ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Monday was our first face to face meeting with Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, and therefore our patron saint, since the University of Gastronomic Science fell out of the folds of the cloak of the Slow Food movement in 2003.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, he arrived late, his excuse being the exquisite tortelli he’d had to stop and sample at an excellent local restaurant. Well, he lives the dream all right. And he lived up to his reputation as a charismatic and passionate speaker.

He talked about the founding of the Slow Food movement, and the university’s role in delivering to its students a thorough education in all aspects of gastronomy. Throwing down some of the catastrophic examples of large scale farming and fishing enterprises driving small, local food producers out of business, he said each time: what is this but gastronomy?

He has a passion for the value of education, and sees, I think, the students of this university as the seeds of an educated future. Teach people what is wrong with the food of today and you initiate the action that will change it for the better. He spoke on the three principles of Slow Food (good, clean and fair = Buono, pulito e giusto, just like the name of his latest book..) and about the movement’s expanding scope, to raise public awareness about issues of biodiversity and the perils of a market-based food economy.

Produce food for profit alone, is the message we’ve been hearing from all three of the Slow Food speakers we’ve had so far, and you sever the social and economic links that allow you to produce food for reasons of hunger, tradition, love, and community — and you destroy the very means of reversing the damage. And so there is a shift in the organisation’s focus now towards community building. The remarkable achievements of the Terra Madre meetings were groundwork for this, but it will be interesting to see how the structure of the organisation changes to accommodate – or not – this wider vision.

Well, I think I was not alone in enjoying our first major indoctrination session. There is something cozy and deeply reassuring about being addressed intimately and respectfully by a leader in a field we all already believe in. This experience I’m in for the next year does feel so validated by the zeitgeist; it feels to me that we are on the crest of a wave of righteous knowledge about the evil being done to what literally feeds our most fundamental human need.

We were invited last night to join Petrini for informal drinks in a local wine bar. And so about a dozen of us descended into a private room in the cellar, picking our way around cases of wine, greeting the owner – hard at work on the meat slicer – to find a full table already of students from another program in our uni, as well as a few uni staff and unidentified (to me anyway) others. So, dodging flaking plaster, we perched on makeshift seats – boxes of wine – and nibbled on excellent salumi and bread and sipped excellent wine, and listened to the mostly Italian banter around the table. Those of my classmates present were mostly unilingual English speakers, so it was not as entirely convivial as it might have been, and as we were more or less at nose level with the table we had the distinct feeling of being literally at the feet of Petrini. But it was pleasant enough, and I made an early exit into the fogbound streets around midnight, leaving the others to enjoy it for a couple more hours.

Lost some time last week to the flu, but it was a well parenthesised week nonetheless. We returned to classes on Monday with a lecture on olive oil history by our very own Allen J Grieco. It was an interesting and illuminating trip and unpacked a few things that hadn’t sat side by side in front of us before: the triumvirate of wine, bread and oil, for example, which travel together through Italian history with an importance not just as food for the body, but as tools of the church as well. Note to self: to ensure perpetuity of product, make sure it’s adopted as a religious symbol (in your local dominant religion). We’re looking forward to more about oil this month; later today we have our first oil tasting which sounds exciting.

Last Thursday afternoon, I had managed to crawl out of the covers and enjoy the presentations of my classmates in Laura Mason’s final afternoon on food culture. We heard about pie, curry, marmalade, tea, cake, pudding and more; some of the groups had brought samples, but in my weakened state I thought rice pudding was about as much as I should attempt.

Friday was my first full day of classes, and we had a talk on animal welfare and slaughterhouses in the morning followed by an introduction to sensory analysis in the afternoon. We sat in what I can best describe as an uncertain silence while a number of translation difficulties in the first lecture were overcome, and took what we could from the slides. The gist of it was that there is masses of EU legislation covering animal welfare but the balance is heavily on the side of he who wields the butcher knife (or indeed the electrical stunning tongs). The animal’s welfare is protected because it is a living creature, but that’s about it for empathy and compassion; the rest of the formula aims to reduce stress and suffering because otherwise the quality of the meat suffers.

We aren’t sure yet if we’ll be visiting the slaughterhouse itself to witness the mechanics of that link in the carnivore’s food chain, but many of us are willing to see it, to understand the whole of the practice and perhaps face the reality of what we eat. The lecturer’s remark that he could not show photos on the slides because there was “too much blood to see things clearly” suggests it’s not an easy show; and he responded to one question about the emotional effect on the people working at the pointy end of things by saying that it’s not a job a sensitive person would take on. He himself was trained in veterinary science and works as an inspector in the slaughterhouse, where his job is to check that the animal’s health before and after death won’t impede its use as meat for human consumption. A far cry from coaxing kittens back to health; but doesn’t every occupation to some extent offer you a series of unlikely choices on which to apply your training? I suppose the doctors who oversee lethal injections are at similar poles of application.

About sensory analysis I will only say this to myself: get thee to a calculator. Our instructor, well known by his students as an… unusual personality, is very much an expert in his field, and I’m looking forward to seeing our tasting booths from the inside. We learned about the particularities of choosing a tasting panel, when a food producer tests, as it continuously does, its products for quality and consumer ratings. Not a simple process of pulling likely looking suspects in off the street. Nosiree, there’s math in them thar hills. We ended our first class with a brief lesson in finding the geometrical mean of a panel’s taste threshold. Yowza.

Luckily the weekend spread before us, and a happy series of gatherings to fill our calendars. I did not make it to the farewell drinking dancing extravaganza in Colorno, but it sounds like a lively and long-lived event. I did gather my strength to attend the ABCD B&W; Birthday Bash on Saturday: Amy, Bruno, Clementine and Don had alphabetically conspired to have more or less consecutive birthdays to celebrate, and the theme was a mercifully simple one: black and white, which most everyone adhered to, including Bruno’s profiteroles, fresh from Harnold’s Gelateria:

I speak from experience to say that nothing restores the strength of a post-flu victim faster than a profiterole slathered with chocolate and filled with gelato. Still, around 2am, with the dancing in full swing, I decided to be the early-to-bed type and slunk off into the Parma night. Or tried to. Turns out I am still culturally challenged by the inside, outside and all around the townside locks on the buildings here. So, having shut the main entry door behind me and proceeded a few metres to the iron gate to the street, I discovered the exit gate was well and truly locked, and swiftly deduced that the unlocking mechanism must be just inside the now locked entry door.

Choices:
a) climb the iron fence in my skirt and weakened (ok and slightly wine-soaked) state – not a great option, although doable since the gate did not have pointy bits on the top of each bar;
b) walk the perimeter of the building and seek alternate exit point (=none found);
c) buzz for assistance from hostesses of high velocity party upstairs.

I opted for c) and then realised this would entail standing on lower rung of gate to read building buzzer name plate upside down, while not strangulating self between bars (you do not want to ring the wrong bell at this hour, I reasoned). I was never a girl scout but I did have a shiny perfume lid I could hold in front of the names to help a bit. Found the right bell. Rang it. Discovered next problem, which was that due to imminent strangulation I could not actually speak into the speaker bit. Luckily Corrie thought to look out the window and came down and released me and the next guest, who swooshed off into the night on her bicycle.

And she was not the only one on wheels at that time of night.

…for then I could rush out to the newsagent and buy a copy of the Independent on Sunday, and read Nancy’s poem which appears in its pages today.

Since I am not and I cannot, instead I will browse the recipes and then read about Englishmen and their beer bellies.

I was feeling so much better this evening, and checking a few food/recipe sites, testing my tolerance for pictures of food (still fairly low – glad that so far you don’t get aromas through the laptop) and I noticed a couple of major differences between two I’ve visited in the past, both by British food celebs.

Further to yesterday’s posting on recipe copyright I was interested to see, while stopping in at Nigella Lawson’s site that I think it has been revamped since my last visit. It’s very much a glossy marketing forum for books, dvds, kitchenware and of course Nigella herself. No Nigella recipes on offer; instead a clever wrinkle whereby she invites readers to post their own recipes. She does provide an index to her own – simply the recipe title and the name of the book it’s from. Drat, and me separated from my one Nigella cookbook by 7 or 8000 miles I think it is. (There are some of her recipes available at UKTV Food, including a good one for lemon risotto.)

Thankfully Delia Smith still offers a hefty selection of recipes, though some (would be interesting to know what percentage) of them are now locked into “premium content” which you have to pay for. (I wonder if more and more recipes will slip into the “premium” void?) While the site is also a serious marketing tool – you can buy kitchenware, books, online recipe collections and even wine – she has a number of added-value pages, like her online cookery school. If you’ve ever lamely wondered how to make shortcrust pastry, joint a raw chicken, or prepare and serve a mango, she gives you step by step instructions with photos. And if that leaves you thirsting for more she offers links to her own cooking school in Norwich (no she doesn’t teach the classes) and the Leith School in London.

On the other hand there is a page where she plugs products for McCain’s that she has developed to bulk up her football team (Norwich City). An interesting wrinkle – given the U.S. copyright controversy – is that she gives a few of the recipes for these away in case you want the hands-on challenge of making a high-carb, low-fat dish like Lean Shepherd’s Pie from scratch (–if “scratch” to you includes using McCain’s frozen mashed potatoes) (why on earth would anyone use frozen mashed potatoes for anything??). And she does tell the alert reader, flat-out, that a simple baked potato (not counting any fillings) is a better source of carbohydrates than anything McCain’s is offering.

I have been languishing in my sickbed for two solid days, mostly too ill for meditation, although I have reached the following conclusion: surely the ailment that delivers the hardest blow to the solar plexis of the student of food culture is stomach flu. My diet since Monday has consisted of a large bottle of water, two glasses of juice, and this evening about a half cup of cooked white rice. Not least of my discomforts was the irritation of knowing I was missing lectures by visiting food culture expert Laura Mason, who I’d particularly wanted to hear. I did manage to listen to the radio for a little while today, and reflect on some recent articles I’d read.

I listened again to a report on Italian vs British food on the latest Food Programme, which is available online until Sunday when it is replaced by a report on olive oil: very timely for us as we begin a few weeks of study on that very topic. This episode was built around a visit to Fiera del Bue Grasso in Piemonte. Some interesting discussion about attitudes to food, issues around steroid use in cattle, and a recipe for brasato. One remark caught my ear (by eminent food writer Anna del Conte, a longtime Italian expat living in Dorset), which was that there was good food to be had in Britain, and the opportunity to buy from producers, but getting hold of it was tied to class (and income).

On a partially connected note I spotted a piece by Israeli food writer Daniel Rogov on finding good food in Britain. I was amused by his observation that “French restaurants have become the rage in the city and many of these serve meals that, in addition to being creative and exquisite are often so expensive that a weekend in Paris is a cheaper way to enjoy French food than by dining in London.”

I had come upon Rogov while reading his excellent commentary on recipe writing which I’d been led to by following a report on some weird things happening with food patents and copyrights Oddly enough, a friend (thanks Ruth!) had earlier in the week sent me a link to an article about food experiments by the very chef Cantu mentioned in the copyright article. Not convinced this is the kind of food I want to spend my money on just now: too many unprocessed foods I haven’t tried yet, still in their original packaging. (Why does everything I read lately make me want to wail “what have we done to our food??”)