter, in itself a control on binge drinking until I discovered lager.

Journalists can’t resist boozy stories and the New York Times crawls around Oxford’s pubs (Cambridge’s are just as sordid) while Book Forum stumbles through Kingsley Amis’s “daily haze of whisky and sweat alcohol”.

“A good pub is a ready-made party, a home away from home, a club anyone can join,” says the NYT. “A pub is a great leveler — not a workingman’s club, but an everyman’s club. The best are filled not only with the scent of yeast and hops, but also with banter and wit. Back in 1954, when the Rose & Crown on North Parade Avenue in Oxford was threatened with closure (inadequate toilet facilities), the defense that won the day called it a “home of cultured, witty and flippant conversation.”

There is no doubt Amis would certainly be cultured and his bon mots compelling but apparently he had no taste when it came to booze:

“Having thus elevated the role of drink to the highest status in human civilization, Amis proceeds with a series of disconnected essays on different types of alcohol, some dreadful-sounding cocktail recipes (see above), a good piece on the types of glasses and tools for making and drinking different beverages, some not very sage reflections on wine, and some even worse ideas about what should and should not be drunk with what food. All enjoyable to read, of course, but what is best in this book are the author’s perorations not on the taste of alcohol, but on its effects. No one who has read his novels could deny that he is the grand master when it comes to describing different levels of inebriation—feeling sober, that first drink, the sensations of getting drunk, blind drunkenness, and, of course, the hangover.”

Meanwhile, The Telegraph in the UK is running a series on great British pubs.

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