East End Review

Tag: Brick Lane

  • Look sharp! Unpeeling the history of citrus fruit

    Look sharp! Unpeeling the history of citrus fruit

    Gerolamo dai Libri, ‘The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’, 1510-18. © The National Gallery
    Gerolamo dai Libri, ‘The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’, 1510-18.
    © The National Gallery

    The dullest most dismal month of the year needs all the help it can get, and it comes to Hackney from all over the world as citrus fruits glow in piles and mounds in every greengrocer in the borough.

    Bright shades of orange and yellow tinged sometimes with green, light up the gloomy pavements, and the aroma of peel and juice as children eat them on the street enhances the visual pleasures.

    But there is so much more to oranges and lemons than just peeling them, eating the juicy segments within and throwing the peel away. Most citrus fruit have a whole range of sensory pleasures for us to explore – the fruity acidity of the juice, the bitter flavour of the pith and the intense perfume of the aromatic oils in the peel, as well as the scent of the blossoms, available here in Hackney’s Turkish food stores as ‘Blossom Water’, an alternative to rosewater. Even the inedible pips have a use, yielding pectin to make your marmalade set nicely. In the past, when citrus fruits were an expensive luxury, every aspect was cherished, and peels we throw away were used in various ways, especially candied.

    The obsessive British marmalade ritual is a survivor of this, maybe it was worse in Yorkshire, but memories of hording sugar (rationing) and then the sticky tedium of boiling up the bitter Seville oranges, slicing the softened peel, saving the pips, keeping the juice on one side to add later, sterilising the jars, remembering to get the waxed paper to keep off the mould, then a greaseproof paper top, and securing this with rubber bands, and doing the labels, and wiping the floor and doorknobs, and the poor cat, and collapsing with exhaustion, remain with me after over half a century. And I still go on doing it. Perhaps the pleasure of having special labels designed for me on the Mac is incentive enough.

    But the sour or bitter oranges we buy for marmalade have other uses: instead of lemon juice on fish or grilled meat, juice and grated peel in the gravy for a roast duck, or a marinade for fish or meat, instead of vinegar in salad dressing, or a sliver of peel to pep up your G & T instead of lime.

    In 16th-century Rome the great cook Bartolomeo Scappi would dress a dish just before serving with a sprinkling of bitter orange juice, salt and sugar, and a little powdered cinnamon. The sugar balances the acidity, the salt and cinnamon bring out the flavour, and the juice cuts the richness. Try this with plain roast or fried chicken.

    Another recipe from Scappi is a simple lemon relish: take a nice organic unwaxed lemon and cut it up very finely, getting rid of the pips but keeping peel, juice and pith, and season with salt and sugar, tasting as you go to get the sweet-sour balance right, and just before using add a splash of rosewater or orange blossom water; this is lovely with roast pork or baked or fried fish.

    On a Thursday last month, the bleakest day of the winter yet, it was no fun at all in windswept Brick Lane, with mercifully few tourists, but far too many boutiques and cupcakes and lattes. It was a relief to totter out of the cold into the two huge Bangladeshi supermarkets, where human warmth and chatter, and the indefinable aromas of spices and provisions, cheered the spirit. At Taj Stores huge sacks of rice, as big as me, arrays of solid cooking pots, shelves of pulses and spices and pickles and kind people to explain things to the benighted old granny. The citrus fruits of Bangladesh are unique, and special to the cuisine. The large green knobbly zara-lebu or shatkora (citrus macroptera) has a fairly solid interior, with hardly any juice, but a fragrant rind, which when lightly scratched gives off a perfume that is so much more than lemony, with overtones of lilies, violets and roses, and can be used grated into a salad or soup, or the whole fruit can be cut into small dice and a few of them added to a stew or baked fish. The smaller yellow shashni-lebu has a perfumed sour juice with many uses. They help you understand why in spite of harsh conditions, low pay, and a tangled political background people from Bangladesh have throughout their long history in the UK clung to the ingredients and flavours of so far away. The Rahim chain of stores supplies many of these.

    Pomelo Salad

    This is a refreshing use of any citrus fruit, but works really well with pomelo, one of the earliest citrus fruits of all. You could use grapefruit instead.

    1 pomelo, peeled, and with the membrane removed from the segments (tedious but worth it)
    1 ripe avocado, peeled and sliced
    1 handful of fresh raw soy bean shoots, well washed
    200g cooked, shelled prawns (save the shells to make fish broth with)
    spring onions, thinly sliced

    for the dressing…

    Vietnamese fish sauce
    organic sugar (something with flavour as well as sweetness)
    3 or 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
    1 cm slice of fresh ginger, shredded or crushed
    1 fresh green bird’s eye chilli, finely sliced
    2 spring onions finely sliced
    Korean sesame oil

    Mix all this lot together until nicely blended, tasting all the time to get the balance you are happy with.

    for the garnish…

    1 handful of basil leaves, coarsely chopped
    some Chinese deep fried shallot
    some Chinese deep fried garlic

    Arrange everything in a shallow bowl and pour over the dressing, then ruin the arrangement by stirring gently until the things are coated, strew the garnish over, and serve.

    Isabella d’Este, plump, acquisitive and forceful, turned a depressingly inconclusive military engagement by her husband Francesco Gonzaga, into a resounding victory by commissioning Andrea Mantegna in 1496 to paint Madonna della Vittoria, where hubby and assorted saints kneel before a Madonna and Child enthroned in a bower, with a huge glowing canopy of bright green leaves, white blossoms and yellow and orange fruit. Mantegna went on to use citrus fruit in the background of many paintings, the lemons and oranges and their white blossoms representing the purity and fecundity of the virgin mother. We also remember his day trip as a young man to Lake Garda on 24 September 1464 when he and his companions were entranced by the verdant meadows and fragrant lemon groves.

    The growers of Lake Garda had a ready market not too far away in northern Europe, where the fragrant acidity of lemons was a luxury, and to Jews a necessity, for its role in Sukkot, the Feast of the Tabernacles, when the etrog, a special kind of citron, was used in harvest celebrations, using the fragrance of the nobbly skin and the potent shape to celebrate both the fecundity of the harvest and the fruitfulness of women in childbirth. Etrogim from as far away as Calabria are still prized by orthodox Jews, specially cultivated to meet rigorous standards of purity.

    Paolo Morando, The Virgin and Child with the Baptist and an Angel, probably around 1514-18. © The National Gallery
    Paolo Morando, The Virgin and Child with the Baptist and an Angel, probably around 1514-18. © The National Gallery

    Mantegna went on using citrus fruits in his work, giving visual delight as well as symbolic weight. The Madonna della Vittoria was placed in a chapel in Mantua constructed on the site of the house of a Jew whose shameful persecution by the townsfolk was perhaps redeemed by the verdant bower reminiscent of the structures of the Sukkot ceremonies. And what are we to make of the angel holding a lemon in a meaningful posture in a painting in the National Gallery by Paolo Morando of the Virgin and Child with saints, which so closely resembles Jewish ritual [right]?

    From Palestine to Bangladesh to the mounds of oranges in Stoke Newington Church Street we can shop and cook and feast all the senses on these wonderful fruit.

  • Buskers and musicians are taking over vintage shop off Brick Lane

    Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
    Busker’s paradise at No 14 Bacon Street. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    A couple of Sundays ago, I was on Bacon Street looking for the Vintage Emporium. Outside Des and Lorraine, a genuine East London junk shop, I asked a couple of men the way and was redirected next door. “Ask for Olli,” they said. “You’ll see he is really nice!”. It took me just a few seconds to realise I had stepped into the close-knit heart of East London’s Brick Lane community.

    Pushing through the door of this intimate coffee shop, I instantly felt at home. The vintage furniture was harmoniously displayed and the smell of fresh lilies heightened a sense of delicacy as I was welcomed by numerous smiley faces.

    On a small stage in the centre of the room was Jess Collins, who co-owns the place with her partner Olli Stanion. She was singing and playing fiddle with another musician, Alastair Caplin. Encircled in thick curtains evoking a baldachin, the look and location of the stage was a give away. “This place is a kingdom for musicians,” I thought to myself.

    Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
    Bacon Street blues. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    Over a month ago the Vintage Emporium was renamed No 14 Bacon Street as Jess and Olli just managed to obtain a two-year lease extension from their new owner, the Truman Brewery.

    Fiddle player Caplin is already part of the furniture, programming sessions of acoustic folk, jazz, swing and old time bluegrass music.

    He explained: “The biggest change of the rebranding is the glass of wine appearing behind the bar so anyone can come with a bottle, pay the £3 corkage fee and listen to music.”

    Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
    String ensemble at No 14 Bacon Street. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    All afternoon, musicians kept on entering a venue that was already packed. “They are all buskers from Columbia Road market and come here to play for fun and to enjoy the tea and cakes provided by Jess and Olli,” I was told later. “Between 15 to 20 musicians can turn up in one afternoon; this is the closest thing to community I have ever felt in London,” insisted Caplin.

    Before I knew it daylight had long gone and people started dancing in the remaining free corners of the room, their faces illuminated by candlelights evoking paintings from the chiaroscuro period. Whilst I was taking pictures, I started daydreaming about how Caravaggio or Rembrandt would have depicted the scene, as a musician started playing harp, accompanying me as if by magic in my travels back in time.

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  • The curious history of the bagel in East London

    Worth their salt: bagels prepared on Brick Lane. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
    Worth their salt: bagels prepared on Brick Lane. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    Where better to pursue the curious history of the bagel than Hackney? Far from its apotheosis in the modern New York Deli, this enigmatic ring bread has been made, revered, and consumed by people of many faiths in many lands from ancient times to the present day. In Hackney we have East End bagel bakeries producing thousands of them every day, alongside equally committed Turkish bakeries with their delectable simit and other braided or plaited breads, all part of the same family.

    A bagel has been defined as a doughnut with rigor mortis, or more accurately as the Roll with a Hole, and perhaps too much has been made of the hole, its metaphysical and corporeal potential exploited in jokes and anecdotes. 

    The distinguishing features of the bagel are its shape: a ring of bread with a hole in the middle, and the cooking technique: a preliminary boil in salted water before baking in a hot oven. A yeasted dough made with white wheat flour is shaped by hand into rings which when they have risen are dunked in a cauldron of boiling water, taken out after 30 to 40 seconds, allowed to dry, then baked. The preliminary boiling gives the bagel its firm chewy texture and dense tough crust. “Munchy firmness” as an enthusiast put it. Cheap mass-produced versions, made with a blast of steam  instead of boiling, to save time and effort, have the disappointingly fluffy texture you might expect. Avoid them.

    Pretzels are made in a similar way, the intricate knotted strips of dough are first treated with lye (caustic soda) or boiled in water with bicarbonate of soda, then baked. The preliminary treatment gives the surface a sort of glazed effect, a salty sweetness and a crunch, that is irresistible.

    But neither of these methods are specifically Jewish, they have been deployed all over Western and Eastern Europe for centuries. Roman soldiers marched on their conquests with buccellatum, rings of twice-cooked bread that were hard and unyielding to eat, but kept well. You could soak them in water and eat with anything, like ship’s biscuits which are also twice cooked. In Puglia in the south of Italy taralli are a much-loved snack surviving from the Middle Ages. They are rings of dough, made in the same way as bagels, but cooked to a hard crispness, and made to last, unlike bagels which are best gobbled up straight out of the oven.

    Medieval paintings of the Last Supper show ring-shaped breads on Christian tables. In the 1650s Suor Maria Vittoria della Verde, a nun in an enclosed convent in Perugia, wrote down a recipe for ciambelle affogate, drowned ring breads, in her kitchen notebooks, recognisable as what we call bagels. Bartolomeo Scappi, master cook in the papal kitchens in sixteenth-century Rome, had a recipe for boiled then baked ciambelle.

    For centuries the East End of London has been home to waves of immigrants, French Huguenot weavers and Dutch merchants. From the 1880s Hackney has been home to immigrants from Poland and Russia, joined in the 1930s by Jews escaping persecution by fascist regimes. By then the bagel had become an iconic Jewish bread in Warsaw, evolving from a luxury white bread for the privileged to a much-loved cheap snack for the many, and cherished here in London as a memory of home and a tangible token of solidarity and comfort. 

    The historian Maria Balinska in her book The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modern Bread has unearthed the fascinating history of the bagel as iconic Jewish comfort food and its migration to England – and to New York –  from Poland in the nineteenth century. The bagel had a big part in the development of trade unions in New York where the battles of Local 338 to secure decent working conditions for bakery workers was a critical phase in labour relations. But by the 1960s the millions of them consumed daily were supplied by massive out of town factories, steam-baked, not dunked in boiling water, like the traditional product, but sliced, frozen and distributed far and wide. This mechanised bagel became emblematic of New York’s vibrant deli culture, and now the ‘bagelisation’ of America has given it a universal identity.

    Bakeries like the ones on Brick Lane and the Kingsland Road area are survivors from the time when the population was predominantly Jewish, and are now selling wholesome old-fashioned bagels to an appreciative cross-section of the borough’s multi-racial residents.

    Brick Lane has perhaps an over-hyped reputation for food from the Indian subcontinent, but it’s also home to a huge spectrum of food from other faiths and climates. An austere and sophisticated Nordic eatery rubs shoulders with the long-established Beigel Bake at number 159 where visual appeal is nil and warmth and friendliness a huge plus. You wait in a line with passing strangers, beautiful but bewildered Japanese visitors, and determined elderly food historians from Stokey along with eager gastro-tourists and their guide, all rubbing shoulders amicably with tolerant locals, patient to wait their turn for freshly baked bagels filled with lox and cream cheese, or massive portions of salt beef. A similar establishment flourishes amicably two doors down.

    It is quite a contrast to another 24 hour bagel bakery on Ridley Road, supplied by Mr Bagels, a hugely successful company that makes industrial bagels for wholesale or retail sales, prepared in frozen or partly cooked form, using mechanical shaping and steam baking methods.

    Halfway up Stoke Newington High Street is The Bagel House, with good bagels with a wide range of fillings, and space to enjoy them. Further north is a small, less hyped bakery, with Turkish pastries and breads as well as bagels baked on the premises. It seems to satisfy the wide range of customers at the bottom of Stamford Hill, but its Turkish products are more satisfactory than the rather mild bagels, which are not what our nostalgia calls for. 

    You really do have to go to Brick Lane to experience the tough love of the real genuine bagel, chewy and resistant to most molars, freshly baked and smelling of yeast and flour, perfumed by the whiffs of gherkin, lox and salt beef, that lurk within. Get there now, stand in line, and bite into a fragrant chunk of East End history.

    Gillian Riley is the author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, published by Oxford University Press. 

  • Brick Lane is remembered in photographs

    Doing the laundry: photograph of Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell
    Doing the laundry: photograph of Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell

    Since moving to London in 1981, Phil Maxwell has always lived just off Brick Lane in an 11-storey tower block. It is the perfect location for somebody who is known as the photographer of Brick Lane and its surrounding areas. “I’ve noticed how the London skyline changes over the years,” Maxwell says.

    These changes are documented in Maxwell’s new book Brick Lane by Spitalfields Life Books, an intimate collection of photographs dating back to 1982. The book dispenses with words to let the photographs speak for themselves.

    His passion for documenting the inner city began in Toxteth, Liverpool, a place that, Maxwell says, “wasn’t too dissimilar to Brick Lane”. Maxwell admits he is particularly fond of his photographs from the 1980s because the “environment was so disconnected”. Maxwell adds: “The area had lots of corrugated iron, dilapidated buildings and that somehow enabled me to focus on the people better.”

    Maxwell’s photography captures moments of humanity that are apparent in all three decades. “There’s a similarity in the faces and a common humanity which I’m interested in capturing in my work,” says Maxwell.

    However, Maxwell has been witness to a lot of change in the area since 1981. Maxwell says: “When I moved here, it was quite run down but now it is a playground for people who can frequent the bars. A lot of people have been driven out of the area. I preferred it before it became commercialised like it is now.”

    This change has not dampened Maxwell’s enthusiasm for the area. The older photographs are special, Maxwell insists, because it shows how Brick Lane used to be a meeting place for Bangladeshi families. “The houses were quite overcrowded, so people treated the street as an extension of their home. It’s like a theatre where all human life is there.”

    Asked if the area bored him, Maxwell says: “I never get bored of the area. If I walked out and took a photograph now, there’d be something new for me. It constantly surprises me.” Against a backdrop of change, Maxwell finds interest in the faces of Brick Lane and its surrounding areas.

    “It’s interesting to see the different characteristics and personalities on Brick Lane or in Whitechapel and Stepney,” Maxwell tells me. Brick Lane is a crossroads between the city and the “real east end” with people on lower incomes. His photography thrives on the hustle and bustle of the marketplaces, the interaction between people from different cultures and the faces of the people.

    When asked if his work was political, Maxwell replies: “It is insomuch that it values the lives and the tribulations of ordinary people. They came together to demonstrate against the war and the BNP and National Front in the 80s and 90s. I celebrate the people and their lives, and the difficulties they have in trying to survive.”

    Maxwell’s book is a heartfelt look at a city and, most importantly, its people. “A lot of our culture celebrates celebrity. I think it’s important to show the other side. I am full of admiration for ordinary people and I want to celebrate them in my work.”

    Maxwell’s work shows the change in our city, but also celebrates the undimmed enthusiasm of ordinary people trying to survive in London.

    Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell on at the Mezzanine gallery, Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA until 26 April.