+++SCOFF! - The free email newsletter on good food and drink. - ISSUE SEVEN, JULY 2005. For a printable colour version of this newsletter (in a ‘pdf’ file), see: http://www.gastronomail.com/archive.htm . Please forward to all your friends and colleagues so they can register to receive their own copy each month by email, at: http://www.gastronomail.com . We never pass on email addresses. Further information at the end of this issue. ++Issue Seven Contents: 01: An A-Z of Scoff: the alphabet of food wisdom - ‘G’ is for ‘GM Food’: Should we be afraid? 02: July offer - Free Champagne Ruinart competition. 03: The unchanged principles of an ancient food culture - Review: Farmhouse Cookery by Laura Mason and Fish: Recipes from a Busy Island by Sara Paston-Williams Reviewed by Hattie Ellis. 04: Recipe: Pommes savonettes, the perfect potatoes - by Nick Jakobi. 05: The drink spot: Best of British Bubbly - The secrets of Nyetimber’s success, by Jonathan Ray. 06: Titbits and crumbs: Store wars – online satire; Dans le Noir – eating in the dark comes to London; Food Ethics Councils Forum – internet debate. 07: The food spot: Too Many Cooks plus a bit of luck How Piers Bearne and his brother-in-law entered an ITV cookery show, and won. 08: How to: Find an alternative to poached salmon - Creative ideas for the whole of summer by Hattie Ellis. [Contents ends]. +01: An A-Z of Scoff: the alphabet of food wisdom - ‘G’ is for ‘GM Food’. GM food contains plant or animal ingredients whose DNA has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally. Individual genes are transferred from one plant or animal to another of the same or different species, or even between plants and animals, with a view to producing better, cheaper or more disease-resistant products. According to the World Health Organisation, there are three main areas of concern: possible allergic reaction; gene transfer to the consumer, which could theoretically, for example, pass on antibiotic resistance; and outcrossing, or movement of genes from GM to non-GM crops. While there is no clear evidence supporting the first two of these concerns, it was reported in The Guardian recently that more than 60 incidents of illegal or unlabelled GM contamination have been documented in 27 countries. The worst example related to StarLink Maize, a GM variety approved only for animals which entered the human food chain in seven countries (not including the UK). Concerns about GM food in Europe resulted in an EU moratorium on approval of GM products in 1988. Before the moratorium, 18 GMOs were authorised for EU sale, although some member states imposed their own unofficial bans. The US, Canada and Argentina want to challenge all bans through the World Trade Organisation. Last year, the moratorium was lifted for the first time when the EC approved a type of GM sweetcorn known as ‘Bt-11’ for human consumption, but opposition to GM foods means there is unlikely to be a flood of it in shops. Labelling in the EU is mandatory for products containing 1% or more ingredients derived from biotechnology or containing GM organisms. Organic food does not contain GM ingredients. +02: July Offer: Free Champagne Ruinart competition. Ruinart is the oldest Champagne House, founded in 1729. Since that historic moment, it has survived the upheavals of the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration to become world famous for the quality and refinement of its champagne. On its website at www.ruinart.com, the House offers extensive advice on the range of its six different cuvées; pairings with food; plus advice on storage, chilling, uncorking, and choosing glasses. Ruinart has kindly donated several half-bottles of its exquisite Ruinart Brut Rosé to give to Scoff! readers as summer competition prizes. Just email the answer to the following question to dan@gastronomail.com by the end of July: some research on the Ruinart website might pay dividends. The winners will be drawn at random from all the correct answers: What is the French term for the chalk-pits which form the famous cellars of Champagne Ruinart? +03: Rich sources of inspiration. - Farmhouse Cookery by Laura Mason - Fish: Recipes from a Busy Island by Sara Paston-Williams The National Trust, £24.99 each. - Reviewed by Hattie Ellis. A rich culinary culture, to be viable, must have a popular base. This is what the English have lost, partly when land was enclosed and industrialisation took us into cities and away from the source of our food. How do we recover? By once more paying attention to ingredients and where they come from, and without being precious about it. The National Trust, supposed to uphold our traditions, has produced two handsome books seeking to do just this. Farmhouse Cookery has the best possible author in Laura Mason, herself from a farming family and the author of The Traditional Foods of Britain. This is not a ‘recipe museum’, as she puts it, but a delightful collection that keeps its feet on the ground. Spinach and sorrel soup, buttered walnuts, duck egg frittata, clotted cream and blackberry ripple ice-cream: such recipes give a taste of the countryside that is bang on target for the growing number of people who are shopping in farmshops and farmers’ markets. Sara Paston-Williams’ Fish uses extended recipe introductions as a space to take you on a voyage around the coast. As well as details of history and landscape, the book has a strong environmental bias. It starts with a plea for us to continue to eat fish – but with more care, and gives a helpful guide to which species to avoid and which can be eaten with a clearer conscience. Try to find line-caught fish, if possible, she writes and, to go even further, attempt to discover if the lines are weighted, which helps stop seabirds getting tangled in the tackle. As with the farm book, Scotland is not included; a shame, since the fishing is so important to Scotland and currently in such dire straits. Both books are well illustrated with landscape shots and food photography. There are few contemporary shots of people, presumably to ensure the books do not date. Some may find them beautiful, some a touch ‘heritage’ (the latter particularly with the fish book); however, the words themselves are full of the living tradition of the people who grow, catch, cook and eat our food. +04:Recipe: Pommes savonettes - by Nick Jakobi. The perfect potatoes for steaks, or roasted meats – if you have two ovens. These potatoes boil, roast and sauté in successive steps, automatically. Simple when you get the hang of it, and the results are spectacular. - A heavy-bottomed roasting pan - Good floury potatoes suitable for roasting - Groundnut oil or similar - Salt Preheat an oven to 240°C. Peel the potatoes and slice them in half length-wise along their longest circumference. Lay them flat on the bottom of the roasting pan and pour on enough water to almost cover the potatoes. Add a little salt, two or three table spoons of oil and bring to the boil on top of the hob. Now place the roasting pan in the pre- heated oven. It must be hot enough that the water continues to boil vigorously. The water slowly evaporates, boiling the potatoes very soft, and leaving a thin film of oil on each one as the level reduces. When the water has disappeared, the atmosphere in the oven turns dry and the potatoes start to roast on their top sides and sauté on the flat sides in contact with the now oily bottom of the roasting pan. When the tops of the potatoes are a light brown (45 minutes in my oven) take the pan out of the oven and carefully loosen the potatoes from the bottom of the pan. The flat side will be a deep rich gold, the rounded side will be a perfect crisp, and the inside will be impossibly fluffy. Serve immediately, flat side up. +05: The Drink Spot: Best of British Bubbly - by Jonathan Ray. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful mediaeval house set deep in the rolling downland of West Sussex. Surrounded by spring-fed ponds and forests, the estate was given by a grateful William the Conqueror to Earl Godwin in 1086, and subsequent owners included Thomas Cromwell and Anne of Cleves. Then one day somewhat more recently – in 1987 – Stuart and Sandy Moss, a couple from faraway Chicago, passed by. They fell in love with the beautiful mediaeval house and decided that they would make it their home. They also decided that they would grow vines there and make wine. Not just any wine, but a sparkling wine of such finesse, elegance and style that it would grace the tables of prime ministers and royalty and be feted even in France as wine of the highest quality. Clearly they were stark, staring mad. But suspend your disbelief no more, for this house is Nyetimber, whose wine has just emerged top of a blind tasting of sparkling wines organised by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. Most of the tasters believed it was champagne, and top champagne at that. This accolade is simply the latest in a long line for Nyetimber. It was Wine Guild UK Wine Producer of the Year in 2004 and has won umpteen International Wine & Spirit Competition gold awards. In the beginning, Stuart did the marketing and Sandy did the winemaking, although she had no experience at all. “Having no knowledge means that you are unencumbered by tradition or previous practice,” she says. “You plant a few sticks in the ground which will take a while to grow, during which time you can read up on winemaking. Then when the wine’s in the vat you can read up on label design and so on. It’s like being a mother – you don’t have to know everything all at once.” The soil and climate at Nyetimber are almost identical to those of Champagne, so the Mosses decided both to plant the classic champagne grape varieties of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier rather than the Germanic hybrids favoured by many English winemakers, and to make their wines in the Champagne Method with a secondary fermentation in the bottle. They sourced all their equipment from Champagne and resolved only to produce vintage wine. Nyetimber produces two wines, the Classic Cuvée, a blend of 85 per cent Chardonnay and 15 per cent Pinot Noir/Pinot Meunier, and a 100 per cent Chardonnay Blanc de Blancs. About 50,000 bottles are made each year. The estate’s first wines were produced in 1992, dazzling the critics. The wines have a definite house style, with the Blanc de Blancs and the Chardonnay-dominated Classic Cuvée both exhibiting plenty of toasty, yeasty and honeyed flavours and, as befits top class sparkling wine, exceptionally fine bubbles. The wines are only released when they are judged to be ready, the average period being four to five years after the vintage. And if one regards Nyetimber as a true rival to the greatest champagnes, rather than as just another plucky English wine, then the £19 it costs per bottle is paltry indeed. Nyetimber doesn’t advertise – although it does have a website (www.nyetimber-vineyard.com/) – and the wine's success has been entirely down to word of mouth. Devotees had feared this fairy tale was about to end when the Mosses sold up to the songwriter Andy Hill in 2003, but they needn't have worried. The estate has continued to produce outstanding wines under Hill’s gifted winemaker Dermot Sugrue, which, given that Hill has been responsible for writing songs for Céline Dion, is the least that he owes us. +06: Titbits and Crumbs. - Store Wars Not long ago, in a supermarket not so far away . . . The Organic Trade Association in the US has put together a fantastic Star Wars parody, ‘grocery Store Wars’, to highlight the battle between supermarket empires and small producers: http://www.storewars.org/ - Dans Le Noir A French restaurant where people dine in the pitch dark, Dans Le Noir, is due to open a London branch this summer. The waiting staff are blind, and the diners blindfolded, offering new taste experiences and an insight into life as a blind person: http://www.danslenoir.fr/accueil_an/accueil_an.php - Food Ethics Council Forum The Food Ethics Council has launched an online forum, with accompanying resources, to debate how power is shifting within the food system: http://www.foodethicscouncil.org/forum/ 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: Too Many Cooks plus a bit of luck - by Piers Bearne. It all started innocently enough. My brother-in-law Ben phoned my wife asking if she wanted to audition with him for the ITV daytime show Too Many Cooks. She laughed and passed him over to me on the grounds that I like showing off and had just successfully replicated a meal I’d had in a Californian restaurant. We headed off to Granada for an audition, fearing that we were to be thrown into a show kitchen and asked to bash together a meal from a fearsome combination of exotic ingredients. But after some basic food knowledge questions and a request to talk about each other on camera, we were simply given a list of six ingredients and two minutes to decide what we would make and how we would make it. It went OK, but we assumed we wouldn’t be hearing any more about it. Then the call came: we want you to come to Manchester to film a show. If you haven’t watched Too Many Cooks, here’s the format. A celebrity chef (Gino) has prepared a starter, main course and dessert. He whips the lid off each in turn, says what it is and puts the lid back. Four teams of two people each strain frantically to catch a glimpse from 20 feet away and start panicking, because they then have to reproduce what he has done, from three piles of ingredients. After each course, one team is eliminated, until a winner is chosen. Our first dish was a broad bean salad with mozzarella and toast. We didn’t realise the beans were already cooked, so we cooked them again, in their shells. Big mistake: “Why you cooka the broada beans? I can’t eat this crrrap.” We survived thanks to the Green team, who threw their beans into the sink. “Lacky boys,” grinned Gino. Then we got it. You have to listen to the title carefully. You have to be ready ahead of time. And if you present the dish well, you will do better. I also found out we had a secret weapon: Ben had been to an international hotel management school and learned every important cooking technique. His seared liver and my mustard mash went down a storm, and our greek yoghurt-based crème brûlée saw off the challenge of the Scottish vegetarian ladies. We had moved towards a division of labour: I did mashes, veg and presentation; Ben did meat, fish, sauces, all the difficult stuff. And we won the round. On Tuesday, however, the competition was fiercer. One pair in particular, Rob and Nic, had sailed through their round: Rob was a serious cook with a professional catering business. We were severely remonstrated by Gino in each round: at one point we both salted the risotto and he spat it out, shouting: “This is shit.” But, in the final showdown with Nic and Rob, they missed the countdown to hand over the Amaretto French toast with grilled figs and coffee cream. We had won. So Ben and I are off to Marrakech for a week’s course at a top cooking school, from where we promise to report back to the readers of Scoff! in due course. Can’t wait. 08: How to: Find an alternative to poached salmon - by Hattie Ellis At the start of summer, perfection is a piece of poached salmon with a wobbly dollop of mayonnaise. But it is good to have alternatives in your repertoire for later in the season. So here are five: 1: Raw. You don’t have to be a sushi master to enjoy the healthy freshness of raw salmon – Rowley Leigh’s raw salmon with ginger dressing is one of many exceptional recipes in his book No Place Like Home. For four people, chop up 300-400g skinned salmon fillet (he slices it thinly across the grain; I just chop it into small cubes) and dress with 1tbs finely chopped garlic, 2tbs finely chopped ginger, 3tbs finely chopped shallots mixed into 50ml lemon juice, 150ml soy sauce and 200ml sunflower oil. Garnish with chopped chives. 2: In pastry. Cook skinned fillets en croûte. George Perry-Smith’s salmon with stem ginger and currants wrapped in puff pastry is a classic that has been widely dispersed, for example in Rick Stein’s Seafood School Cookbook. 3: In salt. Cover the whole, gutted fish above and below in salt, mixed with water to the consistency of wet sand, and bake in a very hot oven (240°C). Cooking time will vary according to size but should be about 45-55 minutes for a 2.5kg fish. Crack open the shell of salt at the table, carefully remove it and the skin, and the flesh will have steamed in its own juices. Serve with melted butter and chopped herbs. 4: Hot-smoked. Hot-smoked salmon keeps well in the fridge and is brilliant thrown into pasta, salads, scrambled eggs and omelettes. 5: Have a change! Try sea-bass instead: an under-rated fish to eat cold. For the best flavour, go for as big a beast as you can, which usually means wild and not farmed. NOTE: Hattie Ellis is recipe editor and writer for Best of British Fish, published by Mitchell Beazley. For a Scoff! reader discount offer see: http://www.gastronomail.com/offers.htm . ++End notes. +HOW TO RECEIVE YOUR REGULAR ‘SCOFF!’ To subscribe to this free monthly bulletin, Send a blank email to scoff-subscribe@gastronomail.com Please encourage your friends and colleagues to subscribe! To unsubscribe at any time, email: scoff-unsubscribe@gastronomail.com For further information on subscription see: http://www.gastronomail.com . +ACCESSIBILITY NOTE: This newsletter conforms to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard, which makes email publications easier to access for people with impaired vision using text-to-speech devices. For details see: http://www.headstar.com/ten . +COPYRIGHT 2004 Gastronomail Ltd. If you would like to reproduce stories from this newsletter, we generally allow this as long as a full credit is included, with our web address and a description of our newsletter. For permission please email jo@gastronomail.com . +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.]