+++SCOFF!
- The free email newsletter on good food and drink.

- ISSUE FOUR, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2004.

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this issue.


++Issue Four Contents:

01: An A-Z of Scoff: the alphabet of food wisdom
- ‘D’ is for ‘Dates’. When does food really expire?

+02: Reader offer: Cantaloupe Restaurant and Bar
- Meal discount of 25 per cent at selected times.

03: Putting the science back into the kitchen
- Review: McGee on Food & Cooking, one of the best books ever 
written on food.

04: Recipe: Grilled duck on roasted vegetables
- by Mike Bazett.

05: The drink spot: The complex, moreish spirit of Christmas
- how to drink Port, by Peter Grogan.

06: Titbits and crumbs: Food Ethics Symposium – this Friday in 
London; Candyboots - bizarre, hysterical, inedible and just so 
Seventies.

07: The food spot: The sweet and sour history of sugar
- by Sanjida O’Connell, author of ‘Sugar: The Grass that Changed the 
World’.

08: How to: How to: Cook perfect pastry
- by Rosemary Perkins.

[Contents ends].


+01: An A-Z of Scoff: the alphabet of food wisdom
- ‘D’ is for ‘Dates’.

Why is it that many foods seem fine well past their supposed expiry 
dates?

In the UK, it is an offence to sell food older than its ‘use by’ date, and 
consumers are officially advised never to eat it. Foods with ‘use by’ 
dates are those prone to support the growth of potentially dangerous 
micro-organisms, such as fresh meat and fish, dairy products, cooked 
meats and ready meals.

‘Use by’ dates must give the day up to and including that which the 
food will remain in good condition. So ‘use by end’, which one 
sometimes sees, means exactly the same as ‘use by’.

On the other hand, if food with a ‘use by’ date also says something like 
‘eat within a week of opening’, or ‘keeps in the fridge for three days’, 
this will apply beyond the ‘use by’ date.

‘Best before’ dates, on the other hand, which are used with less 
perishable goods, are simply a guideline for consumption, and it is not 
an offence for shopkeepers to sell food beyond these dates, with the 
exception of eggs. ‘Sell by’ dates are self-explanatory, and can be 
treated in a similar way to ‘best before’.

As to whether out-of-date food is safe to consume; the answer is 
generally yes, if it seems OK. With tinned and dried goods, you have at 
least another month to play with; with frozen foods you have another 
week; with meat you have two or three days; and with seafood, don’t 
push it beyond a day.

But in any case use your nose, and your common sense: but don’t take 
risks with meat and fish.


+02: Reader offer: Meal Discounts at Cantaloupe Restaurant & Bar.

“The menu is a fashionable Spanish-North African mix of dishes . . . 
Service is an exceptional blend of friendliness and efficiency. Even the 
busiest dishes are cleverly balanced, and comprise excellent, mainly 
organic ingredients . . . Drinks are reasonably priced too. This is a class 
act.”

So said Time Out in its review of Cantaloupe Restaurant & Bar.

Now Scoff! readers can obtain a 25 per cent discount off a meal at 
Cantaloupe throughout January 2005, for weekday lunchtimes and 
Monday evenings. This offer is valid for your whole table, no matter 
how many guests you invite. Please print this page off and bring it with 
you to claim your  discount. Please also make reservations on 020-
7613-4411 and mention Scoff!

For menu, wine list and other info please check website: 
www.cantaloupe.co.uk

We look forward to seeing you at 35 Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, 
London EC2A 3PD.


+03: Putting The Science Back Into The Kitchen
- Book review: www McGee on Food & Cooking: An Encyclopedia of 
Kitchen Science, History and Culture, by Harold McGee  (Hodder & 
Stoughton, £30).

By Hattie Ellis.

McGee on Food & Cooking, even without recipes, is one of the best 
books ever written on food. Even if you have On Food & Cooking, the 
original version by this scientist-in-the-kitchen, this 900-page volume 
is essentially a new book.

Two-thirds longer than the original, 10 years in the making and 90 per 
cent freshly written, it incorporates tried-and-tested information 
gathered from some of the experiments for Harold McGee’s other 
classic, The Curious Cook, and soars over the subject on wings now 
powered by the internet and an explosion of research into food and 
drink.

His first draft of the new cheese section was book-length until it was 
cut drastically, and the final book includes more than 32,000 words on 
fish alone, a subject covered just briefly in the first edition. 
Cooking is a craft honed by centuries of stirring spoons and kitchen 
observations and there is much we take for granted. McGee’s 
revolution is to make us stop and look again, taking science back to 
one of its first laboratories, the home kitchen.

But do we need to know, for example, how an emulsion works in a 
sauce like mayonnaise? After reading McGee, the process is 
demystified, giving you more confidence in the kitchen. You know 
why you add salt at the start, and lemon juice later, and why you have 
to add the oil carefully at first (though not literally drop by drop, as 
many recipes say).

Beyond this, every page has something fascinating. To take just one 
example, I’ve been eating fish around the coast this year and had 
noticed how really fresh fish had a literal taste of the sea. McGee 
explains that the smell of the ocean comes from compounds 
synthesised by algae from bromine, an element common in seawater 
and that this accumulates in the flesh of fish, hence creating this part of 
their flavour.

This is an indispensable book for anyone interested in food although 
McGee’s earlier work The Curious Cook, with its detective-like essays, 
is still an easier read if you just want to curl up with a book rather than 
consult one as a reference work.


+04:Recipe: Grilled Duck on Roasted Vegetables
- by Mike Bazett.

This is a simple, flexible and very tasty dish. It also works well with 
rump steak, cooked rare, or boneless chicken thighs. Serves four.

2-4 duck breasts (depending on size), fat on.
Four handfuls mangetout or sugar snap peas
2 red onions
2 carrots
1 red pepper
1 large sweet potato
1 aubergine.
For marinade: Olive oil; Soy sauce; Rice wine; 2 tsp honey; black 
pepper; Sesame oil (dash).


Score the fat on the duck in a criss-cross pattern, then marinade the 
meat for a few hours. Slice onions, sweet potato and carrot thickly but 
consistently. Cut carrots diagonally. Coat vegetables in olive oil and 
season with freshly ground black pepper and salt. Place in shallow 
roasting tray in preheated oven at 180 for 40 minutes. After 15 
minutes, add sliced red pepper and aubergine, the latter sliced 1cm 
thick and browned in hot pan with olive oil. In the last few minutes, 
add mangetouts so they are still slightly crisp when served.

The duck is best cooked on a barbeque, or use a very hot griddle or 
grill. Place fat-side down (unless grilling) for about 5 minutes, until 
crisp and running underneath. Turn over for 5 minutes. It should still 
be pink in the middle — remove and allow to relax for a few minutes. 
Then slice diagonally about 1cm thick and arrange around mounds of 
vegetables.


+05: The Drink Spot: The Complex, Moreish Spirit of Christmas
- by Peter Grogan.

Picture the scene — a crackling log fire in the holly-decked hearth, the 
shining faces of turkey-filled loved ones about the table weighing up 
the option of just one wafer-thin slice of fine stilton, and perhaps a 
couple of plump Brazils to finish. Just one thing is needed to complete 
this scene of Yuletide bliss — a glinting crystal decanter of venerable 
vintage port. But should the reality be more of a two-bar electric and 
Kentucky Fried turkeyburgers with a couple of hung-over mates, it 
would still be a shame not to crack open the Cockburn’s and celebrate.

Made principally from the Touriga Nacional grape, port comes from 
the upper Douro valley, and the demarcation of the region in 1756 
formed the world’s first “appellation”. Fortification with 25 per cent 
brandy to truncate fermentation and keep the wine sufficiently sweet 
for English palates also worked wonders in preserving the wine on the 
long voyage to Blighty.

There are two basic types of port — those aged in wood and those aged 
in the bottle, which are generally superior. Of the former, ruby is the 
bog-standard, matured in wood for two or three years, then blended, 
filtered and bottled — surprisingly, most is consumed in France. The 
ubiquitous Cockburn’s Special Reserve is £8.18 at Tesco and is 
reliably rich and fruity, if a little cloying after the first half-pint or so.

Moving up the quality scale a notch, we come to late bottled vintage 
(LBV) and vintage character ports. The former are generally made in 
average quality years and kept in wood for four to six years before 
bottling. They don’t improve once bottled and usually have no 
sediment so they don’t require decanting. Sainsbury’s has Graham’s 
1997 at £10.99 and Oddbins has Taylor’s 1998 at the same price, both 
of which are well-made — for my money the Graham’s just shades it 
with riper, sweeter fruit flavours.

Maybe it’s just me, but the quality of LBVs seems to be somewhat in 
decline and, given the choice, I’ll take a ‘crusted’ port every time. 
They are bottled unfiltered (it’s the residual solids in the wine which 
allow it to continue to develop in the bottle) so it needs to be decanted. 
Oddbins has Dow’s 1999 bottling for £13.99 and its lively fruit and 
complex finish put it above most LBVs.

A further notch up the scale are single quinta ports, made from grapes 
from a single vineyard, usually in ‘undeclared’ years. Made in the 
same way as vintage port, they’re bottled unfiltered and are kept for 
two years in wood and, again, must be decanted. Taylor’s 1996 Quinta 
de Vargellas (Oddbins: £24.99) is classy, with good body, fruit-cake 
flavours and plenty of ‘fire’.

Of wood-aged ports, the basic tawnies may be blended with white port 
to lighten the colour and are usually disappointing while the best stuff 
emerges after up to 40 years in wood as the pale, sophisticated 
aristocrat of the family — it’s said to be the preferred tipple of the 
shippers themselves. “One of our best kept secrets” is what the wine 
merchants Berry Bros (0870 900 4300) say of their William Pickering 
20-year-old Tawny Port (£19.95) and I fear that my fondness for it is 
bordering on the immoderate so perhaps I shouldn’t tell you about it. 
Made by Quinta do Noval, it’s a feast of nuts and dates and Turkish 
Delight and would be cheap at half as much again.

And don’t forget white port itself, which is made from white 
grapes,and makes a refreshing aperitif served chilled. Berry Bros does 
a good one (£7.95) which has a nice toffeeish nose and zesty 
marmaladey flavours and has a great affinity with mature cheddar.

Vintage port accounts for just one per cent of total production and 
“declarations” occur every three or four years on average. There are 
three main problems with it — it’s expensive, messy and very moreish. 
To find out what it’s all about, stump up £88 for a bottle of Taylor’s 
1977 from Tanners (01743 234 500). Stand it upright for a day to 
settle, then pour it slowly into a clean jug, leaving the last inch in the 
bottle. Rinse the bottle, then pour it back in. It’ll keep for a good few 
days and at £4 for a dinky little glass — to be found in any junk shop 
— it doesn’t seem extortionate, does it?


+06: Titbits and crumbs.

- Food Ethics Symposium
The Food Ethics Council and the Times Higher Education Supplement 
are running a symposium on the morning of Friday 10 December in 
London entitled ‘Just knowledge? - research on food and farming’. An 
impressive line-up of experts and retailers will examine public 
confidence in food science and technology, and launch a new report. 
Places cost 25 pounds – for more see:
www.foodethicscouncil.org/projects/agrifood/launch.pdf

- Candyboots
And finally, on a lighter note, comes Candyboots, which features 
Weight Watchers recipe cards circa 1974 – which are bizarre, 
hysterical, inedible and just so seventies. There are some links through 
to other similar sites as well, such as James Lilek’s Gallery of 
Regrettable Food:
www.candyboots.com

NOTE: Scoff! is giving away books on food and wine to readers who 
send in their favourite link, if published. Email to: 
dan@gastronomail.com.


+07: The food spot: The Sweet and Sour History of Sugar
- by Sanjida O’Connell.

Sugar has a royal history. A German traveller who met Elizabeth I in 
the sixteenth century commented on England’s love of sugar: “The 
Queen, in the sixty-fifth year of her age, very majestic; her face 
oblong, fair but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her 
nose a little hooked, her lips narrow, and her teeth black (a defect the 
English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar).”

But the sweet stuff, ubiquitous in supermarket food, served in sachets 
with every cup of coffee, the cornerstone of desserts, supersaturated in 
soft drinks, is not a natural component of our diet.

Sugar is extracted from sugar cane, a giant grass that can grow up to 
six metres in height. It was originally domesticated around 8,000 years 
ago in Papua New Guinea and from there it spread throughout the 
world. It became part of the Polynesians’ creation myths, it was 
cultivated in India and carried to China by Buddhists and Hindus; Arab 
Muslims took sugar cane with them as they conquered the Middle East 
and Europe; and it was stolen from them by Christian Crusaders and 
shipped to the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus, where Dutch Jews 
taught the Brits how to refine sugar, before it reached America in the 
folds of the Jesuits’ habits; the Jesuits became the largest religious 
group to own slaves. It was only in Australia that sugar cane was 
conveyed by convicts, though they too, in their way, may also have 
been God’s messengers.

Originally sugar was a play thing of the elite: The English king Henry 
III asked the Mayor of Winchester to procure him three pounds [1.4 
kg] of sugar, including violet and rose sugar in 1226. During 1288 the 
Royal Household used 2,722 kg of sugar – at an exorbitant cost – 
equivalent today to nearly £60,000. As the aristocracy began to be able 
to afford sugar, they served up ‘subtleties’ as a symbol of their wealth. 
These were monstrous concoctions made of confectionery, such as a 
sugar stag that bled claret when an arrow was removed from its flank. 
The average person was unable to buy sugar until almost 500 years 
later: then, between 1700 and 1800, sugar consumption rose by 400 per 
cent per person.

The woman who could be held responsible for bridging the gap 
between the aristocratic use of sugar and every day consumption is 
Hannah Glasse. Her two books, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and 
Easy, and The Compleat Confectioner, were published in 1747 and 
1760 respectively. She described how subtleties could be modified for 
the middle classes: how marzipan and blanched almonds could be 
crafted into a “Hedge-Hog”, and gave the recipe for a little Chinese 
temple, the top, bottom and sides arrayed with “fruits, nuts of all kinds, 
creams, jellies, syllabubs, biscuits, etc, etc”.

Marie Antoinette may have instructed French peasants to eat cake but, 
as sugar became less expensive, it was the English middle class who 
responded. At first a pudding could be part of a second or third course, 
along with meat or fish, but by the end of the 1800s, dessert followed 
savoury courses. The anthropologist, Sidney Mintz, author of 
‘Sweetness and Power,’ noted that, “There is nothing natural or 
inevitable about eating sweet food at every meal or about expecting a 
sweet course . . . Yet it is by now so commonplace that we may have 
difficulty in imagining some completely different pattern.” He adds: 
“The less conspicuous role of sugar in French and Chinese cuisines 
may have something to do with their excellence. It is not necessarily a 
mischievous question to ask whether sugar damaged English cooking, 
or whether English cooking in the seventeenth century had more need 
of sugar than French.”

Yet this desire for sugar may well be our undoing: one in five of us are 
obese, while the French, with their elegant tarte tatins on special 
occasions, remain Gallically svelte.

Sugar: The Grass that Changed the World by Sanjida O’Connell is 
published by Virgin Books, priced £18.99.


08: How to: Cook Perfect Pastry
- by Rosemary Perkins.

The same rules apply for trouble-free pastry of most kinds. Most 
standard cookbooks have recipes for the basic pastry types. Shortcrust 
pastry uses proportions, by weight, of two of flour plus a pinch of salt 
to one of fat, plus water. Use only as much water as is needed just to 
hold pastry together. A higher proportion of fat gives a shorter, 
crumblier and more delicious pastry. Butter has the best flavour, using 
a small amount of lard or white fat gives pastry which is a little lighter. 
The higher the fat content, the trickier the pastry is to roll out

1: You can add a little sugar for sweeter pastry, but this toughens the 
pastry somewhat. You can also add an egg yolk as part of the liquid . . . 
this will give a crisper pastry, easier to handle, less crumbly and rich.

2: Avoid overhandling the pastry. This will overdevelop the gluten in 
the dough, and will make for hard tough pastry that will shrink. You 
should wrap the pastry in plastic and allow it to rest somewhere cool 
for at least half an hour before attempting to roll it 
out . . . you can also leave it wrapped in the fridge for a couple of days 
before using it.

3: To line a flan tin to bake ‘blind’ without pastry shrinking, roll out 
the chilled pastry, ease it without stretching into the tin, leaving it 
upstanding on the sides, then rest and chill again for 30 minutes in the 
freezer or longer in the fridge. Line with a circle of foil, well pressed 
into bottom and sides, and prick with a fork right through foil and 
pastry. Fill with suitable weights . . . beans, rice, ceramic baking beans 
and so on. Bake from frozen for 15-20 minutes in a fairly hot oven, 
remove beans and foil carefully, and put back in oven for three to five 
minutes to dry bottom.

4: For a very perfect top edge, wait five minutes after removing from 
oven and trim edge carefully with a small sharp knife . . . and keep a 
little piece of pastry back for patching in case of disaster.

++End notes.

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+COPYRIGHT 2004 Gastronomail Ltd.
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+PERSONNEL:
Food Editor - Dan Jellinek  dan@gastronomail.com
Drinks editor – Johnny Ray  johnny@gastronomail.com
Consultant Editor – Hattie Ellis  hattie@gastronomail.com
Marketing Director – Jo Weatherall  jo@gastronomail.com

[Issue ends.]