It seems right that on Valentine’s Day I should come upon this article about the reasons to seek out free trade chocolate.
… or do I mean Revenge of the Nutria?
Visitors to Florence, I’m told, often remark on the web-footed, beaver-like creatures you can see frolicking in the Arno. Here too in Parma we’d noticed mammals in the river and wondered what they were: nutria, we were told (aka coypu / coipú / kóypu / ragondin / nuture rat / swamp beaver — but not to be confused with the river otter). And as their species name (Myocastor coypus) suggests, beaver-like they are, in many ways.. until you see their tails, and their colourful teeth!
Apparently these little blighters – Argentinian rodents with rat-like tails – were imported into Europe from South America in the 1920s. They arrived in Italy in 1928, brought here by commercial furriers hoping to turn a quick lire. When this didn’t happen, it seemed easiest to just.. set them free. And some of the rest escaped fair and square, and have made a real success of it: since their first sighting in the wild in 1960, they have spread from Italy to Sicily and Sardinia .
Alas for Italy, coypu really like it here and find many nice things to eat in the river systems, to the extent that they have laid waste to a great deal of native vegetation, as well as rice farms, and their burrowing habits weaken irrigation systems and riverbanks, causing tens of millions of euros in damage per year.
They were introduced to Britain as well, where they caused a lot of agricultural damage, but Britain embarked on an eradication campaign, employing 24 trappers who managed to eradicate the species there in just under a decade, by 1989 (… or did they?).
They are still raised in France for fur, and other products including soap, pate and even jewellery (those lovely teeth, just the colour of Mimolette, alors). Here are a couple of recipes in case you want to make your own pate or ragout. (Lucky for the nutria, animal rights activists at Bite Back are hard at work liberating these giant rodents into the French countryside.)
The French are not the only connaiseurs: apparently the meat is lean and low in cholesterol (well, they are herbivoires) and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries is aiming to get locals to help eradicate them through fine dining, and has helpfully posted some other recipes. If you need some visual prompts, here’s a YouTube video – sponsored by LDWF – to show you how it’s done.
Ironically, just as they are really making a nuisance of themselves by busting loose wherever they were imported, their numbers in the rivers and streams of Argentina appear to have been dwindling.
How do you make 24 foodie students happy? So easy. Make their last class on Friday afternoon a chocolate tasting session. We were reunited with our affable guide through cured meats, Mirco Marconi, who confessed his passion for artisanal chocolate, and treated us to a sampling of 23 different varieties.
We learned a bit about the history of cacao – its discovery by the Olmecs and its appreciation by the Mayans who consumed it as a liquid, relishing the foam. He showed us a picture of the Mexican chocolate whisk, the molinillo, which was actually a contribution by the Spaniards.
The New Taste of Chocolate by Spanish writer Maricel Presilla is, he says, the best book he’s read on chocolate. There seemed to be interest among my long-suffering classmates in doing more of the onerous research required to master this subject: there are chocolate festivals enough to keep us happy: CioccolaTO in Turin next month; the recently elapsed but highly recommended purists’ festival, Cioccolasita; and one to look forward to, Le Salon du Chocolat in Paris, from October 19-22, 2007.
We heard about the chocolate making process, from harvest through fermentation and drying, to refining, conching and tempering. We tasted chocolate beans, unsweetened chocolate, liquid chocolate, and ‘grand cru’ chocolates from Venezuela; we tried chuao and porcelana; criollo, forestero and trinitano. Bewildering varieties and many epiphanies of taste and texture.
My favourites were Guido Gobino’s Cialdine lemon and ginger – a chocolate covered nugget of exquisite candied fruit; Ravera‘s Baci di Cherasco – a crunchy fusion of fine chocolate and top quality hazelnuts (nocciola from Langhe); and Château Domori Porcelana – a silky bite of Venezuelan (70%) criollo — from a company evidently run by a chocophilic poet!? Marconi even brought us a special treat from his personal collection – a Bodrato cherry chocolate, the kind of treat he’d adored as a child and which is now produced with high quality cherries (la ciliegia d.o.p. di Vignola) which, bathed whole in grappa, are encased in a fabulous dark chocolate.
As we were picking and chewing I couldn’t help but think if we’d been served any one of the sampling – unsweetened versions aside – we’d probably have been overjoyed. Taken together, of course, you really notice the differences.
There were three artisan producers named from the US, Scharffen Berger (which has been bought out by a multinational since he’d first encountered them), Ghirardelli and E. Guittard. I’m eager to get back to Hot Chocolates in Courtenay and do a little taste-testing to see how they measure up now…
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.
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.
