Still Cheeselessly in Parma

Sep 22

If you’re a believer in signs, when you read my tale you will perhaps understand why I gave up my attempts to get to Cheese this morning.

First, the friend who was going to come with me had pulled out before I left London. Next, I found out on Thursday that the plans to visit a winery Friday morning with another classmate had changed – the rental car wasn’t rented after all and there was no way for me to get there without leaving on Thursday and staying an extra night — somewhere. I was busy to-ing and fro-ing with packages to the post office and various other errands and just couldn’t manage it, so decided to go on Saturday. Then arose the possibility of getting a ride with someone else to Bra on Saturday morning, but that fell through on Friday. So I went to the train station Friday night and bought a ticket for a train leaving at 5.53 this morning, which would have got me to Bra at around 10.

Got up 4.30, walked to the train station and arrived I guess at about 5.51 – with just enough time to reach the platform and watch my train pull out, in the full knowledge that the next train wouldn’t get me there until an hour after the start time of the talk I most wanted to hear.

I took all this to mean the cosmos was indicating my presence was not required at Cheese this year, so I turned around and walked back home, since it was still too early for the buses to be running. Well at least I got my exercise. And was spared a three-stage, four hour train trip each way. The way things were going, chances are excellent that I would have missed one of those connections and ended up late anyway.

I don’t know how many of you out there have tried to plan trips using Trenitalia‘s rather good website, but it does have one major flaw, which is that it doesn’t tell you the ultimate destination of the train you will be catching/connecting with or the platform you’ll need, which means you have to figure that out on the fly by checking the departure list posted on the platform, and then find the platform listed, and hope it hasn’t changed. A lot to manage in a strange station with sometimes only three or four minutes between trains.

Think I’ll go out and buy myself some… cheese.

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Pausing in Parma

Sep 21

So I’m back in Parma, bracing myself for an earrrrrly train tomorrow. I’m going to Bra, which is not so very far but an absolute pig to get to by train. Four hours or so. Oh well. The destination will, I hope, be worth the pain of getting there: Cheese, glorious cheese.

I got here on Wednesday afternoon: left London where the generally fine weather I’d been grateful for for most of my stay so far had turned cold and grey with spitting rain. I sprinted down the street and got onto the airport bus with about three minutes to spare, made it to lovely Stansted in good time, and then killed it in various queues. The check-in queue was enlivened by a frequent occurrence at Stansted, namely the embarrassed departure of a pair of English holidaymakers who thought they were in the queue for Palma, Majorca. The endlessly unhelpful airport staff of course know all about the confusion – the word Palma is totally indistinguishable from Parma in the English accent over a loudspeaker – but make no concession to the weakness of travellers when making flight announcements. What fun!

My heart sank when I saw the number of Italian teenagers boarding the flight. We used to have to share buses to Colorno with this species on occasion, and in quantity they are among the loudest, most obnoxious and charmless creatures that walk this earth. But other than bolting out of their seats only seconds after a rather bouncy landing (and after a stern voice-of-god reprimand they hastily sat down again) they were surprisingly, gratifyingly well behaved.

Our welcome gift at the micro-airport was at the luggage carousel. The light started flashing, the beep sounded, and through the rubber curtain emerged… the guy who’d waved us into the passport control. He waved and smiled and then disappeared out the other curtain. I do love the way life can be so weirdly casual here.

All else in Parma is calm and quiet.

I have made lightning strikes on some of my favourite eateries – so happy everything is open again! Lunched at Sorelle Picchi and supped at La Croce di Malta (gorgeous torte of melanzane followed by a layered thing with potato and anchovy – interesting but a bit of a waste of a perfectly good anchovy I thought)

The meals have given me occasion to think about the matter of service in restaurants though. I’m thinking is it better to have friendly but inept service, which is more or less the case if you are recognised here, or snotty but correct service. Though usually the snotty service is also bad. So I’m settling for friendly. But it grieves me to see good restaurants losing points with new diners through simple ineptitude.

That having been said, I must praise once again my favourite chef in town, Davide di Dio, whose well deserved holiday seems to have given him some new verve; and I was pleased in the interests of his continued health and sanity to see he had more helpers on board at Ristorante Mosaiko. I hope they can keep up with him. I had a starter of Baccala on a wedge of what looked like a crouton

but turned out to be artichoke, drizzled with balsamico, yum: and I can honestly say I now see the point of Baccala. Then on to a primo piatto of prawns wrapped in crunchy blankets – Involtino di Gamberi Croccanti

with a puree of fennel and lemon cream. Perfect. And then Rombo in crosto di patate alla zucca:

some beautiful turbot, perfectly cooked in a potato crust, docked on a few perfect roast potatoes in a thick orange sea of pumpkin soup. Since it was a night for overindulgence, and as I hadn’t had tiramisu since arriving in Italy, I thought I might as well. Very very nice. I went home well fed and looking forward to my next, and probably final, visit in November.

Tonight will be a quiet night of packing and resting.

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London tasties

Sep 19

A couple of good chows before I left London this week. First, tapas at the Salt Yard, where some very tasty grilled bread with alioli was followed by some other things: padron peppers, stuffed courgette flowers stuffed with ewe’s milk cheese, lamb on roast parsnips,tiny squid…

and then a pair of more than interesting desserts: a fresh plum jelly with sherry cream on top and warm madeleines on the side; and grilled peach slices topped with lavender ice cream, much nicer than chewing on a pot-pourri but with an oddly powerful similarity.

Then on Tuesday, a light lunch at Carluccio‘s – for me, some mushroom soup with pancetta

and an appreciative browse of the stuff in the window:

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Look both ways

Sep 17

Time is slipping by without my being able to keep up. I’ll finish off Oxford when I can, but meanwhile here is what happened last week.

Monday night was a long awaited magazine launch reading at Foyle’s:

Seam is an excellent vehicle and the list of readers, though frightening in its length, was smoothly handled by its super-poet-editor Anne Berkeley, and we reached the break seamlessly, ha ha. Here’s the reading list (I can’t say I checked this against actual attendance but I know a lot of these people did read: Sue Rose distinguished herself, of course, and Mike Barlow was my surprise hit of the evening. I was glad as well for a chance to meet Todd Swift who has been on the edge of my acquaintance for several years, with more and more people known in common. Anyway, the other readers were: Gill Andrews, Pat Borthwick, Ken Champion, John Clegg, Chrissie Gittins, Allison McVety, Caroline Natzler, Julian Stannard, Kearan Williams.

After a bracing glass of wine, a bit of light mingling, and a chance to purchase copies of the magazine, we were treated to a second half reading by Sheenagh Pugh,

who demonstrated her position as an advocate for accessibility in poetry without sacrificing intelligence and interest. I particularly liked her ‘webcam’ poems. (Perhaps webcam poems will be the dream poems of the future?)

Afterwards some of us repaired to a Greek restaurant in Bloomsbury. What can I say: the half timbered interior was probably a pretty clear clue, but we were not in authentic Greek cuisine territory. I was curious to eat “Greek” restaurant food after my Crete experience, and it was about as unremarkable as I remembered, though filling. Anyway I needed to shoot off early to get myself tucked into bed for another day at London Food Link in the morning.

Which I did. And was there until Thursday when I finished up and went to meet Nancy to see Atonement, a well-made, grim but topical number I hadn’t been exactly looking forward to but thought I ought to see, as it’s much discussed. But I’m not a big fan of Ian McEwan, see. This film certainly demonstrated what I don’t like about his creative vision: it seems to be a matter of making each of his characters suffer as much as possible; there is no mercy and no forgiveness in his world. As I remembered afterwards, Alex’s mother once said to me that she only really wanted to see happy films anymore. I’m there too. Anyway Nancy and I took ourselves to Ottolenghi for some A-1 takeaway (the peppery gingery greenbeans, spinach and snow peas were particularly good). I’ve been following his interesting New Vegetarian column in the Guardian but was happy to see he serves some exquisite beef as well.

So that was kind of it for the week. Then I zipped off to Sussex for the weekend. The weather was beautiful: classic autumnal Englishness, clear and crisp. We went to a place called the Boathouse for lunch on Saturday, which was really hopping, with a big anniversary party on the other side of the room. But we had a sunny table overlooking the stream

which was a nice setting with pleasant staff (even in the depths of Sussex it’s the New Britain: 1 each English, Polish, Latvian and Slovakian waiter and a Chinese maitre’d). Food not so good though: I encountered an ammonia-pong skate wing. By its soppy texture I’d say it was previously frozen, if not just plain overcooked, which might explain why the kitchen didn’t notice the problem. According to your sources, the ammonia develops either as an effect of poor handling when caught, or it is a symptom of a less-than-fresh piece of fish. Whatever the reason, it’s inedible at this point, so we sent it back and I had a bit more beef which was ok, and then after a little sit down on the wall by the water

went in search of the sellers of some local free range eggs,

but they were apparently out, leaving a few chickens and a couple of dogs in charge. The church next door was cold and quiet

and after a look round and a cock-a-doodle farewell from the very fine rooster,

we left.

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More Oxford

Sep 14

(**This post was lurking in my unposted half-finished back-(b)log and pertains to two previous posts from September 2007: apologies if it reaches and confuses current subscribers!)

We went round the mulberry tree on Sunday.

I don’t believe I’d ever eaten a mulberry, let alone picked one off a tree. I was surprised. They seemed very fragile, perishable nuggets, difficult to get hold of at the perfect moment of ripeness. Once ripe, these ones at least seemed to be already mouldy. Past their harvest date or inherently flawed? Further research clearly indicated..

The Sunday morning sessions were really interesting. I started with the panel on Foie Gras, poppies and cacao.

The Foie Gras Fracas: Sumptuary Law as Animal Welfare? presented by Cathy K. Kaufman, discussed the ethics of foie gras (duck) production as practised in New York state. Her starting premise was that “killing animals for food is morally acceptable provided that animals not suffer unnecessarily in their rearing or slaughtering”.

The argument she presented was more or less the same as I’d heard from a former chef. She observed that migratory birds have an inbuilt behaviour to store fats for the journey, and to do this practice a form of gluttony that is compatible with being fed the volume of grain that producers provide them; and that the force-feeding of birds, gavage, has been practiced for millenia: it appears on Egyptian tomb-paintings reckoned to date back to 2500 BCE. She also observed that tube-feeding is not a world away from the regurgitation/throat feeding practiced by parent birds on their young (i.e. although we would not want a tube down our throats, it’s not so different from having your mom’s beak pushed down there). The birds Kaufman was writing about were visited by veterinarians who found them generally less stressed and in better living conditions than factory-farmed fowl, as I guess you’d expect when they are raised in smaller numbers. Jeffrey Steingarten has a good piece on the same theme.

In Poppy: Potent yet Frail – Aylin Öney Tan gave the Turkish history of poppy production and the impact of foreign interference in local agricultures. She dated opium poppy cultivation back to Mesopotamia in 4000 BC. Her comments on the physical similarity between poppy seed heads and pomegranates were a revelation, as she showed a few illustrations that could be seen quite differently if you mentally swapped plants. She talked about the culinary uses of poppy seeds: in breads and baking, in both savoury and sweet dishes, and as a cooking oil, which contains no opiates. The oil is also used by artists and the paint industry because of its unique drying qualities. She pointed out that it’s a plant used in its entirety by peasant farmers, including the use of poppy seed pulp (left over from oil pressing) as animal feed (now that would make for happy animals..?). Although poppy production resumed in 1974, after being banned due to international pressure, the legal hoops that villagers have to go through limit the numbers of those willing to cultivate it.

Cacao in Brazil or the History of a Crime by Marcia Zoladz was a bit of a tangled web, covering an example of market manipulation in the late eighties and early nineties. Basically it was the story of a group that was aiming to change the economic and political power balance in Brazil by buying up cacao plantations and then destroying them by infesting them with a fungus known as witches’ broom (Crinipellis perniciosa). The infected plantations would then infect healthy ones and cripple the whole economy. Cacao was always an export crop, so there are question marks about its value in a healthy and self-sustaining economy. Brazil’s complicated social history – where slavery was abolished but replaced by a kind of indentured labour system – was part of the problem, and the reason for the act, as well.

Sunday lunch was organic chicken: local, seasonal foods, very good and extremely beautiful.

A further postscript: The papers presented at the 2007 “Food and Morality” themed Oxford Symposium are now available from Prospect Books.

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