Iambic Cafe | food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Crete part 1: snail tales from central Crete

Apr 19

We’ve just returned from a fantastic week on Crete, which I’ll attempt to document by day, with a very selective sampling from the 700+ photos I returned with; best I can do since I can’t share the feeling of being there.

We were hosted by the excellent and encyclopedic Kostas Bouyouris, agronomist and co-founder of the Mediterranean Association for Soil Health, who led us through Cretan food products in an enlightening and hands-on week of visits.

Our first stop was at the village of Kroussonas, where a group of women got together to start a baking cooperative; they now have a kitchen, shop and catering business. Seventeen of them get together to make traditional Cretan pastries and other baked goods, including one of our favourites: fried (in olive oil of course) pastries filled with wild greens.

Also beautiful, beautiful hand-decorated breads for weddings and other celebrations:

There was a pause when a pickup truck laden with vegetables pulled up, and we waited for some of the bakers to do their produce shopping, Cretan style. I thought this was so clever: have one guy in a truck come to the village, instead of everyone in the village driving to the shops.

We pressed on through staggering landscapes

to Gangales, in the south of Crete, to visit the Melko pasta factory where we were particularly interested to watch them make xinohondros, a traditional “pasta” made of cracked wheat, mixed with acidified fresh sheep and goat milk, cut by hand, shaped into portions and dried. It’s cooked with oil, tomato, potato, onion and celery and often with snails, and as it’s a kind of fortified pasta-cum-thickener, is one of the foods served during periods of religious fasting.

We had a tart and nourishing soup made from this pasta for supper, followed by many other traditional dishes including a platter of boiled goat.

Day two began as had day one, with luscious bowls of fresh yogurt, honey, bread, sesame halwa and strong coffee. We trooped upstairs to have a talk from another inspiring Cretan agronomist, Sotites Bampagiouris, who talked us through the enterprise known as Bio Forum, a ten-year-old economically viable organic farming enterprise.

A marvel of thrift and economy, Bio Forum creates composting heaps made of olive leaves (by-product of the olive harvest), and straw bales from mushroom cultivation, among other organic matter. They don’t use manure for these since the compost is used on vegetables and would therefore come into direct and possibly dangerous contact with food; manure can be used for composting fruit trees.

Seeds are nurtured in greenhouses and then transplanted when they are big enough to stand up against the weeds and insects.

Weeds are not automatically seen as enemies in this field: they act as wind screens, provide a refuge for insects that would otherwise head for more edible homes, help to create an anchor for topsoil through their root systems, and act as natural compost when the soil is turned after harvest. These greens were plump, spicy and delicious; members of the mustard family are particularly useful in areas where soil is compacted as their roots help to break it up, and provide salad greens while they’re at it.

After an organic fruit break at the farm, we zipped off to the Boutari winery, Fantaxometocho (“domain of the phantoms”), for a tour and lunch. The Cretan operation is only three years old, although the mainland company has been going since 1879. On Crete, the vinyards are totally organic, and, even more shocking to me, the vines are grown without irrigation. They say this makes for a lower yield, but a better wine since the plants produce healthier, sweeter grapes with more concentrated aromas; irrigation plumps the grapes up but also waters down the contents. Their late harvested grapes produce a delectable sweet wine which we were lucky enough to sample at lunch.

On the way to our new base in the Amari valley, we stopped for a retail moment in one of the Bio Forum outlets in Iraklion; Don samples a little cheese with basil.

Supper at Aravanes taverna where we began with a salad of lettuce and wild greens, fresh cheese, olives, bread… and went on to have tart rice, lentil stew and more boiled goat.

We finished with baklava we had brought from a pastry shop which we were to return to the next day for a cooking demo. More than ready for bed we crashed….

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Bologna, Mantova, Parma

Apr 15

A few more pictures from Bologna, where the walls have faces…

Bologna birthplace of murdered poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

On Thursday I thought I should make a little extra effort to get to Mantova/Mantua, which I’d wanted to see for a while. I seem to have managed to time my visit with that of every school aged teen in Northern Italy; the place was thronged, mobbed and ringing with the particular, unrestrained, and unmissable presence of the massed Italian adolescent. A sound that is even more penetrating, I was to discover, when situated inside a palace or town square. Yeesh. Worst of all, whether or not it was down to their presence, I found that the Ducal Palace’s Camera degli Sposi was closed for the day, except to those with reserved tickets. Bummer and a half. I bought the postcard but somehow it was not the same.

I did wander around the pretty garden of the Palazzo d’Arco, and because you cannot go through the rooms alone I had an odd and silently escorted tour of my own. I liked the kitchen, whose walls were covered in pots and pudding molds, and was grateful not to have to think about polishing a collection of that size.

Pizza Primavera, in Mantova: rocket and tomatoes.

Mantova, lots of water.

The other day in Parma. A lot of horse meat on sale here.. what would Peter Pan say?

And what about these guys: before I found them, they went out of business. Parma not ready for Tex Mex pizza?

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Easter break

Apr 13

Well it’s nearly over, our two weeks of blissed out sunshiny whateveritwaswedid. Most of my classmates took off for foreign shores: Copenhagen, New York, Istanbul, Montreal, Seoul… I stayed in Parma, mostly, just to be different. And just to have a look round the galleries and museums and churches which I haven’t done, waiting as I’ve been for a visitor to do it with. And I finally had one and here are some of the things we did:

Visited Osteria del Gesso, one of the local thumbs-up dineries. I had a very good meal there, but an even better one a night or two later at Ristorante Mosaika, a little placed I’d walked by a few times and had been wanting to try. We both had selected menus (I had the meat, Meli had the fish) and they were, in our favourite word, celestiale. They started us off gently with some deliriously fresh and beautiful balsamico-drizzled buffalo mozzarella, and delicate rounds of crostini with fresh green pesto; moved us smoothly on into starters (a wonderful rabbit terrine, and a salt cod puree whose salad came with a stunning soy-wasabi dressing) and pasta (gorgeous gnocchi draped with lardo, and a delightful tagliatelle freckled with fresh green herbs and strewn with shellfish)

and mains (tender white sea bass with clams and olives, and for me, meltingly pink lamb);

polished us off with warm, soft chocolate cake…

and for me a nest of perfectly ripe strawberries tossed in citrus and served with gelato.

To work all that off, we went nutria-spotting, checked out some puppets, popped our heads into the Baptistry, the Duomo, and every other church we came upon, except the desanctified ones (which were several); had walks in the Parco Ducale and Parco della Cittadella, sampled gelato from Grom and K2, had a drink in Web ‘n Wine, saw the Aga Khan masterpieces exhibition and peeped round the corner into the Teatro Farnese.

Then a day in Bologna, where we saw the Museo Civico Medievale and the Museo Morandi, the Chiesa San Stefano, the Basilica di San Petronio, and still had time to stumble upon an excellent pizzeria and have a sampling of gelato (from Gelateria Gianni, branches which seemed to materialise at every turning). We expired on a sofa somewhere and had a drink and a few olives before returning to Parma. Where we planned our assault on Milan the following day.

Of course we visited first the Duomo, and then wandered about looking for lunch, which we found at Bellavista Cafe – the food was excellent – the seafood plate disappeared a little too quickly to capture;

the pizzas looked amazing as they went by; the apple cake was delightful.

We then ambled through the Castello Svorzesco for most of the afternoon and never really got to the end of it. Meli had an hour to sprint round the Pinacoteca di Brera while I rested my feet and sipped a spremuta d’arancia.

And then Meli took to the skies from our very own Aeroporto G. Verdi, where the approach roundabout must have the best topiary ever:

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A few surplus and possibly excessive words on waste

Apr 5

There’s obviously something in the air right now; there was a well-portioned segment of the BBC program You and Yours about consumer food waste on Wednesday.

The core of the discussion was a recently released survey by the UK recycling and waste management organisation WRAP, that revealed that about one-third of food people buy in Britain is thrown away; half of it is edible. (That doesn’t include the food that is wasted by consumers when eating at restaurants, and by the food service industry itself, a whole new discussion I’d like to hear about.)

The survey suggested a lot of waste is down to several controllable factors: fridges may not be set cold enough to keep the food properly; people do not eat perishables quickly enough; and they simply buy more than they can eat, because they shop without planning or making shopping lists, and they shop for informal eating rather than prepared meals. Food retailers can manipulate us into buying more than we need through over-packaging, or by discounts or two-for-one deals.

The waste is not simply financial, it is also environmental, since the food industry alone produces about a quarter of the world’s total carbon emissions. Consumer waste is compounded by supermarket waste – when we pick through the shelves to find the freshest products by their sell-by dates, we contribute directly to this of course – and by industrial waste at the farming and factory end of things.

As we’ve certainly heard time and again this year, the speakers agreed that one of the big underlying causes of waste is the cheapness of our food; and I know it doesn’t feel all that cheap when you look at the prices in the shops and compare them with prices a few years ago, but it is a relative thing. Where, Lord Haskins observed, fifty years ago we used to spend thirty percent of our disposable income on food, we now spend less than ten percent. It’s the same as cheap clothes, he said: if it’s cheap, we don’t value it, and it becomes disposable. (I’ll bet there are roughly equal numbers of people in this world today making crumbs and croûtons out of stale bread as there are darning holes in socks that are otherwise wearable.)

Food historian Ivan Day pointed out that there’s a whole branch of British cuisine, a pudding tradition, based on recycling bread: he cited treacle tart, bread and butter pudding, and a Tudor pudding called whitepot that’s made with cream and dates and cinnamon. We don’t make the time to make those traditional puddings nowadays, he said. We’d rather chuck the bread and buy our puddings from the supermarket.

The speakers also agreed that there isn’t as much common knowledge about food nowadays, which means they aren’t always sensible about what they throw away and how long to keep things. Honey keeps for years, but industry is obliged to date it. Yogurt was mentioned as a food that was created in order to stabilise milk for storage; its use-before date can be safely ignored if you keep it refrigerated and use your nose and eyes to see if it’s still edible. If it’s not bubbling or mouldy, it’s safe to eat, it just might not taste its best. They talked about salad bags: pre-washed salads and vegetables are usually washed in chlorine and the water that remains in the bag can turn the produce swampy if you don’t eat it promptly.

Interestingly, WRAP’s CE Liz Atkins said the survey revealed that about ninety percent of consumers don’t think they are wasteful; a further third simply don’t see food waste as a problem. She suggested that if we got control only over the food we could have eaten, it is equivalent environmentally to taking one in five cars off the road. We’re all at fault, she said, it does matter, and we can make a difference individually. Now let’s start with that list…

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Bean-o-rama

Apr 4

Having suddenly realised the end is nigh, or at least that there is a risk all the food in our cupboards might not get eaten before the end of July, I was moved to take out a bag of soja nera and apply it to a recipe for Black Bean Soup. Anything with oranges in it sounds good to me, happy here in orange heaven. And I am becoming well known for my interminable soup making, I think.

So I dumped the beans in a pot full of water and soaked them for about 8 hours as is my custom. Then I drained them and put them in another pot of water and cooked them for about two hours. They were cooked, but they weren’t all that soft, so I cooked them a while longer. And another while. And another. Four and a half hours later they were still stubbornly al dente. I sent a couple of electronic cries for help into the ether. I got sympathy and solidarity by return.

I know I’ve cooked black beans to a comforting semi-sludgy texture before, but I think I’ve also had this problem before. And clearly, so have other people. Something in my memory said it’s a problem to cook them with salt, it keeps them from mushing up, but I hadn’t added any salt; I wondered if it might be the weird mineral content of Parma’s water (Acqua di Sulfur more than Acqua di Parma most days). What should I do? I toyed with the idea of draining the beans and cooking them a while longer in some distilled water, but I wondered if their structure had already been changed irreversibly. So I left them sulking overnight in their cooking water.

In the morning they were still firm and shapely. I turned to Harold McGee, in one of my classmates’ favoured texts, On Food & Cooking, and there was the answer! He describes a condition called Persistently Hard Beans, in which they can take an abnormally long time to soften or never do. He says there are two possible reasons: in one, caused by growing conditions on the farm (high temperature, high humidity and low water supply), the outer seed coat gets very hard, preventing water from moving into the interior. The other is a fault from storage: beans that were normal when harvested undergo a structural change if stored for long periods in warm temperatures and high humidity – exactly Parma’s summer climate.

There is no cure for either condition, alas, but he says you can avoid the first by making sure you pick through and discard the smallest beans. In the second case you cannot identify the culprits until you have tried to cook them. After that, the unsoftened beans will be (obviously) smaller than their properly hydrated companions and you can pick them out if you have the time and patience.

Or you can serve them on rice to really hungry guests and hope nobody notices, for la fame muta le fave in mandorle (hunger makes hard beans sweet). And if you serve enough wine with them you will know that il vino è poesia in bottiglia (wine is bottled poetry). And by the end of the evening when you all look like a sack of old beans, you can all beam at one another and observe gli amici sono come il vino: migliorano con l’età (friends, like wine, get better with age). Amen to that.