East End Review

Tag: Gillian Riley

The red tide: a tomato tour from Naples to Stoke Newington

Tomatoes on the vine.

You can see the red, green and white of Italy’s national colours in the pizza made with tomato, basil and mozzarella, named after Queen Margherita, who was captivated by it on a visit to Naples in 1889. She and her husband King Umberto were there on a charm offensive, to consolidate the newly acquired unity of the country, little knowing that this humble street food would go on to captivate the rest of the world, becoming a symbol of Italy.

The red of the tomato is perhaps the defining colour of Italian cuisine today. It was also the colour of the shirts of Garibaldi’s army, which helped achieve that unity, a reminder of his comrades recruited from the slaughterhouses of the Argentinian beef industry, where they wore protective garments that mitigated the horrors of the job.

It’s hard to imagine the food of Italy without tomatoes, but in the centuries of fine cooking that preceded their arrival, after the discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century, Italian gastronomy was famous throughout Europe. So what did tomatoes have to add? Precious little according to some, who like Elizabeth David, poured scorn on the red tide of crude colour and all-pervasive flavour that has in many ways coarsened this subtle cuisine. Ingredients that can speak for themselves are often drowned in a flood of over-assertive tomato, that comes cheaply, as a paste or purée, tinned pulp or whole fruit (yes, botanically speaking it’s a fruit not a vegetable), or sun-dried.

What do we get from tomatoes that can’t be got elsewhere? A sharp sweet fruitiness, which in the past used to come from a squeeze of unripe grapes (verjuice), gooseberries, pomegranate juice, lemon or bitter orange juice, dry white wine, or a bitter, acidic herb like sorrel, and an additional oomph from umami, sometimes called the fifth taste (more on that in next month’s Citizen), which properly used tomatoes can give us, more as flavour enhancer than bulky ingredient. So let’s go for the fruitiness, and keep tomatoes for what they do best, bringing out other flavours rather than drowning them.

We like to think of sweet old grannies in sprigged aprons lovingly preparing homemade bottled tomatoes and purée, and there are a lot of them about, but in reality commercial tomato products are a major industry, a huge chunk of Italy’s economy, as David Gentilcore tells in his gripping Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, and a huge factor in the cooking of other nations too.

A pasta recipe, All’Amatriciana, is a delicious combination of tomato and other flavours. It’s based on ‘cinque P’, five P’s: pasta, pancetta, pomodoro, pecorino and peperoncino. A tasty version involves serving the pasta, spaghetti in this case, with a sauce made by frying some pancetta cut into small pieces until crisp in a very little olive oil, you put these aside and cook some garlic in the oil and fat until golden, than add a little dried chilli to taste (I use Chinese Facing Heaven chillies, taking care not to burn them which would make them bitter), then chucking in some chopped fresh tomato, not too much, and quickly cooking it down. Serve this on your cooked and strained pasta, with some grated pecorino or parmesan, and the crisp bacon pieces.

What makes this dish for me is the home-cured bacon of Meat N16 in Stoke Newington Church Street which I use instead of pancetta. It’s made from some of their free-range pork, nice and fatty, salted for only few days, then lightly smoked.

And the tomato needs to be tasty too; it’s worth paying a bit more for a heritage/heirloom tomato, rather than the watery, insipid little supermarket beauties, bred for appearance and shelf life rather than flavour. If you look up commercial tomato sites on the web, there are awesome statistics covering every aspect of the mass production of this nice little earner except flavour, whereas on the Isle of Wight site every other word is flavour, with poetic images of pleasingly irregular multi-coloured specimens.

Hackney citizens are fortunate in being able to get these and other organic tomatoes in its many farmers’ markets and whole food stores. They are so good to eat that all you need is salt and a generous splosh of olive oil (don’t ever try to ‘drizzle’ the stuff, a meteorological misnomer if ever there was one); then if you add some chopped garlic and a few basil leaves you have Italian patriotism on a plate and a nice lunch, along with a bit of cheese and some bread, for less than a quid, whereas a cheap pizza, made with inferior ingredients, would set you back many times more.

If you want to experience Italian pasta without tomatoes try the now trendy carbonara, using this time not bacon but guanciale, cured but not smoked pork cheek, which gives up lots of gently flavoured fat in which you toss the cooked and drained spaghetti together with one beaten egg per person, and generous amounts of parmesan. The trick, as some of our best recipe writers have told us (especially in the Guardian), is to reserve a cup of the well-salted cooking water from the pasta and add it in small amounts as you rapidly stir in the egg, so that the sauce goes all creamy, and doesn’t curdle. With all that bacon fat the one thing you don’t need is cream as well. This is a subtle dish, where the pasta is not overcome by the sauce, and you get to enjoy its taste and texture, as well as the smooth coating.

Way back in the 1460s Maestro Martino, cook to popes and cardinals in Rome, made his Chicken with verjuice (see Hackney Citizen, September 2013) using sour grapes to get a nice fruity tang to some chicken joints fried with chopped bacon and finished with a sprinkling of fresh herbs. If you substitute tomato for the grapes you get Pollo alla Cacciatora, which in spite of the pundits I see as fried chicken, with the addition of chopped bacon and vegetables, including tomatoes to give that sweet fruitiness we mentioned, and a splash of wine tossed in at the end, and reduced quickly to a concentrated dry braise, not a stew.

The magic combination of tomatoes and bread lurks in fond memories of the soggy tomato sandwiches of childhood picnics, which should have been horrible but were blissful. There is something about the way moistened stale bread (if it is good bread to start off with) combines with tasty tomatoes and a few basic seasonings like salt, oil and vinegar, to create a new taste sensation. The pundits don’t say why or how this happens. Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, the Science and Lore of the Kitchen explains most of the physics and chemistry of food, but not this. It looks as if a very happy relationship between the enzymes that make stale bread a good vehicle for liquid things (somehow it doesn’t get soggy) and those that give ripe tomatoes their tastiness, creates a magical mixture of textures and flavours that can be found in panzanella, a salad based on tomatoes and stale bread, (see Hackney Citizen, August 2014) and the Spanish pan con tomates.

Here the simplest possible combination of ingredients creates one of the best and most basic items of Hackney’s many tapas bars; that at Escocesa in Stoke Newington Church Street is lovely. The good bread keeps its bite, while the garlic rubbed into it when toasted, combines with the fresh tomato, salt and plentiful olive oil, left to rest a few minutes, to give a savoury mouthful that is both soft and crunchy at the same time. Gazpacho is an extension of this; chopped tomato, garlic, and whatever stuff comes to hand (onion, cucumber …), together with grated stale bread, seasoned with salt and augmented with good olive oil, somehow creates a mixture that is more than the sum of its parts. It can be whizzed up in a blender, or pounded by hand in a pestle and mortar to get a rougher texture, and of course the seasonings are up to you, but it is those mysterious enzymes that do the trick.

August 3, 2016
Look sharp! Unpeeling the history of citrus fruit

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

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.

March 21, 2016
Nosh Hashanah! Food for the Jewish New Year

Jewish New Year food: Short ribs. Photograph: Giulia Mulè

Jewish food doesn’t have to be kosher to be delicious, and you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it. In Hackney we can get the best of all possible worlds, from the austere purity of the supermarkets of Stamford Hill to the rough and tumble of Brick Lane, where authentic bagels with lox and cream cheese or salt beef are consumed by suits, Sikhs, white-van men and bemused tourists.

But to do this we need to try to understand kashrut, the basic ideals and dietary laws of Jewish religion. The laws were given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai and is enshrined in sacred writings and commentaries upon them.

It says what foods are forbidden, and what foods can be eaten and how and when they should be prepared, cooked and served. Meat must be slaughtered to exclude blood and sinews and certain kinds of fat, and never allowed to be in contact with milk and dairy products.

Kashrut resonates on different levels, from common-sense food hygiene in a hot climate to ideals of purity and holiness, for many forbidden items were once destined for holy sacrifices, not profane use. Strict observance creates and reinforces the separateness and otherness of Jewish communities, whilst nurturing the warmth and generosity of family meals and ritual feasts.

We can understand this by reading Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food, an entrancing overview of Jewish food from all over the world, with family reminiscences and recipes, and a wealth of affectionate detail, from Cairo to New York, Baghdad to Bombay.

The food of Ashkenasi Jews reflects that of Eastern Europe, while Sephardi communities, settled all over the world, enjoy a wide range of more exotic dishes from where they now live or used to live. Algerian Jews, many now in exile in France, remain devoted to a cuisine and its rituals based on centuries of life in North Africa.

Special rituals for the celebration of holy days – such as the Jewish New Year, which this year falls on 14–15 September – shape family life, and meals and recipes play an important part in this. The Jewish Museum in Camden Town displays a lot of material showing this aspect of life in London over the centuries.

The Jewish presence in East London goes back a long way, from the Middle Ages when Jews were exploited and persecuted, and eventually expelled, to their acceptance by Oliver Cromwell in the sixteenth century, and an eventual approach to integration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Successful and cultivated Jewish families moved in posh circles, while extending generous charity to the less fortunate in the East End, establishing schools, hospitals and synagogues. This delicate balance was swept dramatically away in the 1880s by the influx of refugees from Eastern Europe fleeing from persecution. While trying to avoid that weasel word ‘swarm’ I find the restrained voice of Dr Jerry Black, author of Jewish London, an Illustrated History who uses ‘avalanche’ to describe the situation.

Just now we are all too familiar with the unsettling mixture of hostility and compassion towards immigrants; to our shame more was done then than now to help and support the 150,000 refugees (from a total of over two million) who fled to London. When the crowded and familiar East End was bursting at the seams, many Jewish people moved northwards towards Stamford Hill, an almost rural area.

A poster advertising flats to be let by the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company in Stoke Newington in the 1890s perhaps explains the arrival of the by now legendary Egg Stores, still flourishing opposite the entrance to Abney Park Cemetery. This used to be a cavernous, pungent store with seething vats of pickles and gherkins and barrels of herrings, freshly baked bread and many items essential to orthodox Jewish gastronomy.

After a fire a few years ago it reinvented itself and is now a smart ultra kosher supermarket, with every imaginable ingredient sourced, produced and packaged in approved conditions, to meet the need of the local orthodox communities, with tins and packs of most internationally known cuisines. But the Egg Store’s greatest glory is still its herrings, probably the best in town, and its meltingly soft, salty-sweet schmaltz herrings, a treat worth crossing London for.

In Hackney the essentials of Jewish food coexist with related cuisines: a few doors down from the Egg Stores is a fine Polish deli, a Turkish snack bar with Middle Eastern flat bread and salt beef bagels, and the Palestinian Tatreez café with a huge white bulbous bread oven and a small but delicious vegetarian menu. On Stoke Newington Church Street a new café called The Good Egg is due to open on 29 Sept, where Montreal, Tel Aviv and California will add deliciousness to an innovative all-day brunch menu, which includes the ubiquitous Jerusalem Breakfast.

Another unorthodox take on Jewish Middle Eastern food awaits the Hackney citizen who ventures to Spitalfields and finds their way to Artillery Lane, where Yotam Ottolenghi offers a kaleidoscopic menu inspired by Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food. His book Jerusalem is a fusion of Palestinian and Israeli cuisine, speaking of harmony and goodwill in a troubled land. Yotam Ottolenghi could be said to be the Daniel Barenboim of gastronomy; his sensitive use of a huge range of spices and flavourings brings balance and harmony to recipes that are like complex musical scores, performed by a large multi-racial band. Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra does not arrogantly call for peace (a big ask) but suggests ways of listening and understanding that could bring it closer. Enjoying food together, like making music, is a good step forward. We are fortunate that this can be done on so many levels in Hackney.

Some Jewish specialities are universal favourites: potato pancakes and fish balls (gefilte fish) are enjoyed all over the world, both of them ways of making something special and delicious out of frugal ingredients.

Latkes

The proportions are usually one egg to about a pound of potatoes. Seasonings can be grated onion, garlic, chopped parsley, nutmeg, pepper. Grate the peeled potatoes and onion and put them in a sieve or colander and squeeze out the excess moisture. Put in a bowl and add the beaten egg and seasonings and mix well. Have some fat or oil in a heavy frying pan and put spoonfuls of the mixture in, flattening them slightly. Cook until golden then turn over and cook the other side. Eat hot.

Artichokes and Broad Beans

This simple but delicious dish is one of Claudia Roden’s family favourites. Preparing fresh artichoke hearts is one of life’s less agreeable chores, but you can buy them frozen from many Turkish or Middle Eastern stores. The one at the bottom of Ridley Road market usually has them.

1 lb each of artichoke hearts and shelled broad beans
sugar
salt and pepper
lemon juice
chopped fresh mint
olive oil

Put everything in a pan and just cover with water. Simmer gently until done (anything from 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the age of the vegetables), topping up with water if necessary, but ending up with a thick sauce. More fresh mint can be added as a garnish.

September 14, 2015
Korean food in East London: Kimchi the best!

Korean banquet. Photograph: Hurwundeki

There’s a buzz around Korean food in London today. Although the hub of Korean life is still in New Malden, a long way to the south west, we can spare ourselves the somewhat arduous journey, and explore local sources of this delicious food, influenced in some ways by China and Japan, but with a joyful identity of its own. Oriental stores stock the basic ingredients, and a visit to Yu Xiao in Kingsland Road, or the Longdan supermarket in Hackney will yield freshly made kimchi, some take-away items, and many of the strange and wonderful fish and plants that you need in order to try Korean food at home.

But since the cuisine depends so much on an assortment of different dishes that take quite a time to put together, it is a good idea to eat out to experience the delights of the full range. Hackney has a small, busy and friendly place in Shoreditch, On the Bab, and up the road in Finsbury Park is the legendary Dotori, a crowded little Japanese-Korean restaurant with a huge following, a contrast to the wide open spaces of Bibigo at the Angel, while Hurwundeki on Cambridge Heath Road offers a haircut as well.

Potted history
In spite of a long history of friendly and unfriendly contact with some of its neighbours (and the recent, unhappy division of the country), Korea has a strong sense of its individuality, with history, geography and various religious influences all shaping a vibrant and varied gastronomy.

You can see this all summed up in the pottery: not the (boring) elitist collectors’ pieces of greeny grey celadon or ghostly white porcelain or even the less posh buncheong stone-ware, but in the glorious range of everyday black-brown glazed onggi storage jars. They contain the country’s past and maybe its future – literally, for within these beautifully crafted forms lurk the essential elements of Korean cuisine. The jars and pots come in all sizes and various shapes, and until a few decades ago every household, in what was then a mainly rural society, would have an array of them clustered outside on terraces or rooftops. They held grains, especially rice, and water, wine, oil, vinegar and the defining condiments that enhance Korean food: soy sauce, brown soybean paste (denjang), fermented red chilli paste (gochu jang), and above all different kinds of kimchi: (salted and fermented vegetables with various flavourings, especially garlic and chilli). The beauty of these pastes is in their sweet, rich, dense flavour, not the amount of chilli in them. Never forget that chillies are enjoyed for flavour and not the macho impact of heat.

Kimchi
Kimchi evolved because things did not grow during the harsh winters, so preserving vegetables and fish was an essential domestic skill. This unique process, salting and fermenting, produces over 200 different kinds of kimchi, free of the harsh acidity of most European pickles. Every family had its own version. The fermentation process did not just make the stuff keep, it actually produced added nutrients, vitamins and minerals that make Korean food some of the healthiest on the planet. Kimchi has a clean, fresh-tasting zing and crunchiness. Different kinds can be served as side dishes, or it can be added to soups and stews.

The craftsmen who made the kimchi containers were socially inferior, their skills taken for granted, but every Korean family owned a range of their pots that survived generations of use, and the sensitivity and talent that went into their manufacture can perhaps now be seen in the cutting edge skills of modern Korean technology in other fields. The pots are now collected and treasured in museums, but also used for their original purposes. The Korean soul and genius is in these unique artefacts, the pots and what they contain, and eating the food is to enter into a world of innovation and tradition, of past history and a new future.

Korean meals
Another magic ingredient is Korean sesame oil. It works best as a condiment, sprinkled over a finished dish just before serving, or dribbled onto a salad, along with a few drops of Vietnamese fish sauce, transforming a banal mixture of lettuce, avocado and spring onions into an exotic treat. I don’t know what they do to make it so delicious, but there is no substitute. Seaweed gives flavour and texture, from slithery to crisp, and a big blast of umami. And tofu adds extra goodness.

A Korean meal might consist of rice, soup, stews, dumplings, pancakes and a lot of differently flavoured side dishes, something to eat out. But you can give your home cooking a Korean tinge by using the two densely flavoured pastes in fish and meat dishes, in soups and stews, and mixed with soy sauce, sugar and fish sauce to make dipping sauces and relishes.

Here are a few Korean-inspired recipes to try out at home:

Bibimbap

The endearingly named bibimbab or pibim bap has become an iconic Korean speciality. It began as a peasant dish, when a frugal bowl of rice had to be eked out with any raw or cooked vegetables and herbs that could be got hold of for free. Now it has become restaurant performance art, with the cooked rice brought to table in an almost red-hot iron bowl (together with the necessary health warning) sizzling and hissing as the other ingredients are stirred in, while the rice sticks to the bottom, forming a delicious crust. Ingredients can be luxurious (thin slices of beef, seafood) or simply sautéed vegetables, chopped kimchi, mushrooms, a sprinkling of dried seaweed, sometimes topped with a raw or fried egg, and of course the red chilli paste. It gets its name from bab or bap, a word meaning a dish of cooked rice. And that is exactly what this is: a recipe to do at home, using cooked rice and plenty of fresh and preserved stuff to give contrasting texture and flavour.

1 bowl of cooked rice per person
An assortment of things such as: sautéed shitake mushrooms, thinly sliced rump steak, an egg, raw or fried, thinly sliced crisp lettuce, Korean radish kimchi, raw bean sprouts, rinsed and dried, matchstick courgettes, raw or stir fried, chopped herbs (basil, coriander, mint).

Marinated Chicken

Chicken breasts and thighs
cut into pieces
Marinade: finely chopped ginger, garlic, spring onion, fresh green chilli,
soy sauce, sesame oil, a teaspoon of red chilli paste, a pinch of sugar,
all mixed together.

Rub the marinade into the chicken pieces and leave for an hour. Then put everything in a shallow pan with a little water and cook slowly until done, about 45 minutes, when the liquid should have evaporated. Taste for seasoning and add more chilli paste if you think it needs it. Serve sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds and a few drops of sesame oil and some rice and kimchi on the side.

Seaweed and Shellfish Soup

This is traditionally made with miyeok seaweed and oysters, and given as a restorative to women who have just given birth, three times a day for seven weeks! You do not have to suffer though to enjoy a version of this, and the iron, calcium and vitamins in the seaweed will do you lots of good. There is a legend that the Samsin Grandmother, a folk goddess, caused the blue marks on the buttocks of Korean babies by hastening them into this world with a good slap, and so is offered this nourishing brew in gratitude.

1 cup of dried miyeok (wakame) seaweed, soaked in cold water for half an hour
½ kilo each of mussels, clams, uncooked jumbo prawns
2 cloves of garlic roughly chopped
Vietnamese fish sauce
Sesame oil

Cook the shellfish separately, covered, with the garlic and strain off the liquid, filtering it through muslin to keep out any sand or shell. Take the flesh out of the shells and put to one side. Tear the soaked seaweed into pieces and cook in water until soft and a nice dark green. Then add the shellfish, their juices, and season with sesame oil and fish sauce. Serve hot.

June 24, 2015
Food in Art – book review: a peek inside the great larder of art history

The Old Man of Artimino by Giovanna Garzoni, 1650. Courtesy of Galleria Palatina, Florence

If it wasn’t so inconvenient to bring a chunky hardback art book on an Easyjet flight, I’d suggest Gillian Riley’s Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance as a ‘top holiday read of 2015’.

A museum gift-shop buy with an academic styling, it doesn’t look or feel the part.

But what better than to read up on the origins of pesto while lazing on the Italian coasts, or peek inside the tomb of the wealthy ancient Egyptian scribe Nebamun (the real thing is on show at the British Museum), from the banks of the Nile?

Authoritative as it ought to be – Riley is a leading food writer and historian – this is a book about the mystery as much as the certainties of art’s centuries-old relationship with food.

With her guidance we discover what’s missing from our collective knowledge and the question marks over the meaning of the preparation, preservation and consumption of food in an array of artworks.

Few would be better placed than Riley to fill in the gaps using her expansive imagination.

Riley answers questions I never knew I had about the great larder of art history; such as why the men of ancient Mesopotamia drank their beer with a straw, or why the Renaissance botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi commissioned a portrait of his pet monkey clutching an artichoke.

And there are lessons aplenty to be learned, starting with the wisdom of Paleolithic cave painters; hunters for whom meat was never blindly taken for granted, but the subject of awe and intricate study in a time when “animals ruled the earth, and man was a puny creature”.

The Emperor Rudolph II, c.1590, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Courtesy of Skoklosters Slott, Stockholm

Riley’s sixth book examines the countless layers of symbolism in the many meals of art history, as depicted in all forms from ancient wall paintings, fine art, mosaics, and frescoes to illuminated manuscripts and stained glass.

For those familiar with the author’s food columns in the Hackney Citizen, documenting intrepid culinary adventures in her Stoke Newington kitchen, expect the same hunger-inducing, poetic prose, and even more to learn here.

It’s a handy volume for those of us who need a narrow lens with which to recall forgotten history lessons, organised into snippets that can be dipped in and out of with ease.

Perhaps unwittingly, Riley’s descriptions of the micro-breweries of Mesopotamia offer much-needed perspective on contemporary foodie culture, reminding us that making your own beer is neither a laughable hipster fad nor a unique cultural advancement of our generation – it’s just something humans have done for thousands of years.

And as for the humble cabbage, its varied role as artistic muse deserves a chapter all of its own, as we discover its long lost identity as a celebrated preventer of hangovers. And, then, ridiculously, as temporary placeholders for the heads of the sick in 15th century psychological experiments – not to be tried at home.

Filtered through Riley’s irreverent, witty and ever-imaginative style, Food in Art is a guide through the sprawling past of art’s many interpretations of food, from the divine to the profound, and crucially the dark, humorous and absurd.

From the practicality of Ancient Egyptian illustrated breadmaking techniques, to the strange vanity of Roman mosaic floors designed to look covered in the remnants of a lavish banquet, mice and all, Food in Art calls for some self-reflection.

It’s a good opportunity to take a good long look at our ‘selfies with Spiralizer’, or the meaning behind Instagrammed kale salads of the 21st century. Rewriting Riley’s book in a thousand years’ time, what will the food historians make of us?

Surely, as ever, we’ll be seen as we are; very vain, a bit clever and somewhat ridiculous.

Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance is published by Reaktion Books. RRP: £30. ISBN: 9781780233628

June 15, 2015
Holy mole! Gillian Riley cooks up a Mexican feast

Gillian Riley gets to grips with a Mexican tortilla press. Photograph: Annalies Winny

Mexicans the world over are recovering from the festivities of Cinco de Mayo, a celebration of the ignominious defeat of an invading French army on 5 May 1862.

At a gloomy point in Mexico’s history, when confusing internal politics and the threat of invasion created dread and despair, a small band of largely untrained men under General Zaragoza defeated the much larger French army at Puebla de
Los Angeles.

This is a good thing to celebrate, and Hackney too can mark this first brave gesture towards Mexican independence.

Fusion food

We can enjoy the world famous dish Mole Poblano de Guajalote (Turkey in a Chilli sauce), which is said to have been invented in Puebla de Los Angeles in the 17th century.

Perhaps the first ever fusion recipe, it combines native Mexican ingredients (chillies, chocolate, tomatoes, maize), with things brought over by the Spanish conquerors (nuts, spices, some fruits). Legend says that the Mother Superior of the Convent of Santa Rosa created this symbolic mix of ingredients to honour the Archbishop who founded the convent. Chocolate, a sacred substance for the Aztec rulers, was a numinous addition to a dish already fraught with symbolism.

The recipe we put together for our fiesta uses chicken instead of turkey, and is a pragmatic version of this great national dish, based on Diana Kennedy’s book The Cuisines of Mexico. London bars and eateries offer burritos and tacos and dazzling cocktails, but traditional festive family cooking is harder to find. So go home, Hackney citizens, put on your pinnies and get to work!

Fiesta time

First of all do a shop in the Wholefoods Market in Stoke Newington Church Street, then browse online for goodies from the Cool Chilli Company, and get some nice free range chicken from Meat 16 or Ginger Pig. We have learned the hard way that frozen or pre-cooked tortillas are disappointing, commercial guacamole expensive for what it is, that a home-made salsa has more zip, but also where and how to cheat and what substitutes we can get away with.

Thus after hours of absorbing and exhilarating toil, I sat down with friends to enjoy a Mexican feast. As well as the mole, there were homemade tortillas and guacamole, with shop-bought salsa verde de tomatillas, tortilla chips, salsa de chipotle and a freshly made salsa of chopped fresh tomatoes, green and red chillies, fresh coriander, salt and garlic. There was a bowl of crème fraîche and plenty of tequila and Mexican beer too.

A Mexican tortilla is a kind of flat-bread made with masa harina, a maize flour that has been ground from corn kernels treated with alkali (lime or ashes) to soften and discard the tough outer skin of the kernels. The chemical effect of this, a process known as nixtamalisation, does wondrous things to the nutritional properties of the masa, creating niacin, amino acids and extra protein and vitamins.

Mexican peasants in the past had a cheap, healthy and balanced diet eating these tortillas with beans, chillies and tomatoes, with little if any meat. They survived and flourished. But when maize got to Europe, and was cultivated all over northern Italy, its paucity of nutrients caused deficiency diseases like pellagra on a huge scale, with resultant social and economic misery. No fear of that in Hackney.

We made batch upon batch of tortillas with masa harina from the Cool Chili Co, available at Wholefoods, who also produce ready made tortillas spewed forth from a massive machine known affectionately as el monstruo.

Tortilla-tastic

One of the joys of a freshly made tortilla is its fragrant aroma, which enhances the things you roll up in it, adding an extra dimension to the already pungent food. The pliable softness of a nicely cooked tortilla adds a tactile pleasure to the business of eating. You reach for more, you call out for more, and with a little help from my guests and some basic technology, more kept on coming. We used two comals and a tortilla press.

The press is like a miniature Adana printing press, two hinged round plates with a lever handle to bring one down firmly on top of the other. We used this to flatten small balls of the masa, mixed with water to a firm dough, between sheets of tough plastic. The flattened dough was then deftly transferred to a very hot comal, a flat metal plate heated on the gas cooker, where it sits for a minute or so as it firms up and browns slightly in patches, then is flipped over and given a few more minutes, before flipping again to finish off.

Trial and error got me through my first batch ever, over half a century ago, so the blunders and tears are forgotten, the main lesson being to keep on trying until you get it right.

Mole madness

This is nothing to what we went through to make the mole. The chicken was browned in a little oil and cooked until almost done in good home-made chicken broth. Meanwhile the chillies needed attention: ancho, mulato, pasilla, are what I used, dried red or deep brown chillies, some wrinkled, which are first softened on the hot comal, then deseeded and torn in pieces and soaked in hot water for an hour or so. Meanwhile the spices needed toasting in a dry pan, the sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds (pepitas) toasted separately on a comal, taking care not to scorch them.

The spices when cool were pulverised, the nuts and seeds ground to a coarse powder and the by now softened chillies pureed in a food processor. The chilli paste was then fried to enhance the flavour and get rid of the rawness, then thinned out with some broth from the chicken, the spices and seeds were tossed in, and the sauce cooked until nice and thick. The final touch was to add the magic ingredient – chocolate, in small bits, tasting as you go; this is to enhance the deep dark flavour, and should always be subliminal … if it tastes of chocolate you have got it wrong.

Add the chicken to this heady brew, heat through and serve with a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds. All this takes time and energy and imagination, but is so absorbing that getting the meal together is as much fun as eating it. Of all the cuisines on offer in Hackney, Mexican is the one you just have to do at home.

Guac attack

Guacamole made in a food processor comes out much too smooth and bland. I always use an Indonesian granite pestle and mortar borrowed decades ago from a generous Dutch friend who resigned herself to its loss.

To make guacamole you first crush coarse salt and garlic with coriander leaves (the tough stems discarded) to make a dense dark green paste, then add peeled, stoned and coarsely chopped avocados and pound (but not too much), so that the texture is variable. Then stir in some finely chopped hot chilli to taste and some coarsely chopped tomatoes. Pile into a bowl and decorate with
coriander leaves.

A homemade salsa is best done with a sharp knife and a chopping board, avoiding the homogenous mush you get with a food processor. Take tasty tomatoes, garlic, spring onions and coriander and chop each separately very finely, stir together and add heat from finely sliced chillies, then salt to taste.

Having wallowed in the tactile and olfactory pleasures of getting these simple dishes together, we now have to admit that a creative cheat can get good results from Cool Chili Company products and a variety of beans, pastes and relishes from other suppliers. A spot check in local shops reveals the unseen presence of enough dedicated Mexican cooks in Hackney to restock the shelves every week. I for one would love to hear of their exploits.

May 26, 2015
Absolutely pho-bulous food from Hanoi by way of Shoreditch

Gillian Riley goes on a mission to make Vietnamese food. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

The best antidote to an overload of warming British winter stodge is the light, bright, fragrant food of Vietnam. We can enjoy it in Hackney, thanks to a cluster of food stores and places to eat, some in Shoreditch, some on Mare Street.

An evening stroll in Shoreditch, at the end of Kingsland Road, revealed a resolute line of diners outside Sông Quê patiently waiting to get in. No hope. But back at noon the following day, exhausted by a bewildering foray into the Longdan supermarket, I collapsed into a bowl of pho, the archetypal comfort food of Vietnam. The ineffable lightness of the broth with its dense but subtle flavours, wafts the cold and hungry food historian into a beguiling comfort zone.
Trying to make pho at home would be counterproductive, so many ingredients, many of them secret, and so much skill is involved, but the small side dish of aromatics can transform many domestic recipes. The supermarket has a refrigerated display of Vietnamese herbs. The other day I counted five different kinds of mint, three of basil, and the wonderfully aromatic perilla, with its purplish leaves and lemony, minty flavour.

The demographics of the Vietnamese presence in London are confusing; an unofficial count of 5,000 shows it’s a small proportion of Hackney’s population, slipping under the radar, but beckoning clients from all over North London to shop and eat here. We are not a hub, like New Malden is for Korea, where 20,000 of the total 30,000 Koreans in the UK live.

The vast land mass of the Indo-Chinese peninsula has a complex history and a variety of cuisines. All three of Vietnam’s geographical areas have a special kind of cooking, but share a tumultuous history, from Chinese dominion for over 2,000 years to the recent tragic horrors of the Cold War. The fertile but much misused land produces fine ingredients and an amazing range of aromatic herbs and vegetables, and people as gentle and bright as their cuisine.

Balance of sensations

The five flavours of Vietnamese cooking are spicy, bitter, sour, salty and sweet, which are used to enhance or adjust the qualities of the ingredients. Colour comes into it too. Red, black, white, green, yellow, all have a special significance. Taste, texture, aroma and mouth-feel all combine to achieve a balance of sensations, from the crispness of deep fried batter-coated prawns, to the crunch of fried shallot on a crisp papaya salad, to the slithery bite of a rice-pancake wrapped salad roll, or the gooey slurp of noodles in
beef broth.

Each of the elements in a Vietnamese dish could be quite violent if insensitively handled, but the subtle combinations of ginger, galangale, garlic, onions, chilli and lemon grass, with the many kinds of fermented fish sauce and fish paste, and peppermint, spearmint, sweet basil, Thai basil and coriander, and many other special herbs, are gently aromatic.

Try it at home

One can eat, or browse in the food stores and come away with the key ingredients to try out at home. One of these is nuoc mam, fish sauce, a condiment with an unbelievably horrible smell and a sublime taste, made from rotting and fermented fish and their entrails. Liquamen, the Roman version, was manufactured on an industrial scale in Spain and Southern Italy and exported all over the Roman Empire. Some came to London, in ships that docked at Southwark, so it is not too fanciful to imagine the legionaries stopping off in Shoreditch for a bowl of fragrant pho.

Happy shopping: Vietnamese groceries. photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

For the sad squaddie heading for the chilly north, there must have been some comfort in smuggling a small flask of liquamen into his kit. If he could have stopped off and turned right up what is now Hackney Road, the most portable and fragrant condiment in the Longdan supermarket might have been a bunch of lemon grass. This herb is a lemon flavoured grass with all the aroma and pungency of lemon peel without the acidity of the juice. It is associated with Thai cuisine, but used all over South East Asia and brings perfume and pungency to many Vietnamese dishes. Our soon to be footsore and homesick legionary might have had the foresight to bring as substitute a plant of the hardy herb lemon balm, it grows well here, and gives a lemony tinge to salads and sauces; used with the native mint, coriander and mustard. We can use these in our attempts to cook Vietnamese food at home, while the fragrant herbs and vegetables mentioned above add an extra fragrant pungency. But the predominance of this amazing fish sauce can be judged by the impressive display of sauces and condiments in the supermarket. Buy lots, like me.

Duck with Orange

This is my adaptation of a
well–known recipe, of which there
are many versions:

2 duck breasts
2 oranges
garlic (to taste)
2 cloves finely chopped
a lump of ginger, size of a walnut, peeled and finely chopped
3 or 4 stalks of lemon grass
finely sliced
1 tablespoon Vietnamese fish sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
a handful each of chopped basil,
mint and coriander
some slivers of the orange peel

Cook the duck breasts skin down to sweat off most of the fat, pour this off and keep for something else. Turn over and add the juice of the oranges and all the other ingredients except the herbs. Cook covered on a low heat until tender (30 minutes to an hour). Remove the fat and slice the meat thinly. Sprinkle the herbs over, and serve with rice and a salad.

Green papaya salad is one of the stars of Vietnamese cuisine. Best done by a professional with a secret sauce and a machine for getting the hard veg into sinuous julienne strips. This dressing can work with any combination of salad vegetables, and cooked meat or fish.

Vietnamese-inspired Salad

Some sliced cooked beef,
rare if possible
1 cup bean sprouts, washed
1 head of blanched chicory
(endive), sliced
1 small red sweet pepper sliced
4 spring onions sliced diagonally

For the dressing

Vietnamese fish sauce
A little rice vinegar or lime juice
Sugar, palm or unrefined, to taste
Vietnamese fish paste to taste
chopped garlic and ginger
several leaves of lemongrass,
very finely chopped

For the garnish

Chopped basil, mint and coriander
Deep fried shallots and garlic
(from the supermarket)
Red birdseye chillies, thinly sliced

Stir fry the sweet pepper and chicory for a minute or two, add the bean shoots and toss for a few seconds, tip into a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients, mix well and slosh in the dressing, give it a good turn and add the garnish just before serving.

March 19, 2015
Having an Ethiopian feast in Hackney

Haile recommended: Ethiopian cuisine. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

The Beatles said it all: John, Paul, Ringo and George inadvertently gave a name to the first near-human in history. In 1974 anthropologists who located and reconstructed the female skeleton of a hominid who lived over three million years ago, rejoiced, in their encampment in Hadar in the Awash Valley, to a euphoric tape of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’; hence her name. Our Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, had her origins in Ethiopia all those years ago, while Hackney citizens were mere blobs of ectoplasm in the primeval ooze of stream and swamp.

Later the great kingdom of Ethiopia, with its unparalleled wealth, its powerful rulers, magnificent scenery and amazing natural resources, was renowned for its jewels and rare perfumes. A sophisticated cuisine evolved to match this splendour, and even now, despite the tangled politics of its recent past, a search for Ethiopian food is for us an insight into a strange and wonderful history.

Pearl of great price

This cuisine is so far beneath the radar of ‘fine dining’ that it’s hard to locate all the places in Hackney where it can be sampled, but once you know what to look for, there is much to enjoy. The foundation of an Ethiopian meal is injera, a wondrous thing that is probably the most visually unprepossessing food ever invented, a sludge-coloured, floppy, slightly clammy pancake, with a porous sponge-like texture, but enough tensile strength and pliability to act as wrap, shovel, spoon and mopper-upper.

A batter is made from the fermented dough of a flour made from teff, the seed of a grass found only in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which is cooked on a metal disk about 50cm across. This forms the base on which the components of a meal are served; the various items are plonked on this absorbent layer, which soaks up the juices, and can also be torn into receptacles for mouthfuls of the different thick stews, wat, or zigni. Injera is nutritionally a pearl of great price, with no gluten whatsoever, but an impressive range of amino acids, vitamins, calcium, minerals, protein, carbohydrates and fibre. Its enigmatic flavour, due to days of fermentation, is neither sour nor acid, but has a distinct tang, a tasty catalyst for the flavour of the spicy meat and vegetables that are eaten with it.

Spice and veg

Vegetables are not mere ‘sides’ but an important item in the diet of the main Ethiopian religions, which have many non-meat days in the year. So vegetable stews are complex and delicious, holding their own with the meaty ones. Dried pulses and lentils, often spiced as they are dried, are cooked in rich dishes, with more flavouring from one of the many different spice mixtures. Spinach or chard is often combined with lentils, cabbage gets a crisp pungency. Sometimes cheese is added, but every vegetable dish has its distinct characteristics.

The spice mixtures used in Ethiopian cuisine are not dissimilar to North Africa and the Middle East, but have their own distinct personalities, mainly from the use of certain items like fenugreek and a rare kind of cardamom, and of course chilli, but with moderation; berbere spice powder is one of the best known, or awaze, a red chilli paste. You could use harissa, or some of the Turkish tomato and chilli pastes, but the effect is not quite the same. Here is a tired woman in a hurry’s cheat:

Zigni Wat

400g good quality minced beef
2 or 3 red onions, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons of Turkish chilli
and red pepper paste
fenugreek, cardamom and
black cumin ground together
ginger, chopped
garlic, chopped
spiced butter
salt to taste

Cook the onion slowly in a heavy bottomed pan until soft and just changing colour. Add the ginger and garlic, then the spice paste and the ground spices. Put in a little water and stir well. Then put in the meat and cook gently until done.

But there are two other factors: the ‘dry’ cooking of ingredients at the start of preparation, where onions, peeled and finely chopped, are cooked slowly without water or fat, until soft and slightly coloured, and then added to the rest of the ingredients. Meat too, is given the same treatment. Unctuousness and flavour are imparted by another magical element, spiced butter, which is added as a flavouring in the course of cooking, not used as a frying medium. Clarified butter is simmered with ginger, garlic and chopped red onion, and a mixture of herbs and spices, then cooled and strained. Again, there is no substitute for this, but it doesn’t take too long
to do.

December 19, 2014
Gillian Riley on sausages – the breakfast of centurions

Doing her wurst: Gillian Riley. Photograph: Jason Fidler

The people of our fair borough cowered in the bushes as the Roman legions stormed up Kingsland Road to subdue barbarians and rebellious tribes up north.

Sausages were what kept these centurions going, portable and long- keeping, tasty and nutritious, and can still be had along our end of the Great North Road where Gallo Nero imports them from Italy or has them made up in London to a traditional recipe.

Turkish stores have a variety of sucuk, beef sausages. Polish delis offer cured and fresh delicacies, and once upon a time Godfrey’s the English butchers (now flourishing in Highbury Barn) had a fine selection.

But if the legions had deviated a little from the long straight track north, and meandered westwards along the high ground that is now Stoke Newington Church Street, they might have hit Meat N16, and refused to move.

Hadrian’s Wall would never have been built, and British history might have taken a different course. This small independent local butcher sells organic meat and fowl, and an array of sausages that demand critical assessment.

These are made to standard recipes, Cumberland, Toulouse and plain pork, and in more adventurous mixtures with herbs, spices and additions like leeks (with lamb), funghi porcini, sun-dried tomatoes, juniper berries.

Customers submit recipes every autumn and gather for a greedy tasting; the Master Butcher chooses the winner, and adds it to his imaginative range. This year’s winner has pigeon, smoked pancetta and prunes, a wonderful combination.

Hackney tribes along Kingsland Road might well have sniffed aromas of the famous North Italian sausage Luganega from the mess kitchens of the Roman legionaries. It is said to have been brought all the way from Lucania (now Basilicata, a part of Calabria in the south of Italy) as vital supplies for the invincible Roman military machine. These sausages lasted all the way to Lombardy and Veneto in the north, where the subdued tribes took them to their hearts, and have been making them ever since.

By the time the exhausted and footsore Roman squaddies had got as far as the Vale of Pickering, on their arduous trek to Cawthorne Camp then over the North Yorkshire Moors to Whitby, they might have found solace in the splendid sausages of what is now Grange Farm in Levison, near Pickering, where breeds similar to today’s Tamworth ginger pigs, and the dark Berkshires, might well have been reared during the four centuries of peaceful Roman occupation, after the defeat of the wild Brigantes, my ancestors.

Today recipes vary but mainly consist of the cheaper, fattier cuts of pork, well seasoned with garlic salt and pepper, and sometimes coriander, cinnamon and cloves as well. But thankfully, we can once again drool over whiffs of the conqueror’s pig products, for today we have the Ginger Pig butcher in Lauriston Road, where meat from Grange Farm is for sale, along with a range of eight or more delicious sausages. These include an imaginative use of onion and black pudding, a peppery pork mixture, and a chunky Old Spot, all meat and fat but no breadcrumbs, for casseroles and stews; there is a home made smoked chorizo and a stonking merguez.

Sausages, those ubiquitous links, can be a delicacy, made from quality cuts, or a shameful repository for unmentionable and unhygienic body parts, slaughterhouse slurry, padded out with all kinds of stuff. Dubious ingredients can be fed into a processor and stuffed into casings, along with preservatives and synthetic flavourings, to become an anonymous wodge, and sometimes a health hazard as well as a gastronomic crime.

Horsemeat is the least of our worries. We need to be sceptical about cheap mass-produced sausages, and critical, in a good way, of what gets into our designer sausages. Fortunately this column is all about good things, not the murky politics of food fraud, so we celebrate here the benign aspects of the sausage.

Throughout history sausages have been made to be eaten fresh, or preserved in some way or other, wind dried, smoked, salted, fermented, or cured in tubs of lard. The content varies depending on the process. Once preserved they can be sliced or cut into chunks, eaten as they are, or added to stews and soups and sauces.

A sausage made with prime lean pork would be a sad and sorry offering on the plate, for fat (where the flavour is) and something cereal like breadcrumbs to absorb it as it cooks, are essential for an unctuous softly chewable result. Trimmings from posh cuts, with their fat, and meat that can’t be sold as an item, are all useful.

Surprising things like tripe, offal, kidneys, liver and lights all get used. Perhaps the ultimate use of fat is in a version of the Jewish kishka, where matzo meal and schmalz (wonderfully tasty chicken fat) are combined with unctuous effect.

One spin-off from pig killing was the collection and coagulation and then cooking of the blood to make black pudding, at its best in French boudin noir, and Spanish morcilla. Tasty fat and something like rice or barley to soak up the juices are often used, but the lack of seasoning and the fear of fat make many British versions sadly stodgy.

November 10, 2014
Inside two Hackney salmon smokeries

Fish you were here? Ole Hansen prepares fresh smoked salmon in his studio. Photograph: Hansen & Lydersen

When prehistoric Hackney citizens roamed the plashy marshes and meandering water meadows of the Lea Valley they brought home wild fowl and fish, fruits and seeds, and enjoyed a varied but by no means balanced diet.

A good catch meant a glut and much feasting, and a poor one left empty bellies. We soon learned to preserve the fish and meat left after a binge by wind drying, salting and smoking.

Of all foodstuffs that started to go off almost as soon as it was caught, fish was the most vulnerable, so barrels of herrings in salt or brine, cod dried to the consistency of a block of wood, sardines, fried then put in a vinegary pickle, all became commercial staples and much loved fare. Our national dish of fish and chips has its origins here, but that’s another story…

When Lance Forman’s ancestors came to Hackney from Odessa in 1905 and set up a smokery in Ridley Road, Londoners were astonished at the delicacy and melting tenderness of their smoked salmon, made not with heavily salted fish from the Baltic, but fresh wild salmon sourced by the Forman family from Scotland.

From subsistence food to a luxury treat, today their state-of-the-art, high tech smokery, having survived fire, flood, and planning blight (the murky shenanigans of the Olympic committee…), borders on the dubious terrain that once housed the games, and here Scottish salmon are still prepared following traditional methods.

The glitzy décor is new, but the age-old methods survive. It is Lance Forman’s genial combination of entrepreneurial skills and unshakeable idealism that saved his firm when other East End smokeries collapsed in the face of unscrupulous competition.

Of the various cures for which they are renowned Forman’s ‘London Cure’ is perhaps the most characteristic: the fish are salted for a short time, rinsed, drained, and ‘cold’ smoked over oak shavings at a low temperature. The resultant delicate, light flesh is thinly sliced diagonally the length of the fish, and best eaten at once.

Sensitive slicing by hand gives variations in the texture of the flesh, with a better flavour and a less slithery feel than the mechanically cut versions done by mass-producers of inferior products. It is paradoxical that a technique evolved for long-life preservation has today brought us an ephemeral product, with a relatively short shelf life.

‘Farmed salmon’ does not have to be a derogatory term; it all depends on how they are reared and what they feed on. Forget battery hens and calves in crates, and imagine the deep pens through which the cold northern waters surge. And remember that fish have been farmed by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and reared in ponds by medieval monastic communities.

In another corner of Hackney, where its ancient inhabitants once roamed amongst fields and hedgerows, swallowed up only recently in brickfields and then by those rows of no-longer-cheap terraced houses, there lies a hidden network of converted industrial premises and modern mews developments.

Behind the stretch of Church Street facing Clissold Park, there lurks a different kind of smokery; Hansen & Lydersen was founded in 1923 in Norway where traditions of catching and preserving fish go back to prehistoric times.

A small family firm, they were producing high quality smoked salmon using ancient methods. The arrival five years ago in Stoke Newington of the smokery of Ole Hansen, great grandson of the founder, brought a whole new dimension to Hackney’s gastronomic life.

Here, in an obscure studio, Ole, with an inspired combination of imagination, childhood memories and down-to-earth hands-on skills, together with his equally enthusiastic team, are offering us a luxury product.

His fish is farmed in the cold bracing waters of northern Norway. It is prepared and salted within 48 hours at the most of being caught, and lightly smoked for not more than 12 hours using beech and juniper shavings, which impart a distinctive aroma; the beech gives a mild background smokiness and the juniper has a pungent perfume – think the best kind of gin, almost spicy, that lingers on the palate.

The fish, suspended in the drying chamber, swaying voluptuously in the wafting aromas, mellow in the smoke, sometimes soothed, we are told, by riffs and arpeggios from the battered upright piano close by. Ole’s manic business plans are both visionary and practical, so I feel sure that the piano is indeed a source of good vibrations, not just a gimmick.

We can buy the salmon on various of the Hackney street markets, or with advance warning from the smokery. It is awesome to watch the perfectionist preparation, as the fish is trimmed then cut in thick vertical slices towards the skin, giving a variation of flavour and texture through each slice.

This account of two smokeries in Hackney is not a David and Goliath story. Both are on the same side, perfectionists, casting stones and rocks not at each other but by implication at the purveyors of cheap and nasty versions of what should only ever be a luxury product. Best not to think of the ways in which unhealthy farmed fish, none too fresh, can be tarted up with synthetic colouring, salt and sugar to boost water content and hence volume, sprayed with a smoky flavour, and squashed to death in a vacuum pack. Instead save up for a lavish meal.

Forget messing around with canapés, pile it up on the plate. As Oscar Wilde recommended: ‘Enough is as good as a feast; more than enough is even better than a feast’.

Fine smoked salmon needs no recipes, but there are things to do with the trimmings and off-cuts. I weep to see the strip of lush fat from the underbelly get tossed into the waste bin. Sacrilege. If you can cadge some, cut this amazing stuff into little cubes and melt gently in a frying pan, then when the fat is oozing out stir in some beaten eggs and cook lightly, no butter, no milk, just a grating of black pepper. A few trimmings enhance a fish soup. The things to avoid are lemon and cream cheese, both of which add nothing to an already perfect luxury.

October 19, 2014