MooMooFoodie

NY Times: How We Got to Dessert

December 2, 2011

How We Got to Dessert

By DAWN DRZAL

Eel in marzipan and goose-liver macaroons may sound like outtakes from Monty Python’s “Crunchy Frog” skit, but in SWEET INVENTION: A History of Dessert (Chicago Review Press, $24.95), Michael Krondl tells us that the eel was offered at a 16th-century Italian banquet while the cookies, known more elegantly as foie gras macaroons, are the creation of a 21st-century Parisian pastry chef. These two dishes show how the relationship between sweet and savory has come full circle — from medieval and Renaissance Europe, when there was no division between them, to their segregation during the 20th century and back again to the current era, in which cutting-edge chefs delight in toying with our expectations.

Krondl’s book attempts to chronicle the evolution of the sweet course by visiting six regions that roughly reflect sugarcane’s spread across the world: India, the Middle East, Italy, France, Austria and the United States. After all, at the heart of dessert is sugar, “the prime mover,” ­Krondl thoughtfully points out, “of the trans-Atlantic traffic in human beings.” As the author of “The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice,” he is qualified to tell the shameful story of sugar as spice.

Although science has established that our love of sweet things is rooted in evolution, ­Krondl posits that “dessert is a purely cultural phenomenon.” Thus the Sacher torte, “an edible manifestation of an urban, cosmopolitan Vienna, as smooth and fitted as a little black cocktail dress,” embodies Austria’s tradition of skilled artisanal pastry cooks. Contrast this with America’s “rural and profoundly unaristocratic” apple pie, an expression of our nation’s “almost religious attitude about home baking.”

Unfortunately, Krondl’s fascinating cultural account is embedded deep within another, far less digestible one. Somehow he fails to draw the crucial distinction between a history of dessert, certainly an ambitious enough subject, and a history of individual desserts. After a seemingly endless trudge through the “thousand and one sweet layers” of Middle Eastern cooking, I reached what Krondl calls the “smoking gun” — that kasutera or “castela cake” was introduced into Japan by the Portuguese in the 16th century — and my first thought was, “Hand it to me, quick.”

“The French noun dessert,” Krondl explains, “originates with the verb desservir, or un-serve, that is, to remove what has been served. In other words, le dessert was set out once the table had been cleared of the dishes that made up the main part of the meal.” Although the term appears a couple of times in the late 14th century, it would not attain its current meaning until roughly 1900.

Medieval European cooks added a lot of sugar to their savory dishes, and at that Italian meal in 1529 featuring the eel in marzipan, Krondl reports, “anchovy salad was served alongside ­sugar-dusted cream pies.” By the mid-17th century, however, when La Varenne wrote “Le Cuisinier François,” a weak “Maginot line” had been established between sweet and savory. Sugar was banned from salty dishes, but sweet foods were still served concurrently with meats and fish. Yet the breach had been opened and would be widened further by the gradual replacement, 150 years later, of “service à la française, the custom of serving numerous dishes simultaneously, . . . by service à la russe, where one dish followed another.” A century of Russian service ultimately resulted in dessert as we know it.

Today we have the surreal experiments of a generation of young “molecular gastronomists” inspired by Ferran Adrià of the legendary — and, lamentably, recently closed — restaurant in Catalonia, El Bulli. At one such meal, “oysters come with a gin and tonic foam, barnacles sit atop cubes of watermelon, seared foie gras is served with cherries and octopus.” Mmm. Just like Grandma used to make.

Cook and Share A Pot of Curry From MooMooFoodie's Kitchen! :)

Tom Yam Curry Chicken from MooMooFoodie's Kitchen! :)

Participate in this meaningful event and spread the importance of intercultural understanding between countries and also between the different races and nationalities within one country!

For background info:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=254441147918239

This is a Facebook Page created by a group of Singaporeans after a report came about that a mainland Chinese family (from China) told a local Indian Family not to eat curry and not to cook curry. The appointed mediator - a certain Madam Giam facilitated the case in such a way that : the Indian family could cook curry only when the mainland Chinese family is not at home. (mediation agreement).

So far, more than 60,000 around the world (mostly Singaporeans!) are joining in. Cook a pot of curry or buy a take-out from a restaurant (if you can't cook or too busy to do so).

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Excerpt from Facebook Page:

http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC110808-0000102/Number-of-neighbour-disputes-hit-high (this is the link)

and this is the clarification to the case:
http://app2.mlaw.gov.sg/Highlights/tabid/168/Default.aspx?ItemId=568

and 16th Aug 2011 (The Law Minister's clarification)
http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20110816-294757/2.html

How we feel
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How could a appointed mediator facilitate the case in such a way that restricts the lifestyle and cooking norms of the Indian family? Or any other local family who practices a cultural lifestyle that we have all made our own? In this case, Curry has always been part of our culture since the 1800s. It can be anything else that you or I hold dear.

There is a native Malay proverb "Di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung" ("You should hold up the sky of the land where you live") - ie one should respect the country in which you choose to live in. ( ie blend/ assimilate/ understand/ tolerate / integrate into the community of your chosen choice)

What we wish for
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When the new immigrants arrive here, we wish for them to respect / embrace the cultural / lifestyle and linguistic norms of this nation. We wish for all new immigrants and citizens to understand and appreciate the various and diverse cultural aspects of the various ethnic-minority groups we have here.

This is Singapore and we are part of Malayan culture. Our hinterland previously was Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago. Our ancestors came, met and mingled and through an adventurous and open mindset, created something unique and beautiful... (thus our local culture as such- curries/ spices/ a vast melting pot of people and mixed heritages)

* A message to all new citizens: We sincerely hope you integrate into our local culture and make attempts to assimilate and embrace/ appreciate the various multi-ethnic cultures we had built up so painstakingly over the decades. Because at the same time, we are definitely open to taking the best that you have to offer, and to create new and beautiful Singaporean things.

*We Singaporeans are basically nice and tolerant people. We will accept you as new citizens and hope you blend in and integrate with us well.


Upset with CMC
-----------------------
We are mainly upset with the "Community Mediation Centre's" mediation action of actually facilitating such a mediation agreement. It is the inalienable right of the Indian family to cook curry at any time they wish to within the four walls of their home. (having said that, let us all- natives, new citizens or otherwise, embrace the multi-cultural aspects of our nation)

Every Singaporean should just cook a pot of curry and eat it (regardless of race / language / religion). We are Singaporeans and we LOVE our curries - be it chicken curry / fish curry / lamb curry / beef curry / beef rendang / lontong / mee siam/ laksa / Petai sambal belachan / ayam buah keluak etc

Thank You Very Much for supporting "Cook A Pot of Curry" Event!

- from the Admin Group

ST: Sweet on sour (Recipe for Pig Trotters in Black Vinegar)

This dish is something that I will never eat. However, according to my mom, it is good to take this during confinement (i.e. after giving birth). For those out there searching for recipe - happy reading and happy cooking.

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Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Taste > Story

Apr 24, 2011

Sweet on sour

Maisy Koh's confinement dish of pig trotters calls for black sugar and black vinegar

By Rebecca Lynne Tan, Singapore Cooks

 

Chocolate is the one thing Ms Maisy Koh cannot live without.

The housewife confesses shyly that the dark, addictive confection is always in the refrigerator of her Bukit Timah condominium.

'Oh, I love chocolate,' says the 38-year-old mother of two, Sophie, two, and Sonya, nine months. Her husband, Dr Beh Swan Gin, is a civil servant.

Yet, whenever she dines out, she hardly picks chocolate desserts, such as lava cakes which ooze warm chocolate from its centre, simply because she can make it at home.

In fact, the former brand management professional who used to work for a luxury resort chain can bake almost anything - from muffins and breads for her kids to kueh salat (a Nonya cake of glutinous rice topped with a pandan-flavoured coconut jam) to fluffy pandan chiffon cakes and carrot cakes.

And it is for those reasons that she always has a good stash of unsalted butter in her fridge, too.

She says it is important to have certain ingredients such as butter and coconut milk in the pantry, just in case you need them at the last minute.

'We had some black glutinous rice the other day, and it needs a dash of coconut milk to go with it, too,' she adds.

But the home cook more than just bakes in her well-stocked kitchen.

She also smokes her own salmon with herbs such as kaffir lime leaves and thyme, as well as cooks Asian dishes like pig trotters in black vinegar. She shares the recipe below.

She admits she was never keen on the 'sourish fatty pork' dish, but enjoyed the one her confinement nanny Yat Yee prepared for her after she had Sonya.

'It is not my favourite dish, but I learnt to cook it because my mother loves it, and so does my mother-in-law,' she says.

The dish is traditionally prepared for mothers after the birth of their babies during the month-long confinement period, and it is also consumed by friends and family who visit the mother during this time.

Ms Koh likes Yat Yee's recipe because of the balance in flavours - the dish is sour yet sweet.

The recipe calls for black sugar, a very dark brown sugar that can be found at wet markets and supermarkets. Use refined white sugar or rock sugar instead, and you will not achieve the right taste, she explains.

She also recommends the Chan Kong Thye brand of black rice vinegar. 'Any other brand might do but I cannot guarantee the dish will turn out good,' she adds with a chuckle.

She took an interest in cooking when she was in primary school and would help her late paternal grandmother with menial kitchen tasks such as pounding condiments with a mortar and pestle.

As a child, she would also stand by her grandmother's side, watching intently as she wrapped bak chang, a glutinous rice dumpling filled with pork, wrapped in bamboo leaves.

She has since learnt to make the dumplings and also cooks dishes such as char siew, spare ribs and tang yuan (glutinous rice balls).

In fact, it seems no recipe fazes her and she is even keen to make gnocchi from scratch with older daughter, Sophie, some time soon.

She says with a laugh: 'I think Sophie will like it, and the recipe for gnocchi doesn't look like rocket science.'

rltan@sph.com.sg

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MAKE IT YOURSELF: PIG TROTTERS IN BLACK VINEGAR

INGREDIENTS

10 eggs

1 pig trotter, cut into large chunks

800g pork collar, cut into large chunks (about 10cm by 5cm each)

30ml sesame oil

300g old ginger, unpeeled and sliced

375ml black rice vinegar (1 bottle, Chan Kong Thye brand)

375ml water

1 Tbs light soya sauce

5 Tbs black sugar

1/2 tsp ground white pepper

METHOD

1. Put eggs into a pot of water and bring to a slow boil. Allow to boil for six minutes, drain and set aside. When cool enough to handle, peel the eggs and set them aside.

2. Bring another large pot of water to the boil. Blanch pig trotter and pork collar in the water.

3. Remove any impurities that might have risen to the surface of the pot. Take the meat out of the water. Clean it thoroughly and remove hairs from the skin. Set aside.

4. Pour sesame oil in a large pot over medium heat and fry ginger slices for about two minutes, until fragrant.

5. Pour the entire bottle of black vinegar into the pot. Then fill the empty vinegar bottle with water and pour the water into the pot as well.

6. Add soya sauce, sugar, pepper and hard-boiled eggs. Cover and allow to simmer gently for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to keep the colour of the eggs even. Remove eggs and set aside.

7. Add pig trotter to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

6. Add pork collar and bring to a boil again. Keep the pot on a rigorous simmer over medium heat, with the lid left ajar. Simmer for 1 to 11/2 hours, or until the meat is very tender.

7. Just before serving, scoop out any impurities that may have come to the surface such as the ginger skin. Place the eggs back into the pot.

8. When ready to serve, bring to a boil again. Serve hot.

Serves 6.

This recipe is featured in Heritage Feasts. The cookbook costs $75 and is available at major bookstores, the Miele boutique, 167 Penang Road, Winsland House II, B1-01, tel: 6738-6286, and online at www.webshop.miele.sg. All proceeds from book sales will go to Kidz Horizon.

NY Times: Where Steaming Fried Noodles Spell Relief

 

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March 19, 2011

Where Steaming Fried Noodles Spell Relief

By KIM SEVERSON

Ramen is usually just steps away from hungry diners in most parts of Japan. Often, it’s in the form of flash-fried, pre-seasoned noodles packed into cellophane bags and foam cups. Now instant ramen is being sent by the truckload to the survivors of the Japanese earthquake.

Of course, instant ramen was born of hardship. In the aftermath of World War II, a Taiwanese businessman named Momofuku Ando was inspired by two things: long lines of starving people waiting for fresh ramen in Osaka and a government edict encouraging people to eat bread made with wheat flour donated by the United States. They pushed bread because noodle companies were too small to handle the demand.

But the entrepreneur had a better idea: mass-produced noodles. In 1958, after several years of experimenting, he began selling chicken-flavored instant ramen to appeal to export markets averse to pork or beef. It was the precursor to Top Ramen. His company, Nissin Foods, would later strike gold in America with Cup Noodles and its varieties of flavors.

From its beginnings in Japan, and despite misgivings about its nutritional merits, instant ramen has found devotees worldwide among the poor and those too tired or ill-equipped to cook. It is the belly-filling standby of travelers and cabdrivers and office workers too busy to leave their desks. In American dorm rooms, ramen sustains the starving student.

I once wrote an article about women in prison who so longed to cook that they figured out ways to approximate the creativity of the kitchen while incarcerated. A favorite recipe was instant ramen noodles dressed up with items from the prison commissary: sliced Slim Jims and crushed Cheetos.

Instant ramen is now entrenched in popular culture. An emo-pop record label, started on a shoestring, is named Fueled by Ramen. There are books like “Chicken-Flavored Ramen for the Soul” and thousands of recipes dedicated to dressing it up. One company sells a little silicone figurine that holds down the lid of a ramen cup, changing color when the ramen is done.

But instant ramen’s essential appeal, beyond cost, convenience and kitsch, is that noodle soup is soulful and soothing.

“At the very basic level, however it was produced, you are getting hot soup and noodles, and that is one of the most basic comfort foods the world has ever known,” said the chef David Chang, who led a ramen revolution of sorts in Manhattan with his steaming bowls of fresh ramen at ’Momofuku Noodle Bar in the East Village. (And who, for the record, says his restaurant is not named after the founder of instant noodles, but rather because momo in Japanese means peach and fuku means lucky.)

Nutritionists and the diet-conscious have made instant ramen a noodle non grata. One packet contains about half the maximum amount of sodium anyone should eat in a day. And most versions are fried, sometimes with particularly unhealthy trans fat.

But attacking instant ramen donated to feed Japanese earthquake victims would be just wrong, said Mr. Chang. It’s still very cold in the north, and there was a recent snow. Although potable water is at a premium, those who can find a source of fuel might melt snow or ice to turn dried noodles into sustenance.

“You are not going to tell a starving person they can’t eat that,” he said. “Now is not the time. For the dire situation they’re in, I can’t imagine a better food.”

 

WSJ: Mochi - New Year's Silent Killer

January 4, 2011, 3:04 PM JST

Mochi: New Year’s Silent Killer

On Saturday, a 66-year-old woman on the outskirts of Tokyo fell victim to a deadly seasonal hazard that lands dozens in the emergency room every year on January 1: sticky rice cakes.

Sticky rice cakes, or mochi, as the Japanese call them, are made by pounding the life out of glutinous rice and are a staple during the Japanese new year feast. The average Japanese consumes about 1 kg of mochi annually, most of which is eaten during the first week of new year, according to the mochi trade association website.

Rhosoi/Flickr Mochi served in a dish known as zoni makes it stickier and more deathly.

While harmless to most, mochi claims a handful of lives every year by getting lodged in the throats and blocking the airways of elderly eaters whose mastication abilities and saliva secretion may be weakened by age. According to the Tokyo Fire Department, this traditional food sends over 100 patients to the hospital every year in Tokyo alone—mostly aged 60 and over— half of which end up in serious condition or worse. Between 2006 and 2009, 18 people died from mochi suffocation in Tokyo, making it the leading food item to cause suffocation.

During the new year, consumption shoots up, as does mochi’s deadly viscosity—mochi is served submerged in hot broth as a dish known as zoni, making it stickier than it would be if prepared otherwise. Almost half of mochi-inflicted injuries in Tokyo occur in January. The Japanese media has reported eight mochi-related deaths in Tokyo in the first three days of the new year.

While these tragic yet preventable deaths are largely accepted as part of the New Year’s landscape, some are beginning to question the preferential treatment given to mochi. In 2008, fruit jelly with konjac yam powder was vilified after 22 people were reported to have suffocated from it over the span of 13 years. After much investigation involving doctors, dentists and engineers, the Japanese government decided last month that the shape and size of the fruit jelly should be altered. That the Food Safety Commission found mochi to be about 50 times more dangerous than konjac jelly seemed to have gone ignored.

With the reports of this year’s mochi death toll mounting, Japanese have bloggers are wondering out loud about the unfairness of mochi’s untouchable status. “The only reason why mochi isn’t regulated is because it’s a traditional food item,” says one blogger. “Is it just easier to pick on a limited number of konjac jelly makers, compared to countless mochi producers?” If bloggers get their way, Prime Minister Naoto Kan  may have one more sticky issue on his new year’s plate.

Read this post in Japanese/日本語訳はこちら≫

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Prosperity Starts with a Pea

December 29, 2010

Prosperity Starts With a Pea

By JESSICA B. HARRIS

AT year’s end, people around the world indulge in food rituals to ensure good luck in the days ahead. In Spain, grapes eaten as the clock turns midnight — one for each chime — foretell whether the year will be sweet or sour. In Austria, the New Year’s table is decorated with marzipan pigs to celebrate wealth, progress and prosperity. Germans savor carp and place a few fish scales in their wallets for luck. And for African-Americans and in the Southern United States, it’s all about black-eyed peas.

Not surprisingly, this American tradition originated elsewhere, in this case in the forests and savannahs of West Africa. After being domesticated there 5,000 years ago, black-eyed peas made their way into the diets of people in virtually all parts of that continent. They then traveled to the Americas in the holds of slave ships as food for the enslaved. “Everywhere African slaves arrived in substantial numbers, cowpeas followed,” wrote one historian, using one of several names the legume acquired. Today the peas are also eaten in Brazil, Central America and the Caribbean.

In the United States, few foods are more connected with African-Americans and with the South. Before the early 1700s, black-eyed peas were observed growing in the Carolina colonies. As in Africa, they were often planted at the borders of the fields to help keep down weeds and enrich the soil; cattle grazed on the stems and vines. These practices are at the origin of two of the peas’ alternative names: cowpeas and field peas. The peas, which were eaten by enslaved Africans and poorer whites, became one of the Carolinas’ cash crops, exported to the Caribbean colonies before the Revolutionary War.

Like many other dishes of African inspiration, black-eyed peas made their way from the slave cabin to the master’s table; the 1824 edition of “The Virginia Housewife” by Mary Randolph includes a recipe for field peas. Randolph suggests shelling, boiling and draining the “young and newly gathered” peas, then mashing them into a cake and frying until lightly browned. The black-eyed pea cakes are served with a garnish of “thin bits of fried bacon.”

Of course, black-eyed peas find their most prominent expression around New Year’s in the holiday’s signature dish: Hoppin’ John, a Carolina specialty made with black-eyed peas and rice and seasoned with smoked pork. Again, though, the peas and rice combination reaches back beyond the Lowcountry to West Africa, where variants are eaten to this day. Senegal alone has three variations: thiebou kethiah, a black-eyed pea and rice stew with eggplant, pumpkin, okra and smoked fish; sinan kussak, a stew with smoked fish and prepared with red palm oil; and thiebou niebe, a stew seasoned with fish sauce that is closest to America’s Hoppin’ John.

Just as nobody is sure of the origin of the name Hoppin’ John, no one seems quite certain why the dish has become associated with luck, or New Year’s. Some white Southerners claim that black-eyed peas saved families from starvation during the Union Army’s siege of Vicksburg in the Civil War. “The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food” suggests that it may come from Sephardic Jews, who included the peas in their Rosh Hashana menu as a symbol of fertility and prosperity.

For African-Americans, the connection between beans and fortune is surely complex. Perhaps, because dried black-eyed peas can be germinated, having some extra on hand at the New Year guaranteed sustenance provided by a new crop of the fast-growing vines. The black-eyed pea and rice combination also forms a complete protein, offering all of the essential amino acids. During slavery, one ensured of such nourishment was lucky indeed.

Whatever the exact reason, black-eyed peas with rice form one corner of the African-American New Year’s culinary trinity: greens, beans and pig. The greens symbolize greenbacks (or “folding money”) and may be collards, mustards or even cabbage. The pork is a remembrance of our enslaved forebears, who were given the less noble parts of the pig as food. But without the black-eyed pea, which journeyed from Africa to the New World, it just isn’t New Year’s — at least not a lucky one.

Jessica B. Harris is an English professor at Queens College and the author of the forthcoming “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America.”

ST: Scarce kimchi turns to 'geum-chi'

Asia

Home > Asia > Asia > Story

Oct 7, 2010

Scarce kimchi turns to 'geum-chi'

Beloved Korean dish as valued as geum or gold, as bad weather sends cabbage prices soaring

People queueing to buy Napa cabbages, subsidised by the Seoul city hall, at the Tongin market yesterday. The price of the cabbage, a key ingredient of kimchi, has skyrocketed after inclement weather caused crops to fail. -- PHOTO: REUTERS

 

SEOUL: It is autumn and the season for kimchi making in South Korea.

But two months of unusually heavy rain have decimated the country's cabbage crop and sent the price of Napa cabbages, a key ingredient of the dish, soaring.

The price of cabbages in markets and grocery stores hit a record high of 10,000 won (S$11) per head this week, up almost five-fold from last year's 1,600 won and three times that of last month's 3,000 won.

Prices of other essential ingredients of the spicy fermented cabbage dish, including radish and garlic, have also doubled over the past year.

South Koreans have taken to jokingly calling the side dish 'geum-chi'. Geum is Korean for gold.

Kimchi-makers have already increased the prices of their products, and supermarket shelves have been emptied of ready-made kimchi packs. Kimchi home delivery companies have also suspended services.

Some restaurants have started charging for kimchi, which used to be provided free as a side dish, while others simply stopped offering it.

'I am not sure if I should start to charge for kimchi or exclude it from the side dishes. I have never experienced such shortage (of cabbage) in my 10 years as a chef running this restaurant,' a owner of a Korean restaurant in Gwacheon told the Korea Herald newspaper.

When President Lee Myung Bak announced he would eat only kimchi made from what he said was cheaper round cabbage common in Europe and North America, many people erupted in anger.

The round cabbage, Internet users pointed out, was only slightly cheaper here than the Chinese variety, suggesting the President's claim was out of touch with the needs and concerns of the masses, reported the Los Angeles Times.

To ease the cabbage shortage, the government has cut tariffs on Chinese-imported cabbages and other produce this week. But not everyone welcomes the government's action to import key kimchi ingredients from China.

A housewife, who gave only her last name Ahn, said: 'I guess cabbages are grown in different soil in China. I am not sure if those cabbages would suit our body.'

She said she is still eating kimchi made last December, reported the Korea Times.

From Tuesday until Oct 20, the Seoul city government is providing the 16 traditional markets in the capital with 300,000 heads of Napa cabbage at just 70 per cent of the market price - enough to feed 10,000 households.

'I lined up five hours before the sale began because I was concerned that I would not get cabbages,' homemaker Shin Jeom Soon told JoongAng Ilbo. The 64-year-old was first in the line outside the Shinwon market in the Gwanak district on Tuesday. The cabbage supplies were sold out within two hours.

This year, a freakish combination of cold temperatures in the spring, an extreme heat wave in the summer and torrential rain last month caused crops to fail and produced a surge in food prices that pushed the country's inflation rate to a 17-month high last month.

Napa cabbage harvests dropped 40 per cent to 153,000 tonnes in the nine months through September, compared with 256,000 tonnes in the same period last year, due to 'abnormal climate changes', the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries said.

South Koreans consume an estimated 1.47 million tonnes of kimchi a year, said Mr Lee Jeong Sik, an official at the agriculture and forestry ministry. Of that, 457,000 tonnes are made at factories and the rest at homes or in restaurants, reported the Associated Press.

Many South Korean homes have special kimchi refrigerators that regulate temperatures to maintain the preferred level of fermentation.

The shortages could not have come at a worse time as the 'kimjang' season is approaching - the annual rite in late October or early November when Korean families gather and make kimchi together before winter sets in.

Housewife An Ok Ju, 55, has decided to skip kimjang this year.

'I have always preferred homemade kimchi over the ones sold in the market, but the price (of cabbage and radish) is just ridiculous this year. I think a lot of housewives will just wait until the shortage eases a little,' she told the Korea Herald.

Madam Kim Hyung Sook has been getting endless requests for kimchi from her grandchildren and husband.

'I don't know how long I can keep ignoring my grandkids and my husband's demands for kimchi at every meal,' she said.

'You are not Korean if you don't eat kimchi three times a day.'

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Pricier ingredients

Napa cabbage: 10,000 won (S$11) per head, up more than 500 per cent from the same time last year.

Radish: 4,150 won per radish, up 251 per cent.

Garlic: 13,100 won per kg, up 105 per cent.

Green lettuce: 4,200 won per bag, up more than 200 per cent.

Spring onion: 3,000 won per bundle, up more than 200 per cent.

FT: The language of food

The language of food

By Simon Schama

Published: July 31 2010 00:32 | Last updated: July 31 2010 00:32

Abraham van Beyeren’s ‘Banquet’ (1667)

There’s not much I won’t or can’t eat. I’ve eaten crocodile in Holland; barbied kangaroo at Uluru and mountain oysters in Wyoming. But tongue has always tested my gag reflex. Lambs’ tongues are a particular problem because, since they are pretty much the same size as our own, one stands a fair chance of biting the former rather than the latter. Given that tongues are dense with cell receptors (50 to 100 for each so-called bud), the experience can be acutely painful and bloody. But there’s another telling aspect to my lingophobia, which is to do with the separate, but connected, functions of the tongue that precludes the possibility of consumption. Biting one’s tongue is an act expressing pre-emptive remorse in the mouth. It’s the threat of damaging or mutilating that multi-tasking organ, the instrument of utterance and consumption, that is at the root (not to pun) of my tongue anxiety, I suppose. Do any of us really want to eat our own words?

La langue, the word and the idea, is, of course, a gastro-structuralist’s dream, especially when allied to the palate; though the connection between language and eating seems not to have occurred to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the founding father of modern linguistics who first posited a distinction between la langue (a system of language) and la parole (speech or individual utterances). Saussure never seems to have reflected on the fact that it is the elemental experience of taste, registered on the tongue’s cell receptors, which gives rise in the infant to sound communication; and that, further evolved, is the defining characteristic of what distinguishes humans from dumb beasts. Almost all of the nerve endings in a newborn are centralised in tongue and mouth, so that the former acts as an astonishingly precocious processor of information coming from the maternal breast and its milk. Babies use their tongues expressively to register difference of mood and wants. The infant sucks, generates a sound, and, in turn, that sound, learned as a signal to prompt parental attention, will cue up a feed: it is, you might say, a perfect feedback loop.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

When in Rome - Jul-31

The latest must-have chef’s toy - Jul-31

Foraging on the streets of San Francisco - Jul-31

So does the lingo compulsion begin with mother’s milk? That as soon as we eat, we feel the need to make some noise about it, a sound that will end up as verbalisation and, eventually, writing. It’s certainly the case that we do seem culturally and socially wired for this connection, and that, while beasts roar with hunger or grunt with satisfaction, our own feeding process demands something more complex. It’s been, for example, a standard form of commentary by travellers, observing those whom they think of as relatively unsophisticated natives, to make a point of commenting on the savagery of eating in speed and silence, akin, they usually say, to animals. That at least was the view of the many travellers to the United States in the 19th century, especially the French and the English who, like Colonel Basil Hall, Fanny Trollope and Dickens, never passed up an opportunity to comment on the velocity and utter silence with which Americans, especially on the frontier, in river boats – but also in large taverns and hostelries – ate.

In contrast, the instinct to register relish through description and discussion has long been established as a protocol of civility. As soon as there are texts, there are food compulsions, not least in the Bible, which can fairly be characterised as food-obsessed, whether in the morphology of taboos, complicated distinctions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy between clean and unclean, but also in prophetic poetics. At almost every critical turning point of scriptural teleology, outcomes turn on food choices: the fruit that evicted men and women from Eden; the mess of pottage that disrupted the family hierarchy; the Singer of the Song’s pomegranate fixation – and on and on. (Much, as the anthropologist Margaret Visser would say, “depends on dinner”.) In culture, rather than nature, there is no eating, and perhaps no cooking, without talking and writing; the manner of utterance in speech and on the page bears a load of significance, whether in rhetorical spectacle (like television); the language manners of menus; or the growth of the vocalising habit in waiting staff which in the United States, perhaps to reverse that earlier reputation for taciturnity, has become a kind of social preaching often done by not-very-good performers.

A chosen diction carries with it a code of values about the nature of food and its preparation. The A-line decorum with which the heavily frocked Fanny Cradock presented her cooking lessons on television in the 1950s made it plain that they were meant for women who aspired to be epitomes of bourgeois propriety. At something like the opposite pole, a half-century later, Gordon Ramsay’s F Word compressing – let’s say it, and strip it of its coyness – sex and alimentation, f***ing and feeding, is a possibly over-strenuous way of proclaiming an earthy combative liberation from the culinary preciousness of haute cuisine.

It doesn’t take much prompting for any number of these gastrodialectics to come to mind. You can’t beat the pioneers of “Fooding”, the French journalists Alexandre Cammas and Emmanuel Rubin, for exploiting the implications of language to communicate their version of an eating and cooking revolution. The neologism of “fooding” is, of course, not accidental. Using franglais as the masthead of a gastronomic manifesto is a gesture comparable to the Italian futurist artist Marinetti’s choice of diction when he launched his attack on la cucina di nonna but perhaps even more aggressive. For “Fooding” – the shameless embrace of the snack, the brief concentrated hit of food before moving on to somewhere and something else, preferably from an absolutely different food culture – intentionally violates much of the holy writ of gastronomie: concentration, slowness, uniformity, coherence, meditative pleasure and even the hierarchy of courses beginning with savoury appetiser or hors d’oeuvre and ending with sweet dessert. And it is striking how much the lingo effect is crucial to the subversion. In 2004 Cammas and Rubin published Fooding, le Dico, a “dictionnaire totalement subjectif” where you’ll find potted biographies of the new heroes, such as Ferran Adrià of El Bulli and Victor Arguinzoniz – “Che Guevara du barbecue” – along with shout-outs to those who, like Anthony Bourdain, have at some point violated the protocols. (There are also entries on “crumble”, Duralex glass and “jerk chicken” (à consommer sans modération sur fond de steel bands déchaîné, au célèbre carnaval londonien de Notting Hill).

The overthrow of gastronomie for “fooding” is the most dramatic recent instance of a language act that is not just incidental to but inseparable from the constitution of a food universe. For it may be that we have now become too logorrhoeic for our own good, whether it’s the almost unimaginable proliferation of food journalism and cookbooks, the multiplication of television food programmes (I plead guilty as an occasional accomplice); the appalling habit (marked in the United States) of training waiting staff to deliver lengthy disquisitions and sermons on their specials – often, and inaccurately, with the personal pronoun attached (as in “my sea bass today comes with wild rice and a stuffing of celery root and rutabaga”). Then there is the menu itself – often a work of faux-literature minus any obligation to obey the basic rules of syntax. (I’ve made it my own rule of thumb – and I recommend it to you – never to order any item described with more than one verb.)

The sheer ubiquity and quantity of such food-wording has lowered the bar of quality to the point of almost complete exhaustion. There is however, another, older food-word culture which sees the experience of food as a way of illuminating human behaviour; to set out what exactly it is that humans do not only when they feed but when they register their feeding on the speaking tongue and the writing mind. What this language reaches for is, surely, a kind of verbal re-enactment; an act of translation from one sort of experience to the other, in the knowledge that much – perhaps the essence – will indeed be lost in translation, as indeed it is lost in comparable verbal exercises when we try to speak or write about music or sex, but without any diminution of the compulsion to try. And, sometimes, what happens in translation can have its own unmistakable richness. Take Z Guinaudeau’s wonderful recipe for mchoui [whole spit-roasted lamb] given to me by my friend, the cookbook writer Alice Sherwood: “Choose a young sheep, fat but not too big. Bsmillah. Plunge the knife into the carotid and let the blood spout out to the last drop. Wash the gash in the throat seven times. Make a hole with the point of the knife just above the knee joint of one of the back legs between flesh and skin. Put a stick through this hole and turning it round, start to loosen the skin. Through this opening blow till the air gets to the forelegs and makes them stick up. The sheep will then swell and stiffen as though it had been a long time in water ...”

What this passage does, it seems to me, is to succeed through the sheer clumsiness of translation. Put another way, the translation of the experience is owed to the mistranslation of the idiom. This rich description of what it is we do when we plant, harvest, slaughter, butcher, knead, bake, roast and consume ought not, of course, to be left to the inadvertent payload of inadequate translation. The strongest food writers aim exactly for that wraparound translation effect. But how to convey that socially inflected rich description without sounding like an anthropology seminar? The best writers embed their cookery – and their recipes – in remembered experience; part memoir, part re-enactment. And when I say embed, in Elizabeth David’s case, at least in the most prodigious of all her books, French Provincial Cooking (1960), this is literally true: in the layout of her best books, ingredients and cooking procedures are – deliberately, I’m quite sure – made to disappear inside the text of the essay in social recollection or the gastronomical archive. To get to, say, the wonderful passages on daubes you have to go via a quotation from Pierre Huguenin’s Les Meilleurs Recettes de Ma Pauvre Mère: “When we arrived at my grandmother’s dark kitchen on Sunday after Vespers it was lit by a ray of sunshine in which the dust and the flies were dancing and there was a sound like a little bubbling spring. It was a daube which since midday had been murmuring gently on the stove, giving out sweet smells which brought tears to your eyes ... ” The effect of David’s heaped remembrances is to turn any individual dish into a kind of archive of social experience. And it was this Proustian act of poetic fusion that first really got me and some of my generation cooking in the 1960s. What we felt truly translated in her paragraphs was remembered sensuality.

Which cues up and leaves the best for last, I suppose, the greatest food writer who has ever lived, or at least written in English: Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, whom even the authors of Le Dico revere for the sublimity of her prose. In MFK, Elizabeth David’s tendency to embed the recipe within memory, archive and ethnography became even more completely dissolved. You don’t, I think, really go to her for the recipes – I’m not sure I have ever actually cooked one. What you do go to her for is the exactly rendered experience of hunger, passion, devouring; and for a matchless, poetic talent. “Borderland”, a tiny essay, for instance, finds her in Strasbourg with her husband Al Fisher in February, in a freezing, “cramped dirty apartment across from the sad zoo, half full of animals and birds frozen too stiff even to make smells”. There is a recipe – of a sort – buried in this essay, but MFK sets up the bleakness of the place she’s in in order to introduce her “dish”, if we should call it that: “tangerine sections warmed on the radiator”. “My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only describe how they are prepared”, which she does with all kinds of details that have not a lot to do with the tangerine treatment, but everything to do with the material presence of the woman herself who is fingering them: “In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently, do not bruise them as you watch soldiers pass, and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent ... tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string ... ” You are then supposed to lay out a newspaper on the hot radiator and lay the sections on them so that they plump up in the heat. They perfume the room. “The sections of tangerines are gone and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl that crackles so tinnily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell. There must be someone, though, who knows what I mean. Probably everyone does because of his own secret eatings.”

Here, next to nothing is lost in translation and, because of the perfect word-play, the shell crackling under one’s teeth like Chinese enamel followed by its opposite, the rush of cold pulp, we are, for a moment, in MFK’s body, indeed in her mouth. Which is as good a place as anywhere to end.

Extracted from ‘Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother’ (Bodley Head, £20), published on August 5. Simon Schama is a contributing editor to the FT

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Fergus Henderson and the British blood and guts style

The widely acclaimed British chef Fergus Henderson opened St John restaurant, near Smithfield meat market in London, in 1994. His book ‘Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking’ (1999) celebrates using every part of an animal.

In Nose to Tail Eating Henderson tells us how to eat radishes at their peak. “Pile your intact radishes on to a plate and have beside them a bowl of coarse sea salt and the good butter.”

Now no one is in any danger of confusing a recipe written like this with anything written by the Eff-Chef Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver. But there’s something about that insistent definite article – “the” good butter. What “the good butter” does sound like, very like, is John Evelyn’s 1699 treatise on salad, Acetaria, or, in fact, any cookbook from post-Baconian (no pun intended again) England of the 17th and pre-Romantic 18th century – Gervase Markham or Hannah Glasse. “Take a faire carp and scour him well,” etc. Henderson also offers aphorisms passed off as dispassionate culinary science and zoology: “Woodcock defecate before they fly, so they can be roasted with the guts in, which heightens the flavour.” (I bet it does.) The message not so deeply coded is that Henderson’s cooking is all about a return to the imagined English pastoral of Parson Woodforde or Squire Western, in which nature, slaughter and cooking, blood and guts, snout and tripe, were assumed elements in the native kitchen and table.

The journey away from fusion, faddism and fashion is meant, I think, as consolatory therapy for contaminated urbanism. “Even just writing this recipe down,” Henderson says of his fish pie, as if presenting himself as someone who, notwithstanding blood and guts, is prone to attacks of urban neuralgia, “its soothing qualities have quite restored me from the fragile state in which I was.” We don’t really need the confessional tone to make the pie; but we register it as a delineator of authorial personality: the poetic romantic butcher-cook seeking to reattach English cooking to its pre-industrial roots.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: Delectable dialect dishes

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Taste > Story

Jul 25, 2010

Delectable dialect dishes

Some like it hot, some like it steamed or fried... put them together and they make up the yummy dishes of Chinese dialect groups

By Rebecca Lynne Tan

To some non-Chinese, Chinese food is all about sweet and sour pork, stir-fried vegetables and fried rice.

With so many dialect groups in the community, confusion arises and others can be forgiven for lumping Chinese food under one giant umbrella.

The distinctive cuisines of Chinese dialect groups are in the limelight now. They are the theme for this year's Singapore Food Festival, which began 10 days ago. The annual festival ends today.

Singapore is made up of a diverse mix of ethnicities and ethnic Chinese form the majority, making up about 76.8 per cent of the population, according to figures from the last Singapore Census of Population, published in 2001.

Most Chinese Singaporeans belong to the Hokkien dialect group. Other dialect groups here are Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese, Foochow, Henghua, Shanghainese and Hockchia.

Cuisines differ a great deal among dialects - from the way a fish is steamed to the way porridge is cooked.

For example, a Teochew-style steamed fish would involve boiling slices of ginger with preserved sour plum, tomato and slices of preserved vegetable. Broth is then added to the fish before it is steamed.

The result is a fish served in a slightly tangy light broth.

Traditional Cantonese-style steamed fish looks and tastes completely different - it is steamed and usually coated in fragrant hot oil and soya sauce, and topped with spring onions and Chinese parsley.

As for porridge, the Teochew style is more like soupy rice, versus the smooth, creamy Cantonese style.

Preferred cooking methods also differ. Some, such as the Teochew, prefer to steam food, rather than fry or deep-fry. The Hainanese, too, prefer simple cooking methods of simmering and blanching.

On the other hand, Cantonese cooking is known for its 'wok hei' - the aromatic charred fragrance which is infused into the food as a result of frying the ingredients over a big flame.

Some dialect groups also use ingredients that others do not.

Hakkas and Foochows are known for fermenting their own wine, which is made from glutinous rice, and often use this in their cooking.

Chef Chan Kwok, 54, group master chef of Orchard Hotel who heads its Cantonese restaurant, Hua Ting, says: 'Cantonese people are well known for brewing good soups. To them, every meal should begin with a bowl of piping hot soup.

'Cantonese chefs believe that soups can help to improve and build up our bodies because of the ingredients and herbs used.'

And if soups are definitive of Cantonese cuisine, Hokkien fare is often characterised by its hearty dishes, such as kong bak pau, which are slices of braised pork belly served in steamed buns.

Hakka cuisine is known for its flavourful and light cooking style, and its popular dish of abacus seeds, which are small yam dumplings cooked with minced pork.

And what about Hainanese chicken rice and pork chop?

Mr Tan Yoke Han, 67, president of the Singapore Hainan Society, says those dishes have been localised.

The chilli and garlic sauce that is served with chicken rice is unique to this part of the world.

The ubiquitous Hainanese pork chop in tomato gravy served with fries or potato slices, he says, was created by Hainanese cooks who worked for the British army and in hotel kitchens and it is an evolution of Western-style dishes.

Foochows come from the coastal region of Fujian province and hence, there is a strong focus on seafood items. Popular dishes include cold crab and clam soup.

Their red wine chicken soup and deep-fried pork liver dishes are also well known.

Mrs Magdelene Low, an executive board member of the Singapore Foochow Association, 57, says: 'We have a good balance of both meat and seafood dishes in our cooking. Our cuisine is slightly heavier than Teochew cuisine.'

But many home cooks believe that the most authentic fare is prepared at home, with recipes passed down through generations.

Housewife Tan Eng Choo, 62, who is Teochew, says: 'I learnt many dishes from my mother and grandmother - how to steam fish, how to make stewed belly pork and how to braise duck.

'We have to keep these dishes true to tradition and remember our roots.'

rltan@sph.com.sg

How can we keep our dialect dishes alive? Write to suntimes@sph.com.sg

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Teochew

Healthy fare include steamed fish with preserved vegetables, tomato, sour plum and ginger (top); pig's trotter jelly (above); and snacks (below) such as pink peng kueh, filled with rice; and white soon kueh, with bamboo shoots and/or radish. -- PHOTOS: DESMOND FOO, ST FILE

Geography: The Teochews are the second largest Chinese dialect group in Singapore, making up about 21 per cent. Many Teochew ancestors came to Singapore from Shantou, in the eastern part of Guangdong province.

Characteristics: Fresh flavours. Sauces are often light but fragrant and tasty.

Cooking methods: Steaming is preferred; other methods include braising and stir-frying.

Famous dishes: Steamed fish with preserved vegetables, tomato, sour plum and ginger; braised goose or duck in soya sauce gravy; pig's trotter jelly or aspic; orh nee, a yam paste dessert; and Teochew porridge, a watery gruel with large fluffy grains of rice. The porridge is often eaten with condiments such as preserved olives, preserved lettuce and salted egg, and simple dishes such as omelette with preserved radish.

Where to try: Chin Lee Restaurant, Block 115 Bedok North Road, 01-285, tel: 6449-5454; Ah Orh, Block 115 Jalan Bukit Merah, 01-1627, tel: 6275-7575; Guan Hin Teochew Restaurant, Block 34 Whampoa West, 01-01, tel: 6298-3179

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Hakka

Favourites include suan pan zi (above) or abacus seeds cooked with minced pork and mushroom; soon kueh made with yam-paste skin (top) and sweet dessert of black bean kueh (below).

Geography: About 8 per cent of Chinese Singaporeans are Hakka, who come from several regions in China, including north-east Fujian province, Guangdong and Jiangxi. The Hakka reportedly moved from central China to southern China during the early dynasties.

Characteristics: A combination of rich and hearty flavours, as well as light soupy fare.

Cooking methods: The use of home-made wine is common in traditional Hakka cooking. Steaming, stir-frying and braising are also popular methods.

Famous dishes: Suan pan zi or yam coins that resemble abacus seeds fried with minced pork and mushroom, and served with shredded cuttlefish; yong tau foo, beancurd stuffed with minced pork; Hakka soon kueh, steamed rice-flour dumplings with a yam-paste skin; lei cha fan or thunder tea rice, rice dish topped with vegetables served with peanuts; and black bean kueh.

Where to try: Plum Village Restaurant, 16 Jalan Leban, tel: 6458-9005; Kew Garden, 315 Outram Road, Tan Boon Liat Building, 02-313/315, tel: 6222-2313

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Hokkien

Yummy goodies include kong bak pau (above) and ngoh hiang, a minced pork, prawn and chestnut roll wrapped in beancurd skin (below).

Geography: Over 41 per cent of the Chinese people in Singapore are of Hokkien descent. Their ancestors came from Fujian province, which is along the south-east coast of China, just north of Guangdong province.

Characteristics: Simple and hearty fare.

Cooking methods: Simmering for soups, braising for meats, frying and stir-frying.

Famous dishes: Kong bak pau, which is sliced braised pork belly served in a steamed bun; Hokkien mee, thick yellow noodles braised in a dark sauce and stock; hae cho, a deep-fried prawn roll; ngoh hiang, a minced pork, prawn and chestnut roll wrapped in beancurd skin; pig's trotter bee hoon or rice vermicelli, and oyster omelette.

Where to try: Beng Thin Hoon Kee Restaurant, 65 Chulia Street, OCBC Centre, 05-02, tel: 6533-2818; Bee Heong Palace, 134 Telok Ayer Street, tel: 6222-9074; Westlake, Block 4 Queen's Road, 02-139, tel: 6474-7283

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Foochow

Red wine chicken soup (above), a Foochow speciality.

Another Foochow must-have is deep-fried liver served with kai lan.

Geography: There are about 50,000 Foochows in Singapore. Other dialect groups closely related to Foochow include Hockchia, Henghua and Hockchew. Most come from the Fuzhou area in Fujian province.

Characteristics: Often cooked with home- made wine, using more meats than seafood.

Cooking methods: Simmering and stir-frying.

Famous dishes: Red wine chicken soup, deep-fried liver with kai lan, fishballs stuffed with minced pork, dumplings, cold crab.

Where to try: Singapura Seafood Restaurant, Block 9 Selegie House, 01-31 Selegie Road, tel: 6336-3255; Lee Do Restaurant, 61 Ubi Avenue 2, 01-13, tel: 6742-6233

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Cantonese

Roast duck, char siew and roast pork (right) are good starters for Cantonese meals. -- PHOTOS: BUSINESS TIMES, DESMOND FOO

Geography: Cantonese people make up about 15 per cent of the Chinese here. Many Cantonese come from Guangzhou, the biggest city in Guangdong province, in southern China.

Characteristics: Rich and robust flavours, tasty soups and dishes with 'wok hei', the charred aroma that infuses the food as a result of being wok-fried over high heat.

Cooking methods: Double-boiled soups, steaming, frying at high heat.

Famous dishes: Roast duck, char siew, steamed fish with soya sauce, braised sea cucumber and Chinese mushrooms, braised spare ribs, watercress soup with pork ribs and red dates, winter melon soup, century egg and lean pork porridge.

Where to try: Hua Ting, 442 Orchard Road, Orchard Hotel, tel: 6739-6666; Mitzi Cantonese Restaurant, 62 Tanjong Pagar Road, tel: 6222-0929

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Hainanese

Hainanese dishes include pork chop in tomato gravy (top); yi bua, a rice- flour kueh filled with coconut, sesame seeds and peanuts (above); and art bua, a rice-flour kueh doused in shredded coconut, and sesame seeds cooked in brown sugar (below).

Geography: Hainanese people come from Hainan island, which is China's southern-most and smallest province. The Singapore Hainan Society estimates that there are about 200,000 Hainanese people here.

Characteristics: Simple cooking with strong flavours.

Cooking methods: Methods typically include boiling and blanching. Cooking styles in Singapore have evolved to include Western-style dishes.

Famous dishes: Bai zhan ji or steamed white chicken which is often eaten with chicken rice; Hainanese pork chop served in a tomato gravy; yi bua, a rice flour kueh filled with coconut, sesame seeds and peanuts; art bua, a rice flour kueh doused in coconut and sesame seeds cooked in brown sugar.

Where to try: YY Kafei Dian, 37 Beach Road, 01-01, tel: 6336-8813; Yet Con, 25 Purvis Street, tel: 6337-6819; Chin Chin Eating House, 19 Purvis Street, tel: 6337-4640

FT: Home cooking in Italy

Home cooking in Italy

By Catherine Nixey

Published: July 24 2010 01:51 | Last updated: July 24 2010 01:51

Mercedes (left), in her Venice home, cooks with Catherine Nixey

Lunchtime in Venice. Outside Gino’s, Dino’s, and Giulio’s, sweating tourists are served lasagne and lamb chops by Polish waitresses. I, however, am sitting in Giorgio’s, and am being offered not food, but photographs by an Italian mamma. “Mia figlia...” She waves another picture. “Mio marito...” For Giorgio’s isn’t an Italian but an Italian’s: the family home of Mercedes and Giorgio, two of that increasingly rare commodity – real Venetians. I’ve come to learn a little about Mercedes’ cooking. Another photograph appears. “E mio figlio!” And rather a lot, it transpires, about her family.

The Italian family meal, as immortalised in a thousand olive oil advertisements, has an almost mythical status: a culinary Arcadia that one admires and aspires to but can rarely hope to experience. However, thanks to a small Italian organisation called Home Food, now you can. Sign up as a temporary member and the organisation will provide you with a menu of matriarchs everywhere from Sicily to the Alps: real life mammas who, for a small fee, will show you their cooking. And their photo albums.

For good measure, I decide to visit two: Mercedes (first names only are given) in Venice, and Ronnie, a septuagenarian grandmother, in Bologna.

Though Home Food is an entirely domestic operation, its aims go well beyond the home. Its founder, Egeria Di Nallo, is a sociology professor at Bologna University. Some years ago, her research led her to observe Italian eating habits and she was worried by what she saw. “Traditional Italian food was in decline in restaurants,” she says. “It takes time – ragù bolognese alone has to be simmered for five or six hours. To make fresh bread for lunch you have to start at 5am.” Lengths of time beyond the means of most restaurants, which today simply buy in their pasta, bread and ragù ready made, she says. “We were starting to forget our own food.” So, in 2004, Di Nallo founded Home Food, with no lesser aim than saving Italian cooking.

To help her on her mission, she sought out not chefs, but home cooks. This was partly because the chef’s tendency is usually towards innovation, whereas the cook’s is towards conservation. But partly also, one senses, from a certain impatience with professional posturing. “Mothers know more,” she says. “The roots of real Italian food are in the family.”

So Di Nallo’s cooks (or Cesarine as they are termed, in honour of a name once common among matriarchs) are all unpaid volunteers. But all have had to pass a rigorous selection process during which Di Nallo examines not only their cooking skills but also their homes and their families. “They must have learnt from a mother, not a book,” I am told. Italian food does not come much more Italian than this.

But, beware, because for those (such as me) raised on imitation Italian, the “real” stuff can come as something of a surprise. Any Brit who first encountered pizza in a Pizza Hut rather than in Palermo will probably recall a sensation of mild horror experienced upon seeing the real thing for the first time. Where, one couldn’t help wondering, was the sponge base? And the fat?

A gauche gastronomic reaction that, after the passage of several years, several pizzas and a few trips to Italy, I had assumed I was beyond. However, I have not been long in the (extremely tidy) kitchen of Ronnie, the first cesarina I visit, when I experience an almost entirely identical reaction; this time to lasagne. Ronnie has just explained to me how to prepare a real lasagne, a process that, in the latter stages at least, involves some assiduous watching of the kitchen clock.

A Pincia cake

As a reward for my hard clock-watching work, I am sat at the table and promised a slice of this lasagne. I eagerly anticipate a swirling soup of saturated fat. What I get instead, is a rather prim, perfect construction. It has, I am told, 12 layers of pasta and has taken two days to prepare. It is also, I am told, Ronnie’s finest creation. The lovely Ronnie beams. So do I. But secretly, I can’t help wondering why she hasn’t put a bit more Cheddar on it.

In contrast, Ronnie’s chocolate torta de Teresina, a darkly delicious creation, could not be less prim. And the only surprising thing about it is that something so succulent and sophisticated could be so simple to prepare, taking probably only 10 minutes in total. What does take time, says Ronnie, is finding the right chocolate. “It must be perfect. No Nestlé. No Lindt.” (A ruling that I am rather shocked by. I had always rather considered Lindt the last word in luxury). Ronnie’s chocolate has, I am told, been bought at an artisan chocolatier in the centre of Bologna.

In the kitchen, Ronnie sets a bain-marie bubbling. The chocolate, which comes in enormous squares, is put in and left to melt. Stirring, explains Ronnie, when the chocolate is the right quality, is hardly necessary. Our role is simply, therefore, to stand, and admire it as it slowly, fragrantly dissolves. Once it has gone, we add eggs, sugar, a few puffs of flour and it is ready for the oven. About 30 minutes (and some even more careful clock-watching) later, it is ready. And extraordinary.

However, even if the food you cook with your Cesarina is not entirely to your taste then, in a sense, that doesn’t really matter. Because, according to Di Nallo, Home Food is, as its name suggests, as much about home as about food. As she explains: “Food isn’t only about taste; it is also about the atmosphere. At Home Food you don’t just get food. You get to eat around a table, to be a member of the family.”

Back in Venice, Mercedes is showing me how to bake Pincia, a traditional Venetian cake made from dried fruit and stale bread. However, because Mercedes, unlike the assiduous Ronnie, never uses scales (she doesn’t even own any) and doesn’t believe in measuring, it is a little hard to follow. She adds a splash of flour, a handful of raisins, gives a final stir, and bangs the cake into the oven. “How long?” I ask, tentatively. “Oooh,” says Mercedes, with a shrug. Clearly timing isn’t a forte either.

Impressive though this is, I feel a little disappointed. I had hoped, at the start of this trip, that by entering the inner sanctum of Italian families I might see enough trade secrets to be transformed from mere worshipper of Italian cooking to actual Italian initiate. But these cooks seem to do everything differently: where Mercedes measures nothing, Ronnie measures everything; where Ronnie is meticulous, Mercedes is relaxed. There seems to be no secret, no common culinary creed to copy at all.

Or almost none. Over each lunch, in a final attempt to understand, I ask both women why they cook. I am expecting an earnest answer about ingredients, or the importance of preserving Italian food. It doesn’t come. In fact, neither really mentions food at all. Both talk instead about family.

As Mercedes says: “To me, food isn’t so much food. It is about family, and friends; about sitting at a table having nice things.” I cheer up. It seems I was an initiate already.

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Details

Temporary membership costs €3.50, and lessons with Cesarine cost €35-€55 (www.homefood.it). Catherine Nixey travelled with Expedia (www.expedia.co.uk), which offers three nights at the Mercure Bologna Centro from £234 per person including flights with British Airways from London.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.