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FT: Global menu - Kicking up a stink

Global menu: Kicking up a stink

By Fuchsia Dunlop

Published: May 20 2011 17:49 | Last updated: May 20 2011 17:49

Cheese-tasting in Shaoxing; stinking beancurd on sale in the market; a beancurd vendor

It was lunchtime, in a private room at the Xianheng Tavern, the most famous restaurant in the ancient Chinese city of Shaoxing.

I opened the plastic boxes that I’d carried, sealed, all the way from London, and the stench of farmhouse cheeses began to waft across the room. The Chinese chefs and waiting staff seated around the table eyed them warily. Only two of the younger chefs had any cheese-related experience. None of the others, including the manager and executive chef of the Xianheng, Mao Tianyao, had tasted it in any form.

Cheese is not a favourite food in China, to put it mildly. Traditionally, dairy products were associated with the nomadic people who lived on the fringes of China and who were regarded as fearful barbarians. The Han Chinese, with a few notable exceptions, avoided eating dairy foods altogether: many were, and still are, lactose-intolerant. In recent years, influenced by western lifestyles, Chinese parents have begun to feed milk to their children, and their purchasing power has contributed to soaring worldwide milk prices. Cheese, however, is still generally regarded as beyond the pale. A few sophisticated Shanghainese might eat Stilton just as sophisticated Londoners eat tripe and chitterlings, but many people, especially in the provinces, have never tasted it.

But if the Chinese disdain the cheeses enjoyed by Europeans, they themselves adore some stinky foods that would appal many foreigners. Shaoxing, an hour’s drive from the Zhejiang provincial capital Hangzhou, is best known for its rice wines, but it is also the Chinese headquarters of “stinking and fermented” (chou mei) delicacies. Although I first went to Shaoxing to taste the wine, over several visits I became fascinated by its odorous foods, including the relatively well-known stinking beancurd, and also “fermented thousand layers” (made from beancurd skin), and various semi-rotted vegetables. All were shocking at first taste, with their earthy, old underwear aromas, but strangely addictive. “Fermented thousand layers” reminded me of the part of a high old Stilton that is closest to the rind, that yellow, sandy bit that gets right up your nose, dirty and delicious.

Over several visits to Shaoxing, I wondered what the locals, such ardent lovers of rotted soymilk and vegetable stalks, would make of rotted cow’s milk, otherwise known as cheese. Finally, I returned to Shaoxing with a boxful of artisanal cheeses from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, including the smelliest I could find in the shop. I had selected one mild hard cheese, Isle of Mull, to serve as a kind of toe-in-the-water; Stichelton, which is an unpasteurised version of Stilton; pale, veined Harbourne Blue; Ardrahan, a fairly whiffy washed-rind cheese that I adore; Milleens, another washed-rind variety with a punchy, farmyardy aroma that acquires a hint of ammonia as it ripens; and a wildly smelly Brie de Meaux. By the time I reached Shaoxing after a week on the road, the cheeses had all ripened nicely, and some were beginning to ooze.

At the Xianheng, a waitress cut the cheeses into pieces, and the assembled tasters began to pick them up with their chopsticks, sniffing and tasting. And where I had been impressed by what cheese and stinky soya products had in common, these culinary professionals were immediately struck by their differences. “Although in some ways you could say the flavours of cheese and fermented beancurd are similar,” said Mao, “vegetable stinky foods are very clean and clear in the mouth (qing kou), and they disperse quickly, while milky foods are greasy in the mouth (ni kou), they coat your tongue and palate, and they have a long, lingering aftertaste.”

Two other chefs said the cheeses had a heavy shan wei (muttony odour), an ancient term used by southern Chinese to describe the slightly unsavoury tastes associated with the northern nomads. Another said that the selection “smells like Russians”. “The difference,” he added, “is that the stinky things Chinese people eat give them smelly breath, while stinky dairy things affect the sweat that comes out of your skin.”

Chinese fermented beancurd, an intense-tasting relish, had always reminded me of a ripe blue cheese, but the Shaoxing tasters, faced with a Stichelton, disagreed. “It does have a rich umami taste,” said chef Chen Judi, “but there’s also a bitter aftertaste that people in this region wouldn’t like at all.” Several of the tasters were repelled by the sourness and astringent aftertaste of the Isle of Mull, which I’d thought was the most innocuous. “Our rotted thousand layers just doesn’t have that sour taste,” said Mao.

The cheeses they found most palatable were the Harbourne Blue (“this is quite close to Shaoxing tastes,” said Mao, “neither bitter nor sour, and quite clean in the mouth”) and, surprisingly, the very strong Milleens, with its ammoniac whiff. “I think people here would be able to tolerate this,” he added. The only cheese that provoked real consternation was the Brie. “It has this animal stench that assaults your nose,” said Dai Jianjun. “Definitely the stinkiest,” said Mao, “I really can’t bear it.” Most of the others agreed. Only one chef, Sun Guoliang, actually liked it. “It has such a complex flavour, like stinking beancurd, rotted thousand sheets and fermented beancurd, all mixed together.”

After our first course of cheeses, we tasted some stinky local dishes for comparative purposes. And I had to agree with the assembled company that, despite the formidable aromas of the steamed stinking beancurd and the rotted amaranth stalks, their flavours were clean, dispersing quickly in the mouth, without the creamy clinginess of cheese. The cubes of fermented beancurd, too, had a magnificent creaminess, but it didn’t hang around: quickly vanishing to leave room for appreciation of the delicate soups and stews that came afterwards.

Much as I love cheese myself, by the end of the meal I was beginning to understand why a Shaoxing local might turn up her nose at Brie, while enjoying the stinking beancurd that perfumes entire neighbourhoods. I was, however, fascinated by how well the mellow tastes of Shaoxing’s amber-coloured wines matched the local stinking delicacies, a marriage as perfect as port and Stilton. The next tasting, perhaps, should be a gathering of European oenophiles around a table of Shaoxing wines and cheese.

‘Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China’ by Fuchsia Dunlop, is published in paperback by Ebury Press on June 2

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: When cream rises to the top

When cream rises to the top

By Rowley Leigh

Published: July 17 2010 00:33 | Last updated: July 17 2010 00:33

The client is perturbed. He expresses the hope that “the cream is there merely to convey the flavour of the mushrooms and that the chicken will not be smothered in a heavy cream sauce”. One knows what he means. Nobody wants heavy cream sauces any more. Not only do they mask the flavour of the ingredients but everybody knows that they are absolutely wicked, being full of calories and cholesterol and, therefore, to be avoided at all times.

Thirty years ago it was slightly different. With the advent of nouvelle cuisine, nobody wanted thick, heavy floury sauces. Cream was OK. Trawl through the books of celebrated chefs Michel Guérard, the Troisgros brothers and Alain Chapel and you will find a fair dollop of cream, usually in the form of crème fraîche as they could not get double or “heavy” cream very easily in those days. French chefs coming over to England could not believe their luck when they saw our product and they practically fell into a vat of luscious double cream.

Thirty years before that, in the bad old 1950s, food was covered in thick sauces. You could go to Wheelers in London and order sole 30 different ways and 28 of them were the same sauce in different variations. Cream was a great luxury that you put on your strawberries rather than on your fish. It is still a great luxury and if we treated it as such, we would use it sparingly rather than not at all.

That does not mean that I do not think twice these days before I deploy cream in a sauce. It should certainly count for something. I still put a little cream in a steak au poivre – only a dash, mind – and am partial to a silky fish sauce when sole or turbot bones have been stewed with shallots, white wine and cream. Similarly, I cannot resist a splash of cream when the luxurious combination of chicken and morels hoves into view. When it comes to chicken with tarragon I have tried to be good. I have stuffed a mixture of fromage frais, shallots and tarragon under the breast of a chicken before roasting it and I have infused a light jus with a little chopped tarragon and tarragon vinegar. I have made a chasseur sauce with tomatoes, mushrooms and tarragon. All these have been good – I wouldn’t repeat the fromage frais effort, though – but none of them comes close to the marriage of chicken, tarragon and cream. To be avoided perhaps, but not at all times.

Rowley Leigh is the chef at Le Café Anglais

rowley.leigh@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/leigh

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Recipe: Chicken fricassee with tarragon

Not really a dinner party dish and not quite enough for four: perhaps, unusually, a dish for three.

Ingredients

1 chicken, weighing about 1.8kg

50g unsalted butter

Cooking oil

3tsp very finely chopped shallot

2tsp chopped fresh tarragon

2tbsp tarragon vinegar

1 glass of white wine

100ml chicken stock

200ml double cream

Sea salt, pepper

Method

● Cut the chicken into eight pieces, leaving some bone attached to the breast pieces. Season them well. Heat half the butter with an equal quantity of cooking oil in a heavy bottomed sauté dish or casserole big enough to take all the chicken. Put the pieces in skin side down. Adjust the heat: the idea is to slowly colour and cook the chicken without letting it, or the fat, burn. Turn after a minimum of 10 minutes. Cook for another five minutes by which time the breast pieces should be cooked: remove them and finish cooking the thighs and drumsticks – it’s perfectly permissible to pop the whole pan in a hot oven to finish them off for five minutes at this stage.

● When all the chicken is cooked, transfer it to a dish and pour all the fat out of the pan in which it is cooked. Put it back on the heat, add the rest of the butter and the chopped shallot. Stew this gently and, when softened, add the tarragon and the tarragon vinegar. Let this evaporate completely and then add the white wine. Using a wooden spoon, scrape up all the caramelised juices from the pan and let them blend with the wine.

● Add the chicken stock and let this boil vigorously until reduced by half and then add the cream all at once. Season with salt and pepper, bring back to the boil and simmer until the cream has thickened a little and reduced to a sauce like consistency. Put the chicken pieces back in the pan with the sauce and warm them gently.

● Taste the sauce: it will probably need more seasoning and a small jigger of the tarragon vinegar (or a squeeze of lemon) may be necessary to cut the richness of the cream. Serve with rice pilaf and a salad of lettuce hearts.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

NY Times: Milk in a Can Goes Glam

March 3, 2010

Milk in a Can Goes Glam

By JULIA MOSKIN

 

Victoria Belanger’s jewel-like condensed milk and gelatin.

SWEETENED condensed milk is everywhere. There’s probably a can or two lurking in your cabinets. It is the key to Key lime pie; it brings the sweet to Vietnamese coffee; it went to Rio for Carnaval last month in the shape of brigadeiros, bite-size balls of milk fudge that are a Brazilian national treat.

But Victoria Belanger, a photographer also known as the Jello Mold Mistress of Brooklyn, may have a unique relationship with the stuff.

“Sweetened condensed milk solved a lot of problems for me,” said Ms. Belanger, who brings her professional understanding of light and color to an ongoing jellied-desserts experiment. “Now I can make opaque layers that set off the clear, bright-colored ones.”

Every few weeks, Ms. Belanger fills a few of her 30 molds — in shapes like fish, roses and starfish — with a mixture of condensed milk and gelatin. She’s drawn to imported and self-created flavors, like mango or crème caramel or milk chocolate-macadamia nut. She unmolds the shapes, photographs them while they still have their satiny sheen, then feeds them to pals and neighbors. “The condensed milk makes it more like a pudding, more satisfying for people,” she said. “I tried Cool Whip and vanilla ice cream, but only condensed milk got it really smooth.”

Sweetened condensed milk and its unsweetened cousin, evaporated milk, have never been in favor with food snobs. “Originally, these were marketed as nutritional solutions, not luxury ingredients,” said Anne Mendelson, a food historian and the author of “Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages.” Fresh milk and cream have always been preferred by American consumers, she said, with the shelf-stable products seen as inferior, if useful, substitutes.

“It was probably frowned on because it comes in a can,” said Alex Stupak, the pastry chef at WD-50 on the Lower East Side, who has made frozen “Oreo” centers, doughnut fillings and even a tart-sweet mayonnaise from sweetened condensed milk. “It’s a righteous emulsifier,” he said. At Momofuku Milk Bar, the chef Christina Tosi uses it to smooth soft-serve ice creams like peaches-and-cream and cherries jubilee.

And as more American home cooks with roots in Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean chime into the national culinary conversation, condensed milk is getting a lot of love. “Just try telling anyone from Latin America that canned milk isn’t real milk,” Ms. Mendelson said. “You’ll have a fight on your hands.”

In the Philippines, it is drizzled onto halo-halo, the popular dessert of shaved ice, coconut and a riot of toppings; in Jamaica, it’s mixed with stout, sherry and nutmeg to make a robust cream punch. Hong Kong-style “French toast,” served at cafes there, is toasted white bread glazed with condensed milk and peanut butter; it is a key ingredient in Thai iced tea and in Vietnamese coffee; and Brazilian cooks whip it with avocado to make gorgeous pale-green desserts like pudim de abacate.

In regions like these, where dairy-making might be difficult, expensive or untraditional, the stability and reliable sweetness of condensed milk has earned it a lot of fans. “It is hard to explain the relationship people have with it in Latin America,” said Leticia Moreinos Schwartz, a cooking teacher in Connecticut who grew up in Rio de Janeiro. “Leite moça came when life was hard and there were not many treats,” she said, using the generic Brazilian term that means “milk of the lady,” a reference to the Swiss milkmaid on cans of Nestlé condensed milk, introduced to Brazil in 1921.

It is one of the three milks in Mexican tres leches cake, and can be caramelized right in the can to make dulce de leche. (Put the can in a pot and boil for three hours; keep the can covered with boiling water or it will overheat and may explode.)

Sweetened condensed milk came on the United States market in 1856, the brainchild of Gail Borden, a chronic culinary inventor. (He had already patented a prototype of a complete nutrition bar, which he called a “meat biscuit.”) Mr. Borden began experimenting with sterilized milk after a series of “swill milk” scandals that revealed the true contents of much of the milk then for sale in American cities: chalk powder, molasses and vermin.

His process — a combination of vacuum pressure, heat and added sugar — produced a dairy product that is nearly indestructible, with a shelf life of years. Mr. Borden made his fortune supplying condensed milk to the Union Army in the Civil War. It was airlifted into Berlin in the 1940s, and more recently has opened up Asia as a major market for American milk.

“We grow up with it,” said Kathy Wong, an owner of Laut restaurant, one of few places in New York that serves real Malaysian pulled tea, or teh tarik. It is a thick brew of strong tea — preferably Boh brand, grown in the cool Cameron Highlands north of Kuala Lumpur — and condensed milk. (Fresh-squeezed ginger juice can be added to make teh halia, reminiscent of Indian chai.) The mixture is poured vigorously back and forth from one pot to another: this is the “pulling” process, which makes the drink smooth and gives it a frothy top. “The higher the pour, the thicker the top,” said her partner Camie Lai, who said that hawkers compete for customers by pulling the tea behind their backs, or from ever-greater heights. Among those who see cooking as an ongoing science experiment or craft project, condensed milk can do the work of milk, sugar and eggs combined — and can often stand in for all three.

Jessica P Lin, who has a blog, epicuriouseateries.blogspot.com, where she posts recipes and restaurant reviews, long tinkered with recipes for ice cream that wouldn’t require an ice cream maker. “At the time, I was a culinary student, but all I had at home was a $10 hand mixer,” said Ms. Lin, who grew up in Dallas and now lives in New York. She has often visited Taiwan, where her parents were born, and where condensed milk is a popular topping for dessert, or bread.

Ms. Lin said that she finally hit on the idea of whipping condensed milk, which she always keeps on hand, into heavy cream. “I was basically trying to be lazy and avoid making an egg custard,” she said. The result takes just a few minutes to get into the freezer.

Condensed milk has a very different chemical profile than fresh, and behaves accordingly. It will not curdle in the presence of acid, like regular milk would (that’s why it’s used for Key lime pie). The sugar crystals in condensed milk will not clump together and harden (this is called seizing), making it useful for candies like fudge.

“All candy-making is about preventing crystallization,” said Michael Chu, an engineer based in Austin, Tex., who writes about his kitchen experiments online at Cooking for Engineers. Mr. Chu’s chocolate fudge recipe, which he calls “absurdly easy,” has the pleasantly cakey, almost sandy texture desirable in fudge, which can be tricky to achieve using milk and butter. He uses condensed milk to reduce the ingredients in the fudge to a mere three (salt is optional), and to eliminate the dreaded step of cooking the sugar syrup to the soft-ball stage. “The manufacturing process has already done that work for you,” he said.

Fudge made from condensed milk is the base for brigadeiros, bite-size sweets served in paper frills and covered with sprinkles. “Brigadeiros are like the cupcakes of Brazil,” Ms. Moreinos Schwartz said. “They are at every birthday party.” (They are named for a once-popular politician, Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, who ran for president in 1945 under the slogan “Vote no brigadeiro, que é bonito e é solteiro” — “Vote for the brigadier, who’s good-looking and single.”)

Once, Ms. Moreinos Schwartz said, it would have been odd to serve brigadeiros at a grown-up dinner party — “it would have been a French chocolate mousse instead” — but now Brazilian cooks like her are embracing their own traditions. In her new book, “The Brazilian Kitchen,” she has transformed the classic, tooth-aching recipe with unsweetened coconut, pistachio paste and real chocolate sprinkles. “Now when I go home, the brigadeiros taste too sweet,” she said ruefully. “I’m like, guys, come on! You’re killing the fudge!”

===

Recipe

Absurdly Easy Chocolate Fudge

Adapted from Michael Chu, Cooking for Engineers

Time: 15 minutes, plus at least 4 hours’ cooling

4 tablespoons ( 1/2 stick) butter, plus extra for greasing the pan

1 pound semisweet or bittersweet chocolate

1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk

1/8 teaspoon salt (optional)

1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional).

1. Butter an 8-inch-square baking pan. Line with parchment or wax paper, letting edges of paper hang over sides of pan.

2. In top of a double boiler or a metal bowl set over (not resting in) simmering water, combine all ingredients except nuts. Mix just until melted and well combined. (Alternatively, use a microwave on low power to melt ingredients, stopping every 10 to 20 seconds to mix well.) The mixture should be heated as little as possible. Mix in nuts, if using.

3. Scrape mixture into prepared pan. Refrigerate until set, about 4 hours or overnight. Lift fudge on paper out of pan and use a large knife to cut into squares.

Yield: 16 two-inch squares.

===

Recipe

Coconut Brigadeiros

Adapted from Leticia Moreinos Schwartz, ‘The Brazilian Kitchen’ (Kyle Books, 2010)

Time: 20 minutes, plus at least 4 hours’ cooling

1 cup sweetened condensed milk

1/2 cup coconut milk

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 teaspoons light corn syrup

1 1/2 cups finely shredded unsweetened coconut (see note).

1. In a medium-size heavy saucepan, combine condensed milk, coconut milk, butter, corn syrup, and 1/2 cup shredded coconut. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce heat to low and whisk constantly until fudgy, 8 to 10 minutes. When mixture is ready, it will pull together into one soft piece, leaving browned residue on bottom of pan.

2. Slide mixture into a bowl. (Don’t scrape the pan; leave any residue behind.) Let cool to room temperature, then refrigerate until very firm, at least 4 hours.

3. Scoop out teaspoonfuls of the mixture and use your hands to roll into balls, about 3/4-inch in diameter. Set aside on a baking sheet.

4. Place remaining 1 cup coconut in a wide bowl. Roll 4 to 6 brigadeiros at a time through coconut, covering surface completely. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for 2 days, or refrigerate for up to 1 month. Serve at room temperature.

Yield: About 30 brigadeiros.

Note: Sweetened flaked coconut will be too sweet. If desired for flavor, toast coconut beforehand on a baking sheet in a 350-degree oven, stirring every 2 minutes.

===

Recipe

Condensed Milk Ice Cream

Adapted from Jessica Lin, epicuriouseateries.blogspot.com

Time: 15 minutes, plus cooling

1 cup cold heavy cream

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 (14-ounce) can cold sweetened condensed milk.

1. In a mixer, whip heavy cream just until it begins to thicken. Add vanilla and whip until soft peaks form. With mixer running, slowly pour in condensed milk and whip until high peaks form.

2. Transfer into a container or bowl for freezing. Freeze at least 4 hours or overnight.

Yield: 6 servings.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

FT: The grandfathers of gelato

The grandfathers of gelato

By Mary Taylor Simeti

Published: August 1 2009 02:08 | Last updated: August 1 2009 02:08

Sicilians adore ice-cream, so much so that in the summertime they even eat it for breakfast. A brioscia filled with a large scoop of coffee or hazelnut ice-cream and topped with a swirl of whipped cream will set a Sicilian up for the whole morning; a lighter version would be a glass of granita – coffee or lemon or, in eastern Sicily, almond – with the brioscia on the side.

The brioscia is, in name as well as in substance, the Sicilian reinterpretation of a French brioche, said to have been the work of the Swiss pastry chef Caviezel, who set up shop in Catania in the early 19th century. Very similar in appearance to an American hamburger bun, a good brioscia should be soft, slightly sweet and capable of absorbing the melt without becoming gooey. The proper technique for eating one filled with rapidly melting ice-cream – a skilful sequencing of squeeze, lick and bite – is something that Sicilian children acquire very young. Foreigners initially tend to make a mess of it.

The ice-cream cometh

Each September the northern town of Cefalù celebrates ice-cream with the Sherbeth Festival , organised by Antonio Cappadonia. Last year, during a five-day event dedicated to Sicilian ice-cream, 12,000 kilos of gelato were devoured with the encouragement of musicians and street artists. This year Cappadonia is giving it an international flavour, having invited ice-cream makers from all over Italy and the Mediterranean. Cefalù merits a visit even without the ice-cream. A medieval town on the sea an hour’s drive east of Palermo, it boasts the lovely small Mandralisca museum, a 12th-century cathedral with a magnificent mosaic in the apse and pretty beaches that are at their best at the end of summer, when the water is warm but the sun has relented a little.

September 16-20; www.sherbethfestival.it

The foreigners who in the 18th and 19th centuries extended their Grand Tour as far as Sicily marvelled at the passion with which the natives procured their supply of snow and consumed the ices produced thereby. So great is this passion – and, it might be added, so delicious is Sicilian gelato – that the Sicilians are convinced that they themselves are the inventors of ice-cream, the guardians of a culinary secret brought here, according to current myth, by the 8th-century Arab invaders, who used the snows to cool their sarbat, fruit syrups diluted with water.

I confess that they convinced me as well. When I first started to write about the history of Sicilian food, I blithely stated that “the passage from sarbat and water, chilled in a container of ice, to granita was only a question of time”. Jeffrey Steingarten, the American food writer, took me sternly to task for this, and sent me abashed to Elizabeth David’s Harvest of the Cold Months to read up on the endothermic effect. One can chill a liquid by adding ice or snow but one can only freeze it thanks to the endothermic effect, that is, by adding salt to the surrounding ice, thus bringing down the temperature well below 0°C. The 8th-century Arabs knew this principle, indeed they imported it from the Chinese, but for centuries it remained in the domain of science and medicine, at most a parlour trick. Only in the 16th century did it migrate to the kitchen.

The first written description of this most welcome innovation is in a poem called “Il candiero”, written by a 17th-century gentleman of Florence, a sort of recipe in verse which ends by saying that this ice-cream, flavoured with jasmine and lemon, was first made to quench the thirst of the “Signor di Carbonagno” (sic).

What’s more, according to the poet, the candiero celebrated in the poem was made by “il Siciliano”. So the Sicilians are not all wrong. Too bad, says Elizabeth David, that we don’t know more about“ ... who that Sicilian candiero-maker was and who his master the Signor Carbognano...”. But we do, and we might. In all likelihood the master was Giulio Cesare Colonna di Sciarra, Prince of Carbognano (1636-1681), whose domestic accounts, preserved as part of the Barberini Archives in the Vatican library, might well reveal to a qualified researcher the secret of “il Siciliano”.

Whether or not they invented ice-cream, the Sicilians certainly do know how to make a good one. Artisanal ice-cream is made in bars, cafés and gelaterias across the island and its quality is generally very high, although much depends on the quality of the prepared pastes and bases that are used. Then there are the upscale ice-cream makers who prepare most ingredients themselves and employ local products – Sicily’s famed almonds and pistachios and its delicious fruits – to flavour their products. In eastern Sicily the acknowledged master is Corrado Assenza of the Caffè Sicilia in Noto, who has long since acquired international fame thanks to his pastries, jams, and chocolates, and is now branching out from the traditional sweet flavours of dessert ice-cream to the new and fashionable savoury ices designed to accompany fish or meat dishes, or as a palate cleanser between courses.

Although there is plenty of good gelato available in Palermo, I chose to go to Cerda, a small town about 70km east of the city, where Antonio Cappadonia has acquired a reputation of being the best gelatiere in western Sicily. He acquired his trade by chance: he was studying law when his father decided to invest his life savings in a bar in the main square, an activity that promised his son a more certain future than a law degree. A self-taught artisan, he met the great names of Italian gelato at trade fairs, took some courses and developed such a passion that he eventually stopped selling everything but gelato.

A singularly pleasant and modest young man, Cappadonia was extremely patient with my questions, and explained the difference between French ice-cream (lots of cream), Italian (heavy on the milk and eggs) and Sicilian (milk and a thickener/emulsifier). In centuries past Sicilians also used inexpensive wheat starch to thicken their gelato but for Cappadonia, as well as for Corrado Assenza, the absolute best emulsifier giving the absolutely creamiest product is flour milled from the carob bean. A totally natural product, it has a remarkable capacity for absorbing water, thus preventing the formation of ice crystals and ensuring a very smooth texture.

The carob tree grows throughout the Mediterranean, and is making a comeback in Sicily, especially in the province of Ragusa, where Assenza operates. The sweetening power of the bean pod and the thickening power of the seed have been known since antiquity (the Egyptians apparently ate the pods and used a paste made from the seeds to glue the wrappings on their mummies).

Interviewing Cappadonia was a delightful experience. In between questions I got to taste his hazelnut ice-cream (made from the best hazelnuts, grown in the Langhe of Piedmont), his lemon sorbet (locally grown lemons), cantaloupe sorbet (melons from Licata), as well as ice-creams made from pistachios (Bronte Reds from the slopes of Etna) and almonds (from the Val di Noto).

He makes a point of knowing where and by whom each ingredient is produced, and is particularly proud of an ice-cream of his own invention, made from manna, the sap harvested from ash trees growing in the nearby Madonie mountains.

It was not the right season to taste the creation for which he is most famous, an artichoke sorbet invented in homage to the principal crop of the farms around Cerda, which he makes of centrifuged artichokes, sugar and lemon juice. He calls it a gelato da meditazione, something to eat sitting down, with thoughtfulness. I can’t wait to meditate upon it next spring.

A new edition of Mary Taylor Simeti’s ‘Sicilian Food’ is out this summer (Grub Street Press)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: The dream cream

The dream cream

By Rowley Leigh

Published: July 25 2009 02:08 | Last updated: July 25 2009 02:08

I started to mangle my words. “Nobody suggests that one should eat it breakfast, supper and breakfast,” I bumbled, and then dug a deeper hole by stating that cream was full of saturated fat and the body actually needed a small amount of saturated fat, an argument that – even though true – was a little difficult to sustain. I was extolling the virtues of cream on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and, these infelicities aside, did not make too much of a hash of it.

What I was trying to say was that it would be a shame if cream really was an endangered species. Apparently Britain exports 60,000 tons of cream a year, mostly because of Britons’ increasing appetite for skimmed and semi-skimmed milk instead of the full-fat stuff. What I can’t work out is whether there is anything wrong in exporting so much cream: while it is the envy of every chef in Europe and we should be proud to export it, it seems sad that we do not have sufficient appetite to support a valuable industry ourselves.

It is worth stressing that cream used to be considered a great treat. Whether in a pastry from the refrigerated counter of the pastry shop or poured from a jug over crumble at Sunday lunch, you knew it was special. The point of custard, be it confectioners’ pastry cream or “proper” egg custard, was that it was a substitute for cream.

Up until about 1975, farmers were encouraged to produce as much milk as they liked. By that time we were swimming in cream and butter, and there was already a significant glut: we exported cream, but this was the era of “the butter mountain” when at times it seemed as if the whole of Europe was in danger of drowning in milk and cream. My parents were in on the act, producing the finest quality high butterfat milk from their pedigree Guernsey herd; they were badly caught out when the penny dropped in the 1970s and government support of dairy farmers slowly began to be withdrawn.

Happily, Britain still has a high production of cream. Whereas 30 years ago we chefs used it with abandon, we now have to be more careful. Customers don’t like their food “smothered” in cream. Nor, as a matter of fact, do I. However, there are moments when a bit of cream is sublime. It may be a plate of strawberries, or a fish mousse, a potato gratin, a piece of smoked haddock or a crème brûlée when simply nothing else will do.

Rowley Leigh is the chef at Le Café Anglais
rowley.leigh@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/leigh

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Chicken fricassee with tarragon cream

An unctuous way to eat chicken – and cream – and best preceded and succeeded by something light. The chicken must be absolutely cooked through before it meets the sauce. Serves four.

Ingredients
1 roasting chicken, weighing about 1.75kg
50g unsalted butter
cooking oil
4 tsp very finely chopped shallot
2 tbs tarragon vinegar
1 glass of white wine
100ml chicken stock
2 tsp chopped fresh tarragon
200ml double cream
Sea salt, pepper

Method

● Cut the chicken into eight pieces, separating the leg from the thigh and leaving some bone attached to the breast pieces. Season them well. Heat half the butter with an equal quantity of cooking oil in a heavy bottomed sauté pan or casserole big enough to take all the chicken. Put the pieces in skin side down. Adjust the heat: the idea is to colour slowly and cook the chicken without letting it, or the fat, burn. Turn after 15 minutes. Cook for another five minutes by which time the breast pieces should be cooked: remove them and finish cooking the thighs and drumsticks – it’s perfectly permissible to pop the whole pan in a medium-hot oven (180ºC) for five minutes, to finish them off at this stage.

● When all the chicken is cooked, transfer it to a dish and keep in a warming oven while you make the sauce. Pour all the fat out of the pan in which it is cooked. Put the pan back on the heat, adding the rest of the butter and the chopped shallot. Stew this gently and, when softened, add the tarragon vinegar. Let this evaporate almost completely and then add the white wine. Using a wooden spoon, scrape up all the caramelised juices from the pan and let them blend with the wine. Add the chicken stock and let this boil vigorously until reduced by half and then add the tarragon and the cream. Add a pinch of salt, some milled pepper and bring back to the boil: now simmer until the cream has thickened a little and reduced to a sauce-like consistency. Put the chicken pieces back in the pan and roll them in the sauce. Taste the sauce: it will probably need seasoning and a few drops of the tarragon vinegar (or a squeeze of lemon) may be necessary to cut the richness of the cream. Serve with a plain green vegetable (spinach would be excellent) if desired and plenty of rice pilaff.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009