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Belgian cuisine to kitchen gardens

We said a fond farewell to Peter Schollier on Wednesday, after an entertaining journey through Belgian cuisine and the poles of food neophilia and neophobia.

Belgian cuisine, which for most of us (who might think of it) means moules et frites, or Belgian waffles, or perhaps even waterzooi, has been subjected to scrutiny and refinement by modern Belgians and is now a large and growing and diverse – and as we might expect, somewhat regional – gastroterritory. Which is what you get from a country that only achieved independence in 1839, after centuries of wandering borders and serial occupation by and influence from the big guys on every side. Anyway, the only Belgian restaurant I know of outside Belgium is Belgo in London (its founders were a Belgian and a Canadian!); Schollier says that the incomparable Leon’s now has branches in Paris.

He then stepped carefully through the history of post-WW2 dining habits in Germany and Italy, building a case to compare the relative adventurousness of the Germans with the nationalistic, if not regionalistic preferences of the Italians. It was a story we’ve certainly seen played out ourselves in Italian restaurants and markets: no foreign dishes or products besmirch the menus of local eateries, and it is fiendishly difficult to find ‘foreign’ ingredients in traditional food retailers, including the open air markets. Which makes sense in many ways; it is absolutely consistent with the vision of Slow Food, for example, which advocates the preservation of local cuisines. But a tough course to follow with today’s international appetites: even in Italy the workforce is swimming with foreign labour which will surely have some kind of effect down the line.

I was curious about the kitchen garden (potager in French) class as I remembered the term from living in England. In Canada I think we exclusively used the more prosaic term ‘vegetable garden’. Which to the niggler doesn’t completely describe something that typically includes fruits and herbs.

Antoine Jacobsohn, from Le Potager du Roi, Versailles, is a specialist in the history of food and horticulture and he shared a bit of his ethnographic research into gardeners and gardening.

In one sesson, he gave us what must be a preview of the paper called “Hot Bed Techniques and Morals: Out of Season Produce in Early Modern France” which he’ll be delivering at a conference in Glasgow March 15-17 (Gardening: Histories of Horticultural Practice). He told us about hot beds which were used by Parisian market gardeners (and others, but Paris was our focus) to force vegetables out of season, with the aid of bell jars (aka cloches) and frames. Pretty much the same tricks used by home and allotment gardeners today. The morality discussion about out of season produce – is it right to trick nature into producing greater yield which, by nature, is less flavourful than seasonal produce? – is, he argued, not a contemporary one, but actually started sometime around 1600.

We learned that, for Parisians, the split between production and consumption only really happened in the 1960s when Les Halles, the vast central market, as well as the city’s slaughterhouse (from where the science museum, La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie now sits) were moved out of town. A good idea in many ways – traffic congestion and hygiene among them – but it did remove food’s origins from the lives and sight of the population who were buying it. The central market used to be a popular meeting and social place outside market hours (which were few as they only traded for four hours in the early morning). The new market at Rungis is ringed by roads suitable for road transport and is not particularly open to visitors, although a determined punter can get there by bus and perhaps manage to pay an entry toll for a look round.

He concluded with an overview of his oral history project, discussing with food producers around Paris their views on the food products of today. He surprised most of us, I think, by reporting that the people he spoke to are by and large pleased and proud of the food they produce, and consider it better in many ways than what was grown in the past, in terms of hygiene, cultivation methods, nutritional value and yield. They did not always evaluate it in terms of flavour, but those who did were able to state that what had tasted best in the past was also the trickiest to sell in high volume. Quality is a perishable commodity, and that’s what makes it hard to produce, difficult to distribute, and of course expensive to buy.

Carbon footprints

I seem to be shuttling back and forth between cultures so much I am either so far ahead of my current pack or so well behind them that my terminology is incomprehensible to anyone but myself.

One term I heard a lot from my English friends on my pass-through last year is Carbon Footprint – a conveniently packaged phrase that I don’t think was so audible in Canada by the time I left, though perhaps that has changed. It would still be understandable in context of course, it’s just that it didn’t seem to have permeated the public discourse as it had in England.

The Guardian published an article recently which lets you calculate the size of yours (hint: it should be small, and “you live like an American” is not the rating to strive for).

You can also use their handy Climate Care Calculator for a quick look at what your lifestyle costs the environment. While you are cleaning up your act, you can pay your penance directly to a charity called Climate Care. Or if you prefer your calculator American-style, there’s another one at Carbonfund.org.

It’s an interesting and topical area for the food industry which, it seems, leaves not so much a footprint as a crater.

Kitchen history and some pics

Had a great lecture today by visiting Belgian historian Peter Schollier, about kitchen workers in 19th century Brussels, with more to follow over the next couple of days, on food and identity, changes in food culture in Europe since 1945, and food culture in Italy vs Germany. He talked at first about the professional chef, how the title is bestowed rather than handed over on a piece of paper, having been earned through apprenticeship and observation.

It called to mind for me something said in We Feed the World, about how the industrial-scale food producers are run like cold-blooded corporations because there is no one at the top of these companies who worked their way up from the bottom, who understands farming as a learned skill.

In that context I particularly liked this text quoted in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: “Farming is not adapted to large scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die.”

And – timely, this – we’re looking forward to hearing about kitchen gardens from Antoine Jacobsohn this very week.


In case you were wondering where everyone was on Saturday.. I found them at the market on via Verdi. All of them. And their socks.


The Italian rule of construction seems to be: never use one sign when you could use eight. Or eleven.


Fido Park, en route to Bologna.


Colorno this evening. Daylight! Waning daylight, but… daylight!!

Piazza della Pace, by day…

…and by night.

Nutella, Faust, wine and cured meats

Corrie passed along the important news about World Nutella Day which is coming up very quickly, on February 6.

Last night a group of us shared a box at the opera to see The Damnation of Faust. Reviews from our company were mixed, but I think it was agreed that overall the second half was better than the first, all beautifully sung of course, by a very large cast, but possibly overwhelmed by some of the visuals that were projected over the proceedings, and the choreography and circus work were a bit much. All in all I enjoyed the evening, though thought I sensed a touch of Lord of the Rings in the depiction of hell, and a lot of loin cloths were used in the making of this opera. Anyway, can’t come to Italy and not see opera, even a French one, so I’ve got that one under my belt.


We have been having “sniff parties” chez nous. MJ has a pretty comprehensive wine aromas kit which we’ve been working our way through with some diligence. We sniff 18 different bottles containing everything from acacia to leather to chocolate to mushroom to smoke, and then sample some wines to see what we can detect in them, and then we eat nice food. This week’s menu featured MJ’s gazpacho – an unorthodox version apparently as it lacked bread, but it was beautiful without – and the near unpronounceable kolokythokeftedes (zucchini cakes with feta and mint). Mint was actually the hardest ingredient to find, but I bought a bag from an erborista, which wasn’t quite right so to me it tasted a bit like mint tea, but it went down all right with some tzadziki. Corrie brought an Orange- cheesecakey- moussey- souffle- kind- of- thing, I think that was the official recipe name, and topped with blood oranges it was delightful.

We kept our menu quasi-vegetarian because we’d spent the afternoon doing a meat tasting, which was exhaustive and somewhat overwhelming: 21 different meats I think. I’d missed the salami tasting before Christmas, and this time we were doing only cured meats made from whole cuts. So we had prosciutto crudo e cotto (raw cured and cooked hams), some smoked hams and a couple of different kinds of lardo which were surprisingly good, even if we did have to take them without the requisite hot toast.

Some Culatello and Culaccia, Spalla crudo and cotto, Prosciutto di Sauris (a whole smoked prosciutto crudo), Alto Aldige (smoked), Cinta Sinese (Tuscan pig), Jamon Iberico, some black pig prosciutto with flavours of blue cheese; and the lardos came later, which I didn’t photograph.

Many prosciuttos: 16 months, 24 months, crudo and cotto, smoked and salted.

Milk prices, wine history, more olive oil


We had a beautiful weekend in Parma: a cool and clear Sunday, ideal for a stroll by the river, after a sprinkling of snow on Friday. That was a meteorological Australia Day gift for our Ozzie colleague, who’d graced us that afternoon with bone fide Vegemite sandwiches, Mintos and Fantales. Friday night several of us checked out Shri Ganesh,the Indian restaurant in town, and it was good: wonderful tandoori chicken, dhal and samosas, and lots of other things too.

Meli has passed along a timely story from BBC News about milk prices and farmer underpayment: A woman sat in a bath of cold milk outside Parliament in protest at the price per litre dairy farmers are paid. (And if you want to support dairy farmers in a real way, you might like to pick one off your morning pint, if you’re lucky enough to get the ones with the lonely hearts ads on them.)

Meanwhile, more classes since the great pig farm visit of ’07. Since Wednesday, we’ve had some wine history, wine technology, sensory analysis, more olive oil tasting, and a dash of semiotics. Phew. Here are some highlights.

Wine history: I was delighted to hear Allen Grieco speak in support of Retsina, the Greek wine that was born from an ancient quest for preservatives – and one turned out to be pine resin, which led to a characteristic aroma and flavour, which nurtured a taste, which only began to die when foreign tourists started to swamp the tastes and production values in Greece within the last thirty years.

In my experience you are either born a retsina drinker or not. Our family was divided on that point. I’d like to suggest maybe it’s a genetic thing, like tongue-rolling? Anyway it made me look forward to visiting Crete again, as I remember well the delightful bottles of retsina made in Chania that perished on my last visit.

Sensory analysis… more statistics. Horrible stuff. And discretion forbids me from saying anything more about the nature of the class; indeed, the very need for discretion says all that should possibly be said about that.

And I would have thought that all that kind of complex thinking about communication in the form of signs (present through their absence) should have made me ready for yesterday’s start in semiotics. But not.

I prefer the oil and wine studies.

Oil tasting was, as always, delightful in every way. We had Greek olive oil day yesterday. The mystery factor was a second tasting of one of the oils after it had been heated to below the smoking point (which no doubt everyone but me always knew was 180 degrees c, right?). So even though it was just heated and cooled, with nothing cooked in it, the flavour was totally gone. It had none of the aroma of the original wine, and smelled and tasted a bit like popcorn. A helpful reminder about (a) keeping your olive oil cool, dark and away from exposure to oxygen; and (b) don’t cook with the good stuff! It’s meant to be added as a condiment after the cooking’s finished. Heat will bring out its flavours, but cooking it will only kill them. A fine line.

You can make it into mayonnaise, if it’s not too bitter or peppery: very pretty. (Guess which one was made – not from olive oil – by Kraft?)

Another useful tip for those of us maybe schlepping wondrous bottles of extra virgin olive oil thither and yon, fresh from some exquisite pressing in far-flung places: you can freeze it if you need to. But once you thaw it, use it up faster than you would fresh, as it will be that much more fragile. As we never tire of hearing, olive oil does not improve with age: its power, aroma and flavours dissipate as time goes by.

We Feed The World

I watched We Feed The World the other night and it was more around the troubling subjects this year has been opening up for me. The film’s ironic opening and closing image shows corn cobs and husks being burnt for industrial fuel. Its title comes from the slogan for Pioneer Seeds, which appears to be the Monsanto of Europe. In the film, one of the company’s senior directors took a tour through Romania, observing that the small scale production there was a reminder of how European farming used to look about fifty years ago, and he hoped things would not change too fast there but the big companies are already moving in, and it probably won’t be long before their world changes for the worse. Some of the things that stayed with me from the film:

  • The initial subsidisation of hybrid crops (the example given was eggplant – which looks better but tastes nowhere near as good as traditional eggplants) by the Romanian government so that farmers buy cheap seed, reap the profits, and then the subsidies are removed the next year, leaving the farmers without saved seed from traditional crops, unable to plant the reproductively sterile hybrid seed, and eating into their earnings to buy the more expensive hybrid seed. And thus starts the cycle of uneconomic overproduction that must surely lead to selling out to industrial giants. And doing what after that: working in some peripheral industry for a poor hourly wage?
  • The wholesaling of Brazilian rainforest which is being systematically razed to plant genetically modified soya for European farm animals. The soil is good, but unsuitable for soya so all the nutrients must be brought in to make that happen. And it means that all the efforts to keep GM out of the European food market are in vain because the animals are eating it.
  • Vast areas of southern Spain are covered in warehouses growing the amount of vegetables needed to feed Europe. More monoculture, more hybrids, and lots of impoverished farm workers from Northern Africa, driven out of their homes and livelihoods by— cheap greenhouse vegetables from Europe. A story very much like the one told in Chicken Madness, where African chicken farmers were being driven out of business by cheap frozen chicken from Europe and Brazil.
  • Small scale fisherman are being removed from the equation by the EC which aims to make all fishing industrial-scale. Which means no more fresh fish for the markets, only the product of trawling deeper and deeper and selling anything and everything they can dredge from the ocean because there’s less and less of what we want. Fish that’s been sitting in the hold for a couple of weeks having died on the nets that are in the sea for 10 or 12 hours does not, the film said, compare with fish brought out of the nets by hand after a couple of hours and sold in the market later that same day.
  • The CEO of Nestle is captured giving a chilling talk about water. What he regards as an “extreme position” is that water is required for human life, and should be a human right. But he, his company (which just happens to be the market leader in bottled water) think it should be considered a “foodstuff” and priced and sold accordingly. He also says that we’ve never had it so good; we’re better fed with more money than any time in history. Yes, we agree, looking at his sleek and well-tended self, you probably are. But not so much those Africans living in greenhouse-shantytowns in Spain, or the farmers starving in Brazil and drinking unclean water while locally grown food is exported for animal feed. Or all the farmers and agricultural workers driven out of business, together with all the businesses that used to serve them.
  • Quote from the poultry breeder, whose mass produced chickens were shown from egg to packaging: “All the market’s interested in is the price. Taste is not really a consideration.” Nor are a lot of other things, from the looks of the world we’ve created.