The Real Food Companion by Matthew Evans

The Real Food Companion

EVANS

Photography by Alan Benson

A CAMPAIGN FOR REAL FOOD

It started with milk. For a while I was the best-fed person in the country, dining at the finest restaurants for my work as the chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald , and what amazed me most was milk. Good, simple whole milk. Milk with the cream on the top, milk that had been caressed into being, from lush grass that the cows fed on, to the gentle pasteurisation that preserved its flavour. Forget your fine dining restaurants, your million dollar fit-outs — it was old-fashioned unhomogenised, full-cream milk that blew my mind.

Good milk set me on a course to find the best produce, and to find out what made it the best. It even got me to grow my own vegetables and milk my own cow. What I learned about milk I related to every ingredient I could get my hands on, from beef to kale, from carrots to figs. Just what is it that makes some foods better than others? Is there a way to tell what is likely to taste better out there, before you buy? How do we get the proverbial cream from the top of life?

Often the great joys I discovered turned out to come from farmhouse producers. Often they were overlooked ingredients, or just plain old-fashioned fresh flavours that can be found across the nation at farmers’ markets; simple food, truly seasonal food that real people can find and eat. Food that makes good cooking easy.

What I have discovered is a country on the ascendancy. Unlike France and Italy, countries that I once visited regularly and which are striving to preserve their gastronomic integrity, in Australia we are now more aware of what we have, what we can do, and are starting to question just how sustainable it is. While older nations are scrambling to maintain the quality of their markets, their traditional recipes and ingredients, we are building a repertoire of ever greater produce.

This book encapsulates a ‘whole food’ philosophy. Mediocrity is not something to aspire to. If large corporate food manufacturers say something is great, that probably means it’s not. This is an anti-marketing book, celebrating resolute flavours, integrity and the joy of good home cooking. It’s not going to tell you to buy a packet of my own brand sauce. It won’t point you to one supermarket or another; in fact, I hope it helps alleviate the need for supermarkets in your food shopping life.

My biggest concern with mass-marketed food is that it promotes mediocrity. It has to. Price points, the weekly and seasonal variations in everything from coffee to pork to seafood, means you can’t brand things (or sell them widely) if they’re fabulous. Fabulous, fresh, unbelievably good food is — virtually without exception — too rare, too fleeting, to be given a brand and sold nationally. Nature, by very definition, creates diversity — the enemy of consistency. So consistency promotes mediocrity. If a big brand gets its hands on something marvellous, they have to bring it into line and make it ‘consistent’. They have to dumb it down because if they sell you something marvellous one day, you may expect it all the time.

When I worked for various food magazines I too faced this dilemma. Here we were, trying to promote the unique, the brave and the most downright amazing food producers in the land. But the advertising dollar came from elsewhere. Only big companies, only those organised into conglomerates, the antithesis of most good food, had the money to buy a page of advertising. Each issue, as with just about every magazine, was a compromise between what the advertisers wanted, and what the punters should hear about. It was a constant tug-of-war between commercial and artisan, between corporate and seasonal, between mission statements and regional variation. The truth is, the small guys are at risk of being shunted out of the market, but more importantly, they aren’t lauded enough for their wisdom, ingenuity or moral stance, because they’re not big or fancy and they don’t have deep enough pockets to get into our collective psyche.

Know this truth: the best food is being grown and cooked by people you’ve never heard of.

This book isn’t meant to be just some glossy tome giving faint praise to producers and avoiding the hard topics. Part of me is ashamed to live in a nation where our national dish, the meat pie — a meal at once both as humble as a shoe and as majestic as a star — is by law allowed to contain as little as 25 per cent meat. And ‘meat’ can include everything on the beast, from eyebrows to bum holes to blood vessels and cartilage. The only thing that 25 per cent can’t include is pure fat and solid bone. Or a foetus.

And that’s why this book talks about producers. It offers an easily digestible but detailed insight into the way food is made, handled, sold and cooked. It’s a cookbook with a focus. It will empower you when you visit a farmers’ market, butcher and baker. It debunks myths, gives honest information on what is happening to our food, and looks internationally to show where we succeed, and where we fail. It has an organic emphasis, but remains sceptical of the hype. It is earthy like the real food within its pages — like the growers, producers, fishers and farmers who provide such bounty for our tables.

It’s all I know about food, in one volume.

100 g (31/2 oz) butter

2 onions, finely chopped

2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf (Italian) parsley

5 celery sticks, finely diced

2 carrots, finely diced

2 bay leaves

750 g (1 lb 10 oz) minced (ground) veal (preferably neck)

500 g (1 lb 2 oz) minced (ground) pork (preferably neck)

1 teaspoon salt

Real Italian bolognese

500 ml (17 fl oz/2 cups) full-cream (whole) milk

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

500 ml (17 fl oz/2 cups) dry white wine

880 g (1 lb 15 oz/31/2 cups) tinned chopped tomatoes

freshly cooked pasta, to serve butter and grated Italian parmesan cheese (Parmigiano Reggiano or Grano Padano), to serve

A real Italian bolognese (what they call a ragu) is an amazing thing to taste. It takes ages to cook, but ends up warming the house, making it smell like the home you wish you’d grown up in. Luckily the stove does most of the work while you write your great literary masterpiece. I’ve used minced veal here, but you can also use beef mince or veal meat diced into 5 mm ( 1/ 4 inch) cubes. If you can’t hang around the house, you could, at a pinch, hurry things along in a pressure cooker. This recipe makes such a quantity that you can freeze it in small batches for quick meals later.

MAKES ABOUT 2 KG (4 LB 8 OZ)

Heat the butter in a large heavy-based saucepan over medium heat and fry the onion and parsley until translucent. Add the celery, carrot and bay leaves, and continue to fry for 2 minutes. Increase the heat, add the veal and pork minces, the salt and some freshly milled black pepper, to taste, breaking up the meat as it fries. Cook the mince until the liquid has evaporated. This could take ages, depending on how wide the top of your pan is.

Stir the milk into the pan and reduce the heat. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the milk has evaporated. Add the nutmeg and wine, stirring, until it has evaporated too, then add the tomatoes and 500 ml (17 fl oz/ 2 cups) water. Reduce the heat to low and barely simmer for 2 3 hours, stirring from

time to time, adding 125 ml (4 fl oz/ 1/2 cup) water as needed. The bolognese should be fairly rich and not watery by the end. Adjust the seasoning, to taste, and serve with your favourite pasta. Remember to toss a little bolognese through the pasta rather than dolloping a spoonful on top. Enrich it with about 1 teaspoon butter per serve, and serve with grated parmesan cheese.

Note: If you like, you can finish cooking the pasta for the last couple of minutes with the bolognese: use about 50 g (1 3/4 oz) ragu per 100 g (3 1/2 oz) dried pasta for one modest serve — you will need to add at least a couple of tablespoons of the pasta cooking water, which will be absorbed as you stir.

8 thin slices prosciutto or jamón

2 x 250 g (9 oz) whole, fresh rainbow trout, scaled and gutted 60 g (21/4 oz) butter

2 tablespoons pine nuts 20 sage leaves

2 teaspoons lemon juice, strained

Roasted prosciutto-wrapped trout with sage burnt butter & pine nuts

Fresh trout is so cheap, yet so delectable; perhaps it’s a tad subtle for our tastes these days. The resolute flavours in this dish, however, go wonderfully with trout, particularly the hard-to-find brook trout. Pretend you went freshwater fishing.

SERVES 2

Preheat the oven to 200ºC (400ºF/Gas 6).

Lay four slices of prosciutto next to each other on a clean work surface so that the long edges are slightly overlapping. Lay the trout across the prosciutto to cover the length of the fish, except the head and tail, and wrap the prosciutto around to enclose. Repeat with the remaining prosciutto and trout.

Melt 20 g ( 3/4 oz) of the butter and brush onto the trout. Place the trout in a shallow roasting tin and roast in the oven for about 8 10 minutes, or until cooked through. Place on a serving plate.

Heat the remaining butter in a frying pan over a medium–high heat, add the pine nuts and toss to brown slightly. When the butter turns a nut brown colour, add the sage leaves

and remove from the heat. Keep tossing and add the lemon juice. It will fizz and froth, so just keep shaking the pan to stop it burning. Pour this butter mixture over the trout and devour immediately. I’d probably drink a semillon with it. As the wine flows, you can tell everyone about the D’Meure chardonnay — the one you’ve heard others on the river talk about, but have never actually seen.

SEAFOOD

Morrie Wolf has lived a few lives. Four hip operations, a chance meeting with God that led to a religious conversion, and fifty years after first putting out to sea, Morrie no longer has the ability to fish for southern rock lobsters (crayfish). Instead, he now drops lines and nets for fish, and takes recreational anglers out off the southern coast of Australia in an attempt to hook tuna, or striped trumpeter, or trevalla.

The fish that Morrie catches could be served in the finest restaurants in the world. It’s immaculate fish that tastes as good as you’ll find anywhere. But all that is coming to a close. What our descendants will get to eat in the future may not include the majestic seafood I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy in my lifetime. And it may include few wild fish at all, unless you earn a fortune.

There will be far fewer Morrie Wolfs in years to come, thanks to overfishing and a scramble to buy back licences worldwide. It’s estimated that there’s been a 40 per cent drop in biodiversity around the world’s coastlines since 1800, and that about one-third of all commercial fisheries are now practically defunct. I’ve been alive while much of it has happened, and not even realised. To my shame I probably ate as much critically endangered tuna during the five years I worked as a restaurant reviewer as my child is likely to see in his hopefully long life.

I should’ve seen what was coming when, in the year 2000, I stood with Ari, a Finnish salmon and herring fisherman, at his home on an island in Helsinki Harbour. He looked crushed, this being yet another day when he came back from sea without a single salmon from a morning’s work. This is not a specific case. You can see the loss of wild fish in the catches brought back by picturesque blue fishing boats as they arrive next to the markets at Trani in southern Italy; paltry catches of mostly small fish, perhaps too small to have bred yet. There’s so little southern bluefin tuna caught these days where it used to be fished on the NSW coast near where I grew up that the line-caught fishery has all but closed. Around the world, fishing is in crisis.

It’s a sad combination of factors that has led to this condition, and many people now place their hope in fish farming to provide good seafood into the future.

12 sheets filo pastry

80 g (23/4 oz) butter, melted, plus 150 g (51/2 oz) butter, extra 40 g (11/2 oz) sugar

2 tablespoons honey 60 ml (2 fl oz/1/4 cup) pouring (whipping) cream (35% fat)

3 tablespoons finely grated mandarin or orange zest 250 g (9 oz) unsalted macadamia nuts 200 g (7 oz) slivered almonds

Macadamia & honey tart

This rich tart can be made with a Sweet Shortcrust Pastry base (see page 150), which is first blind baked, but filo pastry adds a different dimension altogether. Cut it thinly to serve, unadorned.

SERVES 12

Preheat the oven to 180ºC (350ºF/Gas 4). Grease a 27 cm (10 3/4 inch) round loosebased flan (tart) tin. Line the base and side of the tin with layers of filo pastry, brush each layer with a little of the melted butter before adding the next. Trim the edges.

Put the extra butter, sugar, honey and cream in a large saucepan over high heat then reduce the heat and simmer for 3 minutes. Add the mandarin zest and simmer for 1 minute more. Fold through the macadamia nuts and almonds and spread evenly over the prepared pastry case.

Bake in the oven for 25 35 minutes, or until the top is a nice caramel colour. Cool for 30 minutes in the tin before removing. Store the tart in an airtight container in the refrigerator for a couple of days at most, but serve at room temperature.