WOLF issue II - Mexico

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RENE REDZEPI APRIL BLOOMFIELD FRIDA KAHLO

STEVIE PARLE NUNO MENDES NORDIC FOOD LAB

A QUARTERLY FOOD JOURNAL | ISSUE 2 | MEXICO

PLUS: LOBSTERS IN AFGHANISTAN, BEE LARVAE GRANOLA, WHITE FOOD ADDICTION AND LOTS MORE

contents

my life in catering

mexico

a question of taste

And the characters I met along the way

By Morwenna Ferrier

Some words from Rene Redzepi

There’s more to taste than meets the mouth, finds Hanna Hanra

11

03

fur your pleasure Maddie the Coonhound with, on and by some food things

22–23

natural symmetry Patternity look at one of the most ubiquitous of Mexican staples: the avocado 12

04

more taste, less speed It’s impossible to be a fussy eater if you want to see the world

By Rebecca Nicholson 05

mexican chicken buns Or, The Art of Looking Mexican

By Dan Biddulph 26

a taste of tulum Lulu Kennedy (MBE) takes us on a culinary tour of her second home 13

to be enchilado

divorced eggs Despite the name, these eggs are a perfect marriage

By Stevie Parle 27

shell shock

A chemesthetic trip into Mexican gusto

By Ana Caballero

peter & rona

When people say expect to be shocked in a war zone, they never meant this

By Mark Townsend

14

Your favourite new food columnists are back!

06

don’t look back in hunger A buffet of emotional flashbacks and the foods that go with them

By Sophie Wilkinson

i don’t like cricket, i love it Eating crickets and ants’ eggs is commonplace in Mexico, but most of the West is yet to be convinced.

By Rosie Birkett 16

07

cereal killing just like granny didn’t make Inheriting a recipe book can teach you all sorts of things. Even how to make “Bachelor’s Buttons”

By Nell Frizzell

On learning (or at least pretending) to eat in technicolour

By Oscar Rickettr 09

WOLF

What did the Nordic Food Lab do with a beekeeper’s surplus of bee larvae?

By Josh Evans

Editor-in-chief: Eleanor Morgan Art Director: Carla Valdivia Associate Publisher: Hanna Hanra Interns: Teri Ake, Felicity Kendall

17

With special thanks to

taco belle Tacos, April Bloomfield style

Abrams & Chronicle, Auchentoshan, Casa Mexico, Clare Lattin, David Waddington, JD & JB, Lucy Stanfield, Nuno Mendes and Viajante, Tessa Sampson, Sue Webster

18–19

Piggy Publishing

08

white food

29

simple pleasures An afternoon with Nuno Mendes and the food that excites him the most Interview by Eleanor Morgan 20–21

WOLF UNIT 6B THE PRINT HOUSE ASHWIN STREET LONDON, E8 3DL wolf-magazine.co.uk wolffoodjournal@gmail.com {Our cover image of Frida Kahlo was drawn by Sue Webster, blindfolded, “in a game of Exquisite Corpses with myself”} The typeface “Luchita Payol” used in this issue of WOLF was designed by Enrique Ollervides

my life in catering And the characters I met along the way

By Morwenna Ferrier

I asked to borrow her copy of the imaginatively titled: Wicca Spellbook and for the next few weeks, we cast various spells on the customers. Throughout that period, my Myspace accoaunt read: Wiccan.

Then in October, I found a room to rent in London so I handed in my notice. On my last day, Lee took us for jacket potatoes at the pub, and I went home on the bus. That evening, Lee sent me the following text: “as I’m no longer your boss, can we have a drink?” I didn’t reply; Lee was 39 and I was 20. Cheers for that, Lisa.

Robert de Niro 2002 I never put Robert de Niro down as the type that “requests” blondes, but there we go. It was the opening night of a terrible musical he was funding and I was part of a ten-strong team of private waitresses. For some reason Suranne Jones was in the booth behind him, standing on her table and swaying gently while holding a fistful of mini-sausages. I guess I lucked out with Robert.

Robert de Niro is dwarf-small and goes everywhere with seven bodyguards. It was 2001-ish, and his hair was on the turn. He only wanted sparkling water, “no ice”, which I brought him. He didn’t, however, want any of the fish-shaped (and filled) pastry bites I brought him. Still, I presented my aluminium catering platter at his table several times over the course of the evening, which he politely batted away. Eventually, he had to get one of his bodyguards to erect a rope barrier outside his booth. Narc.

Lisa the Witch 2003 Yeovil’s Good Bean was pretty groundbreaking when it opened in 2002, as a sort of rival to Costa. And, it was very popular for a time. That its mantra was “Service before coffee” probably explains why the chain is now defunct, though. Still, in its heyday, everyone wanted to work there: Lee, the manager, told me he received a “record-number” of applications, so you can imagine how pleased I was to get the call. Just the week before, I had applied unsuccessfully for the second time to work in Chard’s Tesco.

Lisa had been working there for three months when I arrived. She was very, very tall and a practicing white witch. I found this out on day two, when I saw her wrapping a piece of red ribbon around her little finger while steaming milk. I was making a mochafrappe except it wasn’t called that. “What’s that?”

I asked, and without looking up, Lisa pointed at the man in the suit and the Denners’ name badge who was reading the Western Gazette in the window seat. The next week, he asked her out. Obviously,

Paul 1998 Paul had a skinhead, sleeves and a criminal record for GBH. He was married to a woman with bipolar and his favourite thing to do was watch (what can only be described as) execution porn: beheadings covertly filmed in the Middle East. One time, he told us, it made him throw up in the sink.

Paul worked at the abattoir where we used to drop the pigs off in the days before Hugh F-W would harp on about knowing where your food came from.

I liked Paul until, one day, I saw him riding a pig that had been brought in for slaughter. It was squealing.

I heard he got done for benefit fraud soon after, and was back inside, but still. I didn’t eat bacon for, like, three years.

The Twins 2004 I didn’t know the meaning of Right until I met these guys. They were French, made a knockout tarte tatin and, in their defence, could prefix their fanaticism with Le Pen on the fact that they too were orphans from Brittany. But still, we went through three black pot-washers that summer. The last one lasted half a day – they tossed cutlery at the back of his head all morning before he walked out.

On my last day as their waitress, they took me to The Bricklayer’s Arms around the corner.

The restaurant was in Battersea, but they insisted we went to the rummest pub in south London. I didn’t want to go, but wasn’t emotionally qualified to say. Instead, I sat under the clouds in the beer garden with my shandy while they routinely patted my head, chirping “Chelsea Girl” at me every time I drank. Then the sun came out. I was about to get another round when the older one (by a minute) grabbed my arm and told me, firmly, that he had got my predecessor pregnant. The younger one giggled and said he thought he was the father.

How we laughed! I asked them what they wanted to drink, took their money and walked out the back door.

Illustrations by Oonagh Read 03

Raymond Blanc 2010 Raymond Blanc was tugging cos out of his vegetable garden when I last saw him. I was at his equally expensive and brilliant restaurant, Le Manoir, in Oxfordshire’s commuter belt, to eat chocolate for an article. It was crap supermarket stuff with dubious expiration dates and, understandably given the events, this would be the last time we met.

Over the phone he had said how excited he was about “thu choco-lut” because he didn’t eat it much. This was probably true. Like Kelly Brook, Raymond didn’t eat carbs after 7pm – I once watched him eat a dinner of wilted spinach. Things started well. We sat and chewed and Raymond grimaced, every now and then spitting into a saucer or the palms of the two chefs-en-training who flanked him. Twice, though, he would cock his head and state: “nut bed, nut bed et oil”.

Then something happened, circa the photoshoot. Raymond got hysterical. We all were, really, through nausea and tiredness (we’d been there since 7.30am), but Raymond more than most. By this stage, we were also filming and photographing him, trying to get the holding shot for the piece, when suddenly Raymond started painting my face with melted c h o c o l a t e – a prop. First with a brush, and then with his fingers, dragging it in long, commando stripes across my cheek. Soon I was covered in the stuff. I don’t know what possessed him, but soon it was in my hair, on my teeth and up my nose. An uncomfortable few minutes passed before (at my suggestion), we gave him a toffee hammer and asked him to batter a chocolate rabbit from Harrods, to camera, instead. He enjoyed this bit immensely, grinning wildly at the lens as he lopped off its ears, nose and waistcoat with clumsy, quick strokes. Eventually, we got our shot.

After about 20 minutes, Raymond sat down.

He had gone pale. Then he said he had to go to his pastry kitchen because service was about to start.

It was 3pm and there was no service. By now, he was almost blue. We said goodbye and bagged up the broken chocolate from the kitchen surfaces.

Through the pass, I saw him prodding the air with a wooden spoon. By now he was transparent.

The next day, I was typing up my article when I saw his face on the TV. Underneath, the Sky News ticker reported that Raymond had fallen down the stairs and broken his leg in six places. I DM’d an apology, but he didn’t reply.

fur your pleasure Maddie the Coonhound with, on and by some food things

I

f you’ve been anywhere near the internet recently and, you know, don’t have a piece of shingle masquerading as a heart, you’ll already be in love with Maddie the Coonhound. Photographer Theron Humphrey has turned his life into an IRL daydream. Following a big breakup and the loss of his grandfather, he quit his lucrative day job and rescued Maddie on Petfinder. He then hit the road with his new best friend, setting out to visit all 50 state in 365 days for a project called This Wild Idea. On the way, he started taking pictures of this stately, ethereal animal on things. All the things. She’ll climb on anything if it makes him happy and, if you’re anything like us, there’s not a single shot that won’t harpoon you. Maddie on Things is a tonic.

She’s like therapy. Here she is around food things. addie on Things: A Super Serious Book About Dogs and Physics M

by Theron Humphrey is Published by Chronicle Books

04

more taste, less speed It’s impossible to be a fussy eater if you want to see the world

By Rebecca Nicholson

U

ntil I was 27 I had been out of the country only a handful of times. At first I didn’t have many chances to, then I developed a strange and sudden fear of flying that kept me firmly on the ground.

Eventually the opportunity to see some bits of the world turned up, as did, with increasing regularity, a cold, pale horror at the thought of even booking a flight, so it was time to do something about it. I did an ‘overcome your fear!’ day seminar at a hotel near Heathrow airport. This involved pushing bourbon biscuits around a plate while a chirpy pilot insisted that flying was safe, before a gentle air steward explained the benefits of not holding your breath, then delivered soothing UHT milk tea to wash all the panic away. It changed my life and is the only reason I ended up spending New Year’s Eve 2011 in Milwaukee at a rave with Skrillex.

Even more than the five-times rule (try something you hate enough and eventually those stubborn tastebuds will relent), travelling altered my relationship with food completely. Feeding yourself when away represents a double step outside of that safe, familiar comfort zone. It’s all different, even when it’s a bit the same. McDonalds is a beacon of global homogeneity and they make it possible to cling to the idea that you can be a fussy eater and want to see the world, because if all else fails, you can fall back on that cheeseburger (plain).

But eventually that cheeseburger (plain) starts to feel overchewed, and even McDonalds knows the importance of local variety – pasta in Italy, lamb burger with fried egg in New Zealand (not nice). It is only half a trip if you don’t eat the food that’s different. Handily my Heathrow airport day seminar gave me a residual sense of anything being possible, so I decided that if I could sit on a plane for 11 hours and not have a meltdown, I could probably eat a pickle and not throw up.

Thus began two years of determined eating without fear. I went to Nashville and ordered cheese grits because I’d read that Britney Spears’ dad made them for her. They tasted like lumpy semolina with Dairylea, but went quite nicely with candied bacon. Southern breakfasts are America’s culinary gift to the world. I left Tennessee with a pancake belly.

I went to Iceland and ate lobster soup from a polystyrene cup on the harbour and it is still the best meal I’ve ever had. I went back to Iceland and had minke whale and puffin, because it seemed rude to send it back. Minke whale was like a gamey beef carpaccio. Puffin was like pigeon. In Norway I tried brown fermented cheese and got a taste for roe squeezed out of a tube on top of scrambled eggs. In St Petersburg I washed down chunks of salty pickled herring with sips of cold, gloopy vodka, then followed that up with red caviar on blinis. In Austin I sat on a porch and listened to crickets while piles of barbecued mutton were heaped on a tray and plonked down on the table.

If any of those trips had been fuelled by cheeseburgers (plain), the memories would have been as pallid as the meat. Better, still, is that they will always be impossible to recreate.

Everyone likes to bring back a souvenir from their holidays – seashells, sunburn, STDs – but flavours stubbornly refuse to move. I learned this after the first time I’d been on a plane, at 14, to Greece, where I ate a breakfast of yoghurt, honey and peaches every day. Back in Lincolnshire I tried to recreate it using tinned fruit and a raspberry Shape. It didn’t work. It shouldn’t work. Experiences created from an alchemy so precise that they can never exist again are the best experiences of all. Even if they involve eating puffin.

05

shell shock When people say expect to be shocked in a war zone, they never meant this

By Mark Townsend

T

he extent of the horror became clear soon after entering the mess tent in Kandahar, south Afghanistan. A few soldiers sat about, idly wondering what might be for lunch. It was spring 2006 and within days the second meal of the day in the desert would become known as the lobster run. Initially it seemed we were being served an odd treat; a few dozen crustacean, slapped on their backs, arms above their head, belly splayed, tail split. Soon several hundred had appeared, crammed inside massive metal boxes and dumped in the canteen by taciturn military contract caterers. Soon, there were thousands. As word spread across the main US base in Afghanistan, so the lobsters kept on appearing.

That lunchtime, within just one of the central mess tents in Camp Kandahar base, it seemed the entire north Atlantic had been emptied of lobster for a special one-off lunch in a far-off and then forgotten war.

It was 44c outside in the desert and the nearest sea was 1,200km away but all you could eat was lobster. There were, it should be said, some bowls of rice and bread, but really all on offer was clawed crustaceans. Marines were piling them five high and then scrambling for seconds. There was no limit to the amount you were allowed. No quota system.

Anyway, who would stop you? Who could you tell?

You were in a war and back home they prayed each night you might stay alive. Calling home to complain that a rival platoon were going overboard on the lobster run might give the wrong impression.

The inevitable outcome of serving lobster in such industrial quantities meant lobster quickly assumed the value of fish fingers. Several would be discarded on a single plate, barely nibbled at. Halfeaten innards littered the mess tent. A US soldier might think of nothing of leaving several lobster untouched before going out on patrol among villages of starving children. Despite inquiries, I never knew who decided the war should be fought fuelled on crustaceans. But someone in the corridors of the Pentagon had clearly read Napeolon’s edict that an army marches on its stomach and came to the logical conclusion that the more desirable the food the better it might fight.

Similarly, I could never discover exactly where the actual lobster had travelled from, other than the fact they were flown in most days on gigantic US cargo planes inside freight containers containing frozen cargo. But they were, the catering corps insisted, American Lobster – homarus americanus – which probably meant they had been caught off the eastern seaboard and had travelled 8,000km to assist the war effort. They were definitely caught wild. At the time lobster aquaculture was a lose-lose game, largely because they are cannibals and quickly swallow any profit before they themselves are eaten.

Living on lobster was odd. Normal, regular foods that civvies ate became insufficient to bother with.

Each day, the side servings of rice were increasingly untouched. Yet, if you flew by helicopter to one of the new small bases on the shifting frontline, you entered a regime of boil-in-the-bag beans, brittle biscuits and preserved meat from a species you could not identify upon consumption.

Food that had no flavour or obvious provenance felt right in a combat. Some places were not meant for seafood and the desert was one of them. Later when the war turned increasingly ugly, the attrition rate from disease and dysentery rocketed throughout battalions but no one ever blamed the lobster. No one could give it up.

I would return to Afghanistan a few times and the flow of lobster always seemed healthy on the major bases, if a little less gung-ho each time. Yet only in February 2013 did the US army announce it would cut back on catering as part of its £4bn relocation ahead of the forthcoming withdrawal. Jeffrey Hawk, spokesman for US forces in the country, described the end of the lobster run – a little-known part of the war but one that managed to endure away from the public gaze for at least seven feastful years – as part of a “need to reduce our current food stock in the Afghanistan area of operations”.

But fear not, important people will still be allowed to graze like kings in the amphitheatre of modern warfare, particularly those who accompany the politicians who must occasionally pop out to show they care. Among a team of reporters alongside former prime minister Gordon Brown, we ate decent cheeses and meats on the way there. Fine wines and nibbles were provided on the way back. Yet somehow I felt short-changed.

No-one had considered to provide the lobster to which one rightfully expected in a war zone.

By the end of next year coalition forces will have largely pulled out from Afghanistan. The conflict provides many statistics, the 7,000 at least Afghan civilians who are dead and the 444 British soldiers killed, but there are also less important tallies of which we will never know the right number. Exactly how many lobster died in the desert feeding a war that would never be won?

Illustration by Teri Ake 06

don’t look back in hunger A buffet of emotional flashbacks and the foods that go with them

By Sophie Wilkinson

T

hough I can locate the exact week that I grew breasts (it coincided with my discovery of buttery, slippery potato dauphinoise on a trip to Chantilly with my dad and his parents) to me, food’s not only a catalyst for sudden weight gain. It marks so many emotional milestones. Food is multisensory so, along with my near-autistic ability to retain facts and details, it has a canny way of jamming itself into my memories.

The closest I came to death was when I was nine. My sister Laura, aged 13, had decided to cook pasta for the family. Taking note from her chemistry lessons, she plopped a thermometer into the (bubbling) water to test if it was boiling. The thermometer shattered, muddling into the tortellini like a glam-rock pesto, but she didn’t tell any of us.

Not when Sarah, our oldest sister, spotted the little silver blobs on the pasta, not when I pulled a rounded shard of glass from between my back teeth. It was only when my mum was on the phone to Sainsbury’s, complaining of a contamination, that Laura, head in hands, mumbled, “I’ve killed us all”. Mum took us to Greenwich Hospital’s A+E, and after a few X-rays, we were told by doctors that the mercury would simply “pass through”. After my mum gave Laura a bit of a talking to and we giggled that we could see Sarah’s bra hooks in the X-rays, we all went for fish and chips.

Luckily, I survived into womanhood, getting my first period when I was 16. My mum was so excited

that her youngest daughter, a chunk of soporific moomin, had started to show signs of womanhood, that she held a party in my period’s honour. She invited my older sisters and one of their friends, and instructed us all to wear red or pink. She laid on a spread of smoked salmon, tomato soup, tomato salad and chorizo sausages. We drank pink champagne and pink lemonade and there were red jelly and strawberries for pudding. And there was definitely some sort of beige carbohydrate (the symbolic tampon?) on offer, because I was a large girl. My mum and I spent nearly every Friday of my early teens at the Chinese buffet in east Greenwich.

Hemmed in by aggressive, thumb-like people jostling for salt and pepper squid, she would brief me from across the sneeze guard on how to most efficiently squidge the most sweet and sour pork into my aluminium container.

Later on, during the bleak summer my best friend told me she was moving to France, I realised I was in love with her. Not only did that mean I was into girls, it meant that my feeling wasn’t about to go away.

Spending the holidays indoors watching re-runs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the only thing I ate was Red Leicester cheese, grilled until the bubbles crusted, atop on a white bagel. I splashed Worcestershire Sauce all over it and doused in thick, gloopy, garlicky Pizza Express salad dressing, adding a few sprigs of bagged

salad leaves to make it healthy. Whether it was my metabolism, the power of heartbreak, the physical liberation of coming out to myself, or simply an indicator just how much I was eating before, I returned to school two sizes smaller, swamped in my blazer.

At university – a time for bored experimentation – I undertook this rite of passage with gusto. As well as going out with a verified psychopath from the netball team, willing myself to get my heart broken again, one drizzly afternoon I mushed pre-made coronation chicken sandwich filler into a freshly microwaved sachet of Uncle Ben’s rice. I thought it could make a nice, cold curry. Gagging with every sloppy mouthful, I forced it all down, willing myself to never make such a stupid mistake again. More fool me, then, when I thought that peanuts, sweetcorn and sweet chilli sauce would suffice as a deconstructed satay-style snack. It somehow had the texture of hair and gave me a rash. But again, I forced it down. By graduation, I’d fried chicken skins just to see what they tasted like, spent entire weeks consuming nothing but apples, brown rice, diet Red Bull and vodka, gobbled toasties dispensed from a vending machine, used slightly warm Tesco own-brand salmon to make sashimi and once ate an entire pizza on a curb outside the student union, spitting out each mouthful, yelling “It’s just for the taste!” but I never again made the mistake of dating a netball player.

3 SISTERS, 66 ARTISTS, 120 RECIPES … 1 LOVE

Over 100 original recipes accompanied by illustrations from artists around the world.

Beautiful, vibrant and entertaining,

This is Art to Eat.

07

just like granny didn’t make Inheriting a recipe book can teach you all sorts of things. Even how to make “Bachelor’s Buttons”

By Nell Frizzell

T

here are certain names that are almost more fun to have in your mouth than the food to which they refer. Lady Churchill’s Haddock Savoy, for instance. Or Mixed Bathing. Or the gloriously homoerotic Bachelor’s Buttons. All three of which can be found within the green leather covers of my grandmother’s recipe book.

I only recently inherited the book, after growing up on a diet of no-meat-and-eight-veg slumps, served up by my multicoloured mother every night, at some point between the Archers and her 9pm bedtime. The most striking thing about the book is that it exists at all. My grandmother – a figurehead of the aga – seemed, to me at least, to do most of her cooking with the aid of little more than butter, salt and a constant source of low-rumbling warmth.

I have also, in the twenty-eight years I’ve known her, never seen the 95-year-old old boot drink anything other than sherry, white wine or coffee. So it probably comes as little surprise that great swathes of the book remain spotless; slightly yellowed, but resoundingly empty. The soups section, for instance, is as blank and unblemished as a mozzarella ball. The only liquids Margaret E Jarvis was interested in were those that were either fortified or caffeinated.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The book dates back, according to the inscription on the title page, to 1949 – one year before my mother was born. Walker’s Private Recipe Book it announces, “A Handy Book for the Housewife”, printed in E.C.4, just a few miles from where I now live.

The index, which divides the book into thumb-shaped morsels, reinforces my impression of late 1940s food. There is a whole subsection devoted to Entrees, another for Fish, while Meat, Game and Poultry are all lumped together, beside that other slightly strained combination Vegetables and Sauces. The idea that you could devote a whole recipe book to vegetables alone was, I assume, as laughable as that of going out without your girdle.

Beneath that comes Omelets, Puddings and Sweets. Any woman who served up a cheese “omelet” after a meal would almost certainly become my life-long companion if not the mother to my biologically-impossible children.

The only annotation on the index page is where, in her neat but capitalised writing, my granny has added “BREAD” to the Cakes and Pastry chapter. That’s right, Walker, you can squish our Sauces and fuck with our Game, but don’t you dare mess with our god-given carbohydrates.

This is, undeniably, the busiest section of the recipe book, kicking off as it does with “Lemon Meringue Pie (or apple)”. This recipe seems to include a quite unlikely quantity of cornflour, but hey, when you can’t even decide what fruit you’re eating, I suppose a little thing like thickening agent isn’t going to put you off your stride.

The next page – and I swear this is true – is topped with a recipe for “Jam Sandwich”. I say recipe, it’s actually just a list of ingredients.

And not at all the ones I was expecting. This jam sandwich includes 2oz of marge, 1 egg, 4 oz of flour, 3 oz of sugar and 2 tablespoons of Hot Water. That’s it. No instructions. No explanation. To quote Benjamin Disraeli – for it applies equally to my entire family’s attitude to meals – never complain, never explain.

Further down the page we come to those much-anticipated “Bachelor’s Buttons”. These are basically flour, sugar, butter and an egg rubbed together and baked “in small lumps on tin”. Now, I know what you’re thinking – these sound ever so much like the Jam Sandwich. And yes, it hadn’t escaped my notice either. All that separates a sandwich from a button is, in this case, a little hot water and a sprinkling of sugar. I’m sure they were delicious, whatever in God’s name they were.

Later in the section, on a pinkish page still spined with crumbs of baking long-since forgotten, is the recipe for something called “German Pancakes”. As my granny spent much of her old age living in the same village as a quite wonderful Scrabble-playing, chainsmoking, compulsive-reading German émigré called Miriam, I can only assume these pancakes are something to do with her. They seem like fairly normal pancakes, until you turn the page and enter what I like to call the “cream of tartar zone”. 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar and 1 teaspoon of “carb soda” – just what every good breakfast needs.

There are lots of other baked goods in here, often subtitled with, I imagine, the name of the person who passed the recipe to her. Sponge cake (Hayes) for instance.

Or Gingerbreads (Jessie). I find this deeply touching, if not reassuring, as most of my memories of my granny’s life – particularly her recent old age – is fairly friendless.

At least in comparison to the women of my generation. I like to imagine her, back before motherhood and matrimony attacked her frankly-incredible waist, swapping recipes and stories with Jessie or Hayes, whoever they were.

The best name, however, belongs to Baking Powder Cob Loaf. I can’t think of many adjectives that would make me less inclined to eat bread than “powdery”, especially if it came in a cob. And yet it is the longest recipe in the book. It is not, however, the most used.

No, the recipe – judging by the stains, the greasemarks and the frayed edges – that saw the most action, is for salad cream. My god, my granddad loved salad cream. All condiments, in fact. A diabetic for most of my lifetime, food was often, for my granddad, little more than a tiresome slog. A refuelling fraught with stress, maths and more than a little cajoling.

But dress that dish up with a dollop of horseradish, a glob of mustard or – best of all – a slick of salad cream and he was happier than a horse in oats.

Which is why, I imagine, my grandmother made it for him.

Most days. Along with a small bowl of egg custard every night and a bowl of weetabix every morning. Theirs was a love that didn’t demand champagne and oysters. It wasn’t fed with hot buttered passion or conspicuous consumption. It was dished out daily; quietly, unassumingly and wholeheartedly.

My grandmother and grandfather were, without doubt, the most in-love, most happily-married any couple I’ve ever known.

Sadly, she never wrote the recipe for that.

Photographs by Nell Frizzell 08

plain white teas On learning (or at least pretending) to eat in technicolour

By Oscar Rickett

W

hen it comes to food you will forever be remembered, in the minds of your friends, for what you first cooked them. I’m often surprised when people who first served me baked beans in a can reveal an effortless mastery of the El Bulli cookbook. Like a supercilious adult patronising a child, I want to pat their head, tell them they’ve been “very clever”. This is how old friends of mine treat me when I manage to muster up something as simple as pasta with a semi-acceptable tomato sauce. It’s like they imagine I go into the kitchen and instantly stumble around, battering myself over the head with pots and pans as I throw rice into a frying pan whilst feverishly boiling up a packet of sausages, my tongue sticking out the side of my mouth. It’s not an unjustified assumption on their part. Before I worked out how to cook non-embarrassing food, I used to give people stir-fries with mayonnaise, half cooked fish with mayonnaise, unadorned rice with mayonnaise. I still love mayonnaise but I’ve learnt to pretend that my enjoyment of food isn’t dependent on it. What sprang from that love of mayonnaise and what has remained, is a deep-rooted love of white food.

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, I’m not talking about the food white people eat; I’m talking about food that is actually white, in colour. Potatoes, chicken, mushrooms, cream, mayonnaise (still, always, forever), mozzarella, pasta: if it’s white and it can be teamed with something else that’s white, I’m eating it. Once I learnt that cream could be used to make sauce and that this was a little more dignified

than just handing a jar of mayo to everyone I fed, I became obsessed with using cream in everything.

I imagined it made me French, or at the very least slightly dangerous as it indicated a blithe disregard for my health.

I hadn’t noticed this stranglehold white food had over me until a couple of foodie friends of mine pointed it out and turned it in to a tedious, long-running joke that persists to this day. As a person suffering daily with colour blindness (it’s true, they did a test on me), I had not noticed that I was living in a one-tone food world. I tried not to let this sustained barrage of abuse get in the way of my love of rice, ricotta and ravioli but it got in my head. I’d look down at my plate of potatoes, chicken and cream and feel shame.

Every delicious mouthful of mozzarella, pasta and mushroom would be accompanied by swimming visions of my stupid, scornful friends and I’d finish my meal, my sumptuous, filling meal with tears of rage running down my cream smeared face. With the slings and arrows of cruel foodorientated gags flying around my head, I had to do what people find so hard: I had to change. I had to stop thinking of broccoli as a “useless, green plant unfit for eating” and start thinking of it as a “useful green plant fit for eating”. I had to throw a tin of tinned tomatoes into my creamy pasta sauces. I had to buy sweet potatoes.

And I did it. Today, I am a different man. Salad sits on my plate, red meat sizzles in my pans and green beans dance in boiling water on my hobs.

09

I feel, though, like the character in The Streets’ early hit Weak Become Heroes. Once upon a time he stayed out all night, full of pills and visions.

By the end of the song he’s kicked the drugs but something isn’t quite right. The piano loops of the music he used to listen to are still with him, the synapse-altering affects of the pills are still in place. Reminded of the old days, he thinks about his new life: Solid concrete under my feet No surprises no treats the world stands still as my mind sloshes round The washing up bowl in my crown My life’s been up and down since I walked from that crowd Yes, life in my technicolour food coat is more solid. Yes, it’s healthier. But what have I lost? The comfort of creamy sauces on potatoes, the thrill of a plate painted only one colour, the sheer simplicity of living life in one hue. I used to be different. Now I’m just like any other modern metro male with his Nigel Slater books and his new fangled interest in kale. Every time I’m buying food I have to consciously remind myself to get things in a variety of shades. I don’t think about the food, I think about the colour of the food. I have stopped living naturally. Society, what have you done to me? Why couldn’t you leave me and my white food in peace?

pa arriba pa abajo pal centro pa dentro Illustration by Emily Robertson 10

Until I went to Mexico, I hated Mexican food. What I thought was Mexican was basically greasy, floury tortillas in lots of fat with cheese and ground meat. I actually thought it was all Tex Mex. I am intrigued by the way Mexican food and the way it is portrayed throughout the world because Mexican restaurants, from our part of the world, are like Irish pubs; you can find one anywhere, but not have the authentic experience. In Mexico there can be several different cuisines in one state and, all over, it is just such a high level of dining experience Ö I love that, at 10pm at night, everyone eats tortillas Ö so much more so than in Scandinavia. Street food is obviously a huge thing in Mexico; it is like the soul and foundation of the place, so I love eating that. But there seems to be a new coming of Mexican cuisine as a foremost expression. There is a new dimension to it in that what you can find on the street is elevated at night in fine restaurants. There is so much history and technique in Mexican food and I hope to somehow take what I have learned into my cuisine, using my ingredients. Mexican cuisine should be recognised for what it is: one of the worlds greatest mouthfuls.

Rene Redzepi, spring 2013 11

natural symmetry Patternity see pattern everywhere, from the mundane to the magnificent.

Here, they see a Mexican staple in an entirely new light

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hen you look at the pebbled, tough green texture of an avocado skin, what do you think of? Toads, maybe? Not if you have an eye like Patternity does. After spending some time with a piece of the fruit, they saw similarities with the undulating ripples and patterns of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. And as for the stone, ethereal and planet-like in the way they’ve shot it, it reminded them of Libya’s Waw an Namus, the volcanic field, cone and caldera in the southern Fezzan region of southern Libya, or, the near-geographic center of the Sahara Desert. May you never look at an avocado in Still lives: Patternity X Neil Watson, geographical images via Google Earth

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a taste of tulum Director of Fashion East, Lulu Kennedy, takes us on a culinary tour of her second home

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his is my $2 regular breakfast at my local caf’ run by three generations of one family. Fried eggs on fried tacos, rice, black beans, home made tomato and chilli sauce. Plus a chai (local spinach) and lime juice (pictured right). It’s only 9am, but already it’s about a million degrees under the plastic awning. I really like their loud plastic tablecloths and they’re always playing very loud mariachi on the radio. Everything is loud and jolly!

After cycling 8km back to town after a lazy day at the beach, we’re in need of a little snack. Our dear amigo here (below left) has made some delicious sort of homemade rice and meatball things, deepfried, that he serves with shredded pickled onion, red cabbage and coriander. They are amazing. We ask him what they’re called and he told us in Mayan dialect. I wish I could remember what it was.

Anyway, he cycles around the backstreets of Tulum pueblo selling his snacks. It’s quite hard to find him but totally worth the search!

Behold the contents of my fridge in my apartamento (below).

It’s all you need. Before cycling down to the beach for the day I usually stop at my favourite roadside cart where a couple sell amazing homemade food out of tupperware boxes to massive, friendly queues of people. It’s always packed, with lovely banter – I’ve picked up some good swear words there.

I go for the local Mayan drink, pozol (below), which is made from crushed corn, coconut and sugar cane. It’s like a meal in a drink and tastes of the earth, the way corn does. It’s the one thing I can’t wait to drink whenever I get back to Mexico – it makes me feel really happy and at home.

Then I get a couple of chicken salbutes to go (right), which I later eat for lunch on the beach with a cold beer, picnic style. Salbutes are hardcore fried tacos filled with chicken or pork, lots of (very) hot avocado mole, chopped white cabbage, pickled red cabbage, onion, coriander and habanero. You don’t understand how tasty this is.

Lulu footnoted this email with: “I am now literally beside myself with homesickness, padding glumly to the kitchen to drink some neat chilli sauce from the bottle :(“

Photographs by Lulu Kennedy 13

to be enchilado A chemesthetic trip into Mexican gusto

By Ana Caballero

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f there is any country that identifies itself with the chilli pepper, it’s Mexico. In this case, we will refer to them as they are called in this country; simply, chiles. Capsicum anuum, the domesticated species of the plant genus Capsicum, was one of the first cultivated crops of the American continent proudly within Mesoamerican territory.

Thankfully, they managed to survive XVth century Spanish imposition, XIXth century French fashion and XXth century Americanisation. Throughout all this cultural chaos, the spicy fruits have held their place, a main player in every meal; whether they’re poured over, cooked into, stuffed or roasted, they have always been involved.

Recent studies demonstrate a total of 1.5 million hectares of Mexican land dedicated to the production of chiles, with an estimated consumption of 7.1 kilos per capita. So it’s no surprise that, along with corn and beans, they’re are a defining, if not the defining element of Mexican flavour. The only problem with chiles is that they cannot be categorised as a single flavor. Within Mexico alone, there are 56 different reported types that range not only in size, form and colour, but also form – dried, smoked or fresh. Their flavor profiles are as diverse as their country’s north and south borderlines: desert and rainforest. And then there’s the heat.

Capsaicin is the component in chiles that binds with our TrpV1 receptor. The function of this protein, which is both sensitive to temperatures above 43°C and capsaicin, is the detection and regulation of body temperature, providing the sensation of scalding heat, piquancy and, basically, pain. This compound, along with those responsible for the coolness in mint and bite in carbonation, all belong to the category of gustative (taste) sensations known as chemesthesis.

Chemesthetic sensations are chemically-induced gustative sensations which involve the activation of receptors other than taste and odour. In this case, they are related to physical stimuli. These receptors, both to pleasurable and painful effect, are not only found in the mouth, but also in the skin, gut and other mucous membranes (hence jaloproctitis, otherwise known as the burning ring of fire, or, if you’re being a grown up about it, rectal burning). So although aromas (volatile compounds) and tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami) are important for the flavor experience, chemesthesis should not be discounted as another of its building blocks.

Mexicans don’t forget this. Quite the contrary.

Chemesthesis is, in fact, a highly pursued gustative feeling to Mexicans, and of vital importance for understanding their palate. Creating more heat and physicality to a meal is part of everyday life, and often done to overwhelming excess, to achieve a sort of flavourful state that in the Spanish language we call enchilado. This word means, literally, to in-chilli-yourself, which is a highly sensory state

achieved by ingesting large amounts of capsaicin.

So why is this (acquired) state so important for the Mexican palate? Why is pain such an integral part of flavorful pleasure?

As a student of Gastronomic Sciences (I’m also working with the team at The Nordic Food Lab), I am encouraged to reflect on ideas like this, and believe I’ve found an answer to this, however you look at it, peculiar behaviour. I spent four years in the Gulf of Mexico, where the average temperature is 42°c with 90% relative humidity, or, in plain English, hot as hell. This is the Tabasco state, home to the Olmec civilization, forgotten cacao plantations, crude oil extraction and lots of lovely green iguanas.

You would think that, in a place where sweat drips down your body while dining, being enchilado wouldn’t be desirable. Not true. Just like all selfrespecting Mexicans, people here enjoy their chemesthetic tripping. The heat seems to create a different kind of flavour logic. For example, if you ask for a local’s flavour evaluation on two identical tacos – one with a moderate level of chile, the other with a large amount – they would almost certainly rate the second, hotter, taco, with its numbingly painful amount of heat, as more delicious.

Dealing with the stifling environment around them has nothing to do with contrast. Rather, hitting it full on. Enjoying your taco is not necessarily about appreciating balance, but challenging it.

This concept might seem confusing for an outsider whose daily intake of piquancy is just that of his or her pepper grinder. Flavour for this type of palate is assessed more for taste and aromas. In Mexico,

Illustration by Mat Williams 14

hardcore heat is equally important and those that who can’t take it can be perceived as painfully irritating, and accused of killing the synergistic balance on a plate. I agree to a certain extent. But my logic is not that of an outsider’s, really – we Latinos love physicality, drama, body language and emotion. For us, this means flavour, too; an act that is in itself performative and intense. If you have been properly enchilado before, you will understand this analogy. If not, I suggest you to undergo this little experiment: Sit down with a bottle of chile sauce and put at least five times more than your normal tolerance on just one bite of food, then eat. If you are sipping in small bits of air to cool your burning palate, it’s working. If you can’t exhale those sips of air because your own body temperature is too painful, you have succeeded. It’s a nose-dripping, eye-opening, gut-warming, heart-burningingly painful experience! After the rush is over you’ll be a little shaken up, relieved, and, most of all, feeling alive. This liveliness is not at all metaphoric; your body literally becomes more sensitive, more physically alert.

In a place like Tabasco where the heat can get incredibly stuffy, a bit of refreshing alertness doesn’t sound so illogical after all. Moreover, in a country with so much colour, diversity and soul, experiencing vivacity in every bite is just another element of Mexican flavor logic. As one of my good professors pointed out, the perception of flavour, in the end, is the sum of all these cultural, physical, and chemical aspects, an emergent moment of experience. The performance within this moment is something that Mexicans might subconsciously appreciate and understand just a little better than the rest of us. And if for the sake of this it takes a little pain, well, they know how to deal with it. While I was there I saw a flood drag houses under two meters of water, learned how to keep an eye out for narco crap, and somehow managed to not let my body melt away under such high temperatures. On the other hand, I multiplied my family tree by around 100 places, basked on white sand beaches, hiked in lush jungles and ate myself silly. In Mexico, harshness and pleasure are shaken up and molded into one.

To understand Mexican flavour, you have to not just handle the heat, but learn to love it. Suggestions for desenchilandote (de-chilli-ing yourself): ★ Water. Not terribly effective, but better than nothing. ★ Beer. You probably have it more readily available than the former. ★ Milk (the fattier the better). This’ll work much better than the above. ★ Cream. If you have access to cream, it will work better than anything else. Its fats coat the tongue and allow the heat level to decrease.

Still lives by Ivan Roberto 15

i don’t like cricket, i love it Eating crickets and ants’ eggs is commonplace in Mexico, but most of the West is yet to be convinced.

Rosie Birkett, however, has had more than her fair share of our winged friends

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ince working as a food writer it’s fair to say I’ve found myself in a few hilariously unlikely scenarios. Slurping opium tea from the palm of a tribal prince in Rajasthan or being serenaded

by Chris De Burgh at my table at a restaurant in Chiswick (I was, I kid you not, wearing a red dress) are two that spring to mind. But when I found myself crawling around a pine forest in Roskilde last year, stopping next to an ants’ nest and popping the wriggling little things into my mouth under the nonchalant instruction of some chefs from Noma, I felt like I was living my own David Lynch film.

“They taste just like lemongrass, and that bitterness is caused by their high levels of formic acid,” said Lars Williams, the head of research and development at Copenhagen’s revolutionary restaurant. “I’m a little bit obsessed with the culinary taxonomy of untapped species at the moment,” he offered up by way of explanation. At the time Williams was leading experiments at the Nordic Food lab, the innovative research facility set up Noma founders René Redzepi and Claus Meyer to scientifically explore New Nordic Cuisine and other forward-looking foods. As well as looking into algae and fermentation to create new flavours, Williams had been using insects – ants, crickets and rose beetles – as unlikely ingredients in his experiments: hence the forest.

While all this wild food foraging slightly appealed to my inner tomboy, I might have found the idea of eating live ants more of a struggle had I not, like Williams, just spent time in what can only be described as an insect lock-in, at the Wageningen University in The Netherlands. Here, I popped my insect-eating cherry, tentatively crunching on crickets with leading entomologist Dr Arnold Van Huis, one of Europe’s most outspoken exponents of the practise of eating insects. He believes that these critters, which are so widely consumed in Mexico, Sub Saharan Africa and South East Asia, could be a crucial protein source in the face of the forthcoming food crisis.

Van Huis is working on the extraction and purification of insect protein, with €1m of funding from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation. That’s an indicator of quite how seriously the Netherlands – the secondlargest exporter of agricultural produce in the world – is exploring alternatives to conventional livestock. In case you’re wondering what is meant by the term ‘food crisis’, by 2050, the world’s population will have reached nine billion. A billion people are already hungry, and 80% of available agricultural land is in use. Van Huis believes that farming insects could provide a solution.

In Holland, awareness is much higher than elsewhere in Europe, thanks in part to his efforts.

“There are about 250 different species of insects eaten in Africa, and when I came back from sabbatical there I published a paper on that. In the last few years the interest in insects has grown.

Every week we have television crews here.”

At least 1,400 species of insects are eaten across Asia, Latin America and Africa. From a scientific and ecological perspective, farming insects for the food system makes a huge amount of sense: insects thrive in crowded environments, they’re low in fat, high in protein and fibre, rich in zinc and amino acids and give off 100 times less greenhouse gases than conventional livestock.

They also produce much more meat per kilogram of feed than most farmed animals do, and can mostly be eaten in their entirety. In the west we associate bugs with dirt and squalor, not culinary pleasure. And, while our post-St John enlightened selves might fawn over plates of fried chitterlings or crispy pig’s ears, and while we might laugh off having probably unknowingly consumed horsemeat in a processed foodstuff at some point, a plate of fresh, sustainably sourced mealworm larvae isn’t going to have us salivating. Just yet.

This is one reason that Van Huis’s research involves extracting protein in the form of ‘insect flour’. “The western problem with insects is just psychological,” he says. “They’re more sustainable and can be made very delicious.”

The Mexicans are way ahead of us on that one. There, ants’ eggs, or escamole, are a real delicacy, served at gourmet restaurants and held in similar esteem to caviar. In Oaxaca, crickets are a commonplace street food, fried in garlic, salt, lime juice, and red chilli, or coated in chocolate. But I had never considered raiding my nearest pet shop before I listened to Van Huis’ reasoning. The thought of eating insects used to utterly repel me. I’m the girl who couldn’t clean out her childhood guinea pig for fear of coming into contact with an earwig.

“The psychological factor will eventually disappear,” insists Van Huis. “We eat snails, oysters and shrimps – why not insects?” To help change perceptions, Van Huis and his colleague, chef Henk van Gurp, have penned Het Insectenkookboek, an insect cookbook. Their hope is that the book, which was published in Dutch last year, will help to normalise the idea of entomophagy (the consumption of insects as food). “Once people taste them, it stops being a problem.”

This is where the Nordic Food Lab – who last month received 3.6 million Danish Kroner in funding from The Veluc Foundation’s program for environment and sustainability for a project entitled Discerning Taste: Deliciousness as an Argument for Entomophagy – and their fascination

Illustration by Oonagh Read 16

with insects comes in. It may well be bound up in the ecological consequences, but first and foremost is the quest for creating something delicious from new foods, and opening up people’s eyes to the possibilities of ingredients that are underestimated, under-appreciated, and undiscovered.

This has always been at the heart of Noma – which took the seemingly obscure and frugal Scandinavian larder and translated it, through a prism of Redzepi’s artful, imaginative brilliance, into what’s been heralded as the best food in the world. Redzepi himself has been a big driver behind the Lab’s involvement and pursuit of entomology – and Williams et al are running with this.

When we returned from the forest to the lab, we tasted a rich, umami-laden broth made from grasshoppers. It was deep, bitter, unusual and very reminiscent of soy sauce, with a nuanced, interesting flavour. We also ate the ants in the incarnation that would then famously and controversially grace the tables at Noma (and at Noma’s pop-up at Claridges last year) – served live, on a mound of creme fraiche which balances their powerful acidity and binds their feet, which is of course crucial if you don’t want them crawling over your diners’ Chanel.

But while I might have tasted enough ‘alternative protein’ for anyone’s money, my insect ingesting didn’t end there. When I returned to London, I wanted to challenge one of its most talked about cooking talents to cook me an insect tasting menu. Ben Spalding, who at the time was heading up Simon Rogan’s London pop-up Roganic, kindly obliged, and had some serious fun with the pile of worms and crickets I brought back from Wageningen, creating a deranged version of bhel puri with curried mealworms and puffed rice, delicious tempura crickets – a sort of nutty land prawn – and tender Jerusalem artichokes seasoned with savoury bug soil made from ground-up critters, among other amazing things.

After about the third course I began to relax, feeling that familiar sense of excitement that comes with awaiting the next course on any other tasting menu. Sure, the nice glass of white burgundy was probably helping, but after a while I began not to fear the courses, like the rather gruesome grilled king oyster mushroom served to me rolled in ‘worm dust’ – bits of tangibly wormy mealworm – but genuinely enjoy them. This is what Van Huis was talking and I was amazed that, by the end of the meal, I no longer saw these things as rank little pests and, rather, as tasty morsels that, like any other non-luxury ingredient, if given the right treatment, could be truly delicious.

In fact, when Spalding served up the last course: a bug syrup-glazed veal breast coated in cricket juice reduction with a sublimely nutty flavour, I was led to draw one final conclusion: I don’t like cricket, I love it.

cereal killing What did the Nordic Food Lab do with a beekeeper’s surplus of bee larvae? Turn it into granola, of course

By Josh Evans, Researcher at Nordic Food Lab

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e began experimenting with bee larvae last summer, when an urban beekeeping initiative in Copenhagen started supplying us with their surplus. At first I was surprised. Why would a beekeeper want to remove bees from the hive?

I assumed it had something to do with the honey harvest, that the beekeeper removed some of the brood early in the season to yield an excess of honey later on. My idea was perfectly logical and also completely wrong. It turns out the larvae of the common honeybee, Apis mellifera (specifically the drone brood) are removed as a strategy to manage Varroa mite populations in the hive.

The Varroa mite (Varroa destructor) is mean.

Its Latin name is ‘destructor’ – how sinister can you get? It’s a parasitic mite that latches onto the immature larvae, sucking out their hemolymph and leaving gaping holes in their carapace, which makes them susceptible to infectious disease.

Certainly nature has neutrality about it, but it still affects me to see such complex societies, whole hives of these noble pollinators with which we have coevolved for millennia, crumble at the feet of this puny, vociferous force.

There is no known method to completely wipe out the mite, and it has been very successful in spreading to honeybee hives around the world (save Australia, for now). Beekeepers have developed an arsenal of techniques to deal with it, hoping to keep its numbers under control. The most effective and least invasive technique beekeepers have developed is to systematically remove a third of each frame of drone comb per week throughout the brood season, which runs from early summer to fall. There are two castes of bees in the hive, other than the queen: the workers, which are all female; and the drones, which are all male, and whose sole function is to mate with the queen so that she may collect their sperm and use it to fertilise worker eggs.

It takes around 21 days for a worker to hatch, while it takes drones around 24. This extra time makes drones the ideal breeding ground for the mites – an extra three days for the young to prey on their host.

The hive will produce thousands of drones in a season, only a few of which are needed to submit their sperm to the queen. The rest are a reproductive safety net. They are easily culled with no ill effects to the hive. This makes the drones

the perfect decoy. The beekeeper will remove the drone brood just before the pupae hatch. By repeating this practice throughout the season the beekeeper is able to maintain the mite population in the hive at about a quarter of what it would be otherwise – hopefully low enough to keep the hive healthy over the winter.

The mite is vampirous and ineradicable but in itself poses no threat to other organisms. And the drones would almost all die anyway. So by removing and consuming the most serious threat to their population we are participating both literally and symbolically in the survival of our apian collaborators.

Traditionally, the combs have been eaten whole – larvae, pupae, honey, fermented pollen, and all – and in that form they are one of nature’s most complex and nutritionally complete foods.

They are still eaten this way in parts of Ethiopia, and in other small pockets of the world. The comb is also utterly delicious. Straight from the hive, when the larvae are soft and still warm, they burst delicately in the mouth, smooth and savoury and slightly sweet. The flavour is something of egg and raw nuts and warm honeydew melon. The comb drips with honey, speckled with cells of fruity, intense, lacto-fermented pollen. The whole is luxurious, bewildering, ambrosial.

But the fresh comb is an ephemeral thing, and a messy one. To use the brood in cooking, we have to separate the larvae and pupae from the pollen, honey, and wax. At first, we froze the comb, broke it up and sorted the pieces by hand. This took a long time. So we brought out the liquid nitrogen, froze it to -197˚C, smashed it to pieces, and sieved away the debris from the brood. That worked much better. Then we sorted out the honey and pollen, deep-frozen in hexagonal prisms (perfect for later use), and disposed of any pupae too close to adulthood (they taste a tad too bitter). The sorted brood keeps well in the freezer.

The first thing we did was to make mayonnaise.

The larvae are fatty and savoury and fill in for eggs exceptionally well. This is what we served with live ants as one tasting for our presentation at the MAD Symposium last summer.

Then, like we do with most things, we stuck some in the dehydrator to see how their flavour intensified.

Images by Chris Tonnesen and Josh Pollen 17

They gained a deep sweet and savoury dynamic and, with a bit of fine salt, turned into a great little bar snack.

Yet leaving the insect whole can only get us so far. For most people, the largest barrier to ingesting an insect is being confronted with its whole form, intact and unabashedly insect-y. If we transform the animal we can start by introducing their flavours, and build from there. This has proven an effective strategy in general. So we made granola, replacing the usual oil and sugar with bee larvae and honey. Simple food that everyone knows and anyone can make.

We let the larvae thaw until soft, then blend them into a pale yellow liquid of a viscosity between milk and cream. We stir honey through to sweeten, fold it through a mixture of oats and whatever seeds or nuts we have on hand, salt to taste, bake until golden, cool to room temperature to let it crisp up and we’ve got ourselves some dangerously snacky goods.

BEE LARVAE GRANOLA makes roughly 1kg 750 g dry ingredients (we’ve settled on a basic ratio of 1:1 for oats : seeds/nuts (our standard recipe is 5 oats : 2 sesame : 2 sunflower : 1 pumpkin) 250 g bee larvae 100 g honey 5g salt sometimes we add in a bit of fennel seed or dry juniper berry for a burst of spice Preheat oven to 160˚C. Bring larvae to room temperature. Measure out dry ingredients. Blend larvae in a blender with honey and salt. Mix into dry ingredients, with spices if desired. Spread mixture out on pans in a thin layer. Bake in oven, stirring every few minutes for even browning. Stir in some birch syrup while baking for a touch more sweetness and larger clumps, if desired.

The larvae are about 50% protein, 20% fat, and 30% moisture, fibre, and other compounds by weight. This high protein-low fat content is likely what accounts for the rapid browning of the granola – more rapid Maillard reactions as the proteins react with the sugars in the honey and oats.

This recipe cooked a whole 10 minutes faster than a control with grapeseed oil instead of larvae.

The high protein also affects the flavour – the granola is heftier, more savoury and satisfying with a rounder, more full taste. If you want more fat, a few knobs of butter never hurt.

The best part is that the granola turns the milk brown – the childhood joy of processed cereal, but better. We eat it in solidarity with the bees, in honour of our mutual dependence, and in the name of all things delicious.

taco belle

A taqueria isn’t the most obvious step for Spotted Pig, Breslin and John Dory owner April Bloomfield.

But her new New York venture, Salvation Taco, goes to show just how much a girl can do with her pig

Hi April! How did you wind up opening a taqueria?

Had it been in motion for a while?

AB: My partner, Ken Friedman, and I were taking about how much we love tacos (my favourite is al pastor) and we began thinking about how amazing it would be to open a bar that served great tacos.

They are the perfect food for a bar; small, tasty, satisfying bites that are packed with a punch. That is how Salvation Taco was born.

open seven months, and we are still evolving. We are constantly learning to use ingredients in unexpected ways, while focusing on respecting Mexican cuisine.

Salvation Taco is at Pod 39 Hotel, 145 E 39th St, New York, NY 10016

This issue of Wolf is dedicated to Mexican food as it seems to be the cuisine getting chefs the most excited around the world. Have you noticed that buzz?

Oh yes. Over the past two or three years, the amount of restaurants that have opened with a Mexican or Latin-influenced menu has tripled. Places in New York, for example, include Empellon Cocina, ABC Cocina, Fonda and Salvation Taco, obviously. I think it’s amazing. And about time, too!

The menu at Salvation Taco has a clear Bloomfield stamp with the ingredients. How did it work? Was it a case of you coming to your collaborator, Roberto, with the ingredients and him helping you Mexican-ise them?

I wanted to do tacos but in a style that was ultimately fun, new and a wee bit quirky, but it also needed to make sense to our guests who were expecting Mexican food. I had to learn the foundation of Mexican cuisine so I could think outside of the box. Roberto Santibañez is a good friend and I really admire him. His food is refined and elevated. We got to talking and he fell in love with the idea of blending both our styles for the menu at Salvation Taco. He will prepare something or I will prepare something, and then we taste, ponder and talk through the dishes to determine what would make the flavours pop. It’s very much a collaboration.

Are you in the kitchen there a lot?

Yes, absolutely! I was working stations from day one, which I love! It helps me to process the system in the kitchen, the preparation techniques and flavours, and allows me to fine-tune along the way. We are still very young as a restaurant, we’ve only been

For the sauce: Chipotle morita (or chipotle) chilies, 6 each Toasted pecans, a handful Olive oil, 2 tablespoons Chopped white onion, 2 tablespoons Chopped garlic, 1 teaspoon Kosher salt, to taste

Ingredients, for the steak: 6oz (170g-ish) skirt steak, one per person Guajilo chili powder, 1 tablespoon Kosher salt, 1 tablespoon Mexican oregano, 1 teaspoon Garlic powder, 1 teaspoon Onion powder, 1 teaspoon Ingredients, to serve: ★ Coriander, to taste ★ Lime wedges, 1 each ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

What was your relationship with Mexican food previously?

For years I didn’t really understand Mexican food.

I thought it was all very heavy. When I moved to America ten years ago, I met some amazing chefs (Roberto Santibañez and Sue Torres, amongst others) and ate these amazing tacos in Los Angeles and in San Francisco. These experiences made me look at Mexican food in a totally different way.

Have you been to and eaten street food in Mexico?

Yes I have. The most amazing experience was having the opportunity to make tamales and chocolate with an amazing family in Oaxaca, Mexico. The tamales were so creamy and custardy. It was so great to get my hands on those ingredients and learn the authentic way the dishes are prepared. We also went to a market in Mexico City that was bustling with hard working locals. We ate various tacos filled with ingredients like zucchini flowers – so delicious.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

ROASTED CAULIFLOWER WITH CURRIED CREMA TACO We created this taco with the knowledge that curry and cauliflower is a very common pairing. It’s one we thoroughly enjoy eating!

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Ingredients: Cauliflower, 1 head Olive oil, 240ml Ground coriander, 2 tablespoons Maldon salt, 2 tablespoons Chopped mint, 2 tablespoons Chopped garlic, 1 teaspoon Water, half a cupful Cream, 240ml Curry paste, 240ml Fresh curry leaf, 2 per person Lime wedges, to serve

Method: First, cut the cauliflower into individual, bitesize florets and season with oil, salt, chopped mint and garlic. Place the cauliflower florets on a sheetlined tray, add a splash of water and cover tightly with foil. Roast in oven at 350f (180c) until the florets are nice and tender, then remove them from the oven and uncover – this should take about 10 minutes.

Next, turn the heat up to 475f (250c) and, once hot, return the cauliflower to the oven to cook until golden brown.

In the meantime, put the crema and curry paste in a bowl and stir to combine.

To assemble the tacos, spread 1 tablespoon of the curry crema directly onto a tortilla. Add a few of the roasted cauliflower florets and garnish with fresh curry leaf that has been fried crisp. Serve with a lime wedge.

SKIRT STEAK WITH PECAN AND CHIPOTLE TACO The recipe for the sauce is one of Chef Roberto Santibanez’. We felt like it was a great pairing for the grilled steak. It has a great texture and flavor profile – being spicy, smoky, and nutty all at once.

Photograph by Michael Hauptman, illustration by Teri Ake

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Method: Toast the chilies until puffed, fragrant, and slightly darkened, then remove them from the heat, allow to cool and remove their stems and seeds.

Next, heat the oil in a pan and gently toast the garlic, before adding the onions and sweating on a low heat. Once the onions are lovely and soft, place all of the ingredients into a blender and puree to a slightly chunky paste. Add water to the blender if necessary, a splash at a time. Season to taste and place to one side while you prepare the steak.

Combine the salt and spices in a bowl, then season the steak generously with the mix. Cook on the grill to desired temperature, we recommend medium.

Allow to rest.

To assemble the taco, spread the pecan chipotle sauce on the tortilla. Slice the steak and put in the tortilla.

Garnish with coriander and serve with a lime wedge.

CEVICHE VERDE CON CHICHARONES We like the combinations of flavours and textures this dish offers. The chicharon (pork scratching) provides a nice crunch, as well as an edible vehicle for the ceviche. The ceviche itself has a great complexity of flavor from the fish, fresh apple, and green sauce. This is a very refreshing dish.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Ingredients: Blanched spinach, 130g Serrano pepper, 1 per person Garlic clove, 1 per person Ground cumin, 1 teaspoon Wild striped bass, 30g, diced, Maldon salt, 1 tablespoon Lime juice, 240ml Chicharon, 2 per person Diced apple, 1 tablespoon Sliced red onion, 1 teaspoon

Method: First, combine the spinach, Serrano pepper, garlic and cumin in a blender and puree until smooth.

Then, in a bowl, combine the salt, fish and lime juice and leave for five minutes to allow the fish to cure.

Remove the fish from the bowl and place it in a separate bowl with the diced apple and onion.

Dress with about one tablespoon of the spinach puree and toss to coat evenly. Serve in a chilled bowl garnished with two pieces of chicharon.

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simple pleasures

An afternoon with Nuno Mendes and the food that excites him the most Interview by Eleanor Morgan

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t’s fair to say that Nuno Mendes is a Mexican food freak. Just say the word “taco” to him and his eyes will widen like saucers. Between his training and formative jobs in California and then working under Ferran Adria at El Bulli, the Portugese chef-patron of Michelinstarred Viajante and The Corner Room in London’s Bethnal Green lived in Santa Fe, where he worked at the notorious Coyote Café, which is known for its blend of Mexican, Spanish and native American cuisine. “It was one of the highlights of my career,” he says. “It opened my eyes to the richness and complexity of Mexican food, inspiring me to travel and properly experience it.” After this, he was hooked.

“As a cook, it’s one territory I feel that, even though I’ve experimented with it a great deal, I’m only barely scratching the surface,” he grins.

“That’s unbelievably exciting to me.” Nuno took us shopping in his favourite spot, Casa Mexico – a stone’s throw from Viajante, it’s a wonderful shop run by an older couple that sells lots of traditional Mexican cookware, clothing, furniture, textiles and, much to his delight, groceries – before going back to Viajante to cook his versions of his favourite Mexican dishes. Watching him work is captivating; even though he’s preparing what he says are “rustic” dishes, the precision bleeds through, in the preparation (“I like to keep super clean-and-tidy, else things get out of control”, he winks) and the way he dances through his small kitchen from pan to grill to sink to larder to fridge and back again. Every few minutes he said, “I’m having so much fun” and, on serving up, “I really hope people try these at home”. So, you know, do.

SEABASS CEVICHE WITH HORCHATA All the preparation with this can be done the night before so that, when you come to make it, you can just have fun. I didn’t just want to go down the traditional leche de tigre (or ‘tiger’s milk’, the Peruvian term for the citrus and fish juicebased marinade that traditionally cures fish in a ceviche) route. When I think about some of my favourite Mexican dishes, horchata is up there.

The recipe of this milky, rice or ground almondbased drink varies across Latin America, but in Mexico it’s always made with rice, milk, cinnamon and vanilla, and is served ice cold at taquerias all over the place. You can’t beat it on a hot day, with something spicy to eat alongside. So I figured a blend of half leche de tigre and half horchata would work well in a refreshing ceviche, and add a new depth of flavour. Plus, vanilla works so well with fish – particularly seabass, which I used here. One of my dreams is to open a taqueria – if I ever get to realise that dream, a version of this will definitely be on the menu. Mexican food is so much fun.

TIGER’S MILK I’m not going to give exact measurements here, because in Mexican food it’s all about tasting and finding the balance as you go, and it depends on how much fish you’re serving. You know when it’s right. Make this the evening before you make your ceviche and strain before you’re going to serve.

★ Handful of leftover, cooked fish. I used monkfish because it happened to be leftover from service in the restaurant. Soak it in a little water and put both the fish and liquid into the mixture. ★ Big handful of coriander (leaves and stems), chopped ★ Juice of around six limes, depending on how juicy they are ★ Salt (it needs to be quite salty, so be bold) HORCHATA Again, precise quantities are not my forte. But you’re not looking for a thick, sweet and luxurious horchata here (you could turn some of the mixture into one, though, by adding more nuts, sugar and milk) – you want something with the same flavours but with a thinner, lighter texture so it doesn’t overpower the fish. ★ Couple of handfuls of white rice (whatever you have) ★ Handful of almonds (skinless, ideally) ★ Enough water to cover ★ Cinnamon sticks (I used the Mexican kind because the flavour is spicier) ★ One vanilla pod (again, Mexican vanilla packs more of a punch) Leave these ingredients to soak together overnight, and blitz together in the morning.

Before serving, briefly heat in a pan with the vanilla (scrape the seeds out and throw the pod in, too) and a couple of cinnamon sticks broken up. Let it cool, then strain.

FISH I like to use seabass for ceviche. The texture is perfect – quite meaty, but yielding. And it goes without saying it needs to be super fresh. You don’t want a really meaty fish because it’ll just go tough the longer it sits in the lime juice. Slice it into thick, bite-size chunks and lay out on a tray. I prefer a very quick marinade with ceviche because far too often you will order it and the fish is tough because an aggressive lime marinade has “cooked” it for too long. If you have really fresh fish, it’s best to just let the flesh become slightly opaque. Coat the fish in the juice and zest of one lime, a splash of Photography by Cat Stevens

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olive oil (I’m Portugese, I bleed the stuff ), and plenty of salt, probably more than you think. Leave for no more than a few minutes.

To serve, lay the fish out on your plate. Make a half-and-half blend of the leche de tigre and horchata.

Dress the fish with enough spoonfuls so it’s totally covered and the mixture starts to bleed across the plate. Zest a lime over the top, and you could serve it like that. Delicious. But I’ve elevated it with a sprinkling of fried and crumbed chicken skin, crushed almonds, sliced radishes and their leaves, coriander cress, pickled white onion, garlic flowers, coriander oil* and yet more olive oil. It’s worth making an effort with those extra things for a vibrant, textured mouthful each time. * Make this by gently heating a large amount of coriander in olive oil. Blend, then pass through fine sieve.

MONKFISH TACOS WITH ACHIOTE These are typical of what I love about Mexican food in that what is presented to you is full-flavoured but deceptively simple, made to be eaten quickly, and you have no time to think about how much work has gone into it. But so much has. Mexican cooking processes can be so involved and multilayered, particularly in sauces such as the one I use here. People so often have a misconception of what Mexican food is, thinking it’s all overpoweringly spicy, stodgy and fatty, and I want to scream from the rooftops about how much there is to learn about it! I feel like a kid around Mexican food, even after cooking for as long as I have. Cooking these fish tacos makes me so excited.

SAUCE This is based on a Spanish sofrito and the classic Veracruz (tomato and chilli) salsa. The cascabel chillis add a rich, fruity smokiness and the jalapenos and olives add a fresher heat and piquancy. The key is to cook it long and slow, in plenty of oil.

One white onion, diced very fine One clove of garlic, chopped Three ripe tomatoes, grated on flesh side Three dried cascabel chillis Teaspoon smoked paprika Handful pickled jalapenos Handful green olives, chopped (I use gordal because they’re my favourite) ★ Zest one one lime ★ Olive oil ★ Salt ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Cook onions in plenty of olive oil over a low heat until starting to caramelise. Season at the beginning to help draw the moisture from them and allow the sugars to release. Add garlic, paprika and the grated flesh of the tomatoes.

Char the chillis under a hot grill for a couple of minutes until starting to blacken, chop, and add to the sauce. Leave to cook down for around 20–25

minutes (it will be smelling amazing now), until it becomes sweeter and hotter. Then go in with your jalapenos and olives and cook for a further 10-15 minutes, always on a low-medium heat so it doesn’t catch. Season with more salt at the end, and finish with the lime zest and a few drops of juice. Keep warm.

ONION PICKLE ★★ 2 shallots, finely sliced and separated into rings ★★ Red wine vinegar ★★ Sugar ★★ Mexican oregano (intensely floral) ★★ Mexican epazote (citrusy, almost minty – Mexicans use it a lot for tea) ★★ Coriander seeds ★★ Salt Chop your shallots finely and place into a bowl with a huge pinch of salt. This is essential to draw the moisture and harshness out of them. Then fill the bowl with enough water to barely cover the onions and leave for 10–15 minutes. Meanwhile, gently heat red wine vinegar in a saucepan along with 3–4 teaspoons of sugar (I don’t like pickles to be too

sweet), a heaped tablespoon of toasted coriander seeds, a handful each of both the Mexican oregano and epazote, for five minutes. Rinse the onions, strain the vinegar mixture, and combine. Put back on the heat for 30 seconds, and add more oregano.

FISH (AND THE REST) The base of this fish marinade is achiote spice paste, which is used abundantly in Mexican cooking, particularly with pork. It’s derived from the seeds of the tropical achiote trees. The colour is wild, and dyes everything. On their own I think they’re really peppery and nutmeg-y, but this paste combines them with other things like cumin, cloves, cinnamon, Mexican oregano and allspice.

So you need a meaty fish that can stand up to that like halibut or monkfish. I used monkfish here. ★★ One box of achiote paste (you can find this online, or anywhere that sells Mexican ingredients) ★★ Monkfish tail, sliced into bite size chunks ★★ Tablespoon coriander seeds ★★ Corn tortillas (they have to be corn, for authentic Mexican flavour) ★★ Radishes ★★ Olive oil

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Toast coriander seeds under a hot grill until starting to brown. Remove and break up with your hands. It will smell beautiful. Place in bowl with broken up achiote (it comes in a sort of small brick) and plenty of olive oil. There’s no need to season – the paste is salty enough. Add your fish to the marinade, which will stain your hands if you don’t keep washing them, and leave for a few minutes. Get a non-stick pan nice and hot and, meanwhile, begin toasting your tortillas either in a dry, hot pan or under the grill. You want some black bits here and there. Once your pan is smoking pour in some olive oil, let it start to spit, and add your monkfish pieces. Cook for a minute on each side, or until the fish has taken on some colour.

To serve, divide the fish pieces between each tortilla, top with a spoonful of the tomato sauce, some onion pickle, some sliced radishes and a further squeeze of lime, if you like. Provide plenty of paper towels – these can be unbelievably messy – and eat immediately.

a question of taste There’s more to taste than meets the mouth, finds Hanna Hanra

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you develop associations with flavours. Who isn’t reminded of childhood when they open a packet of Hubba Bubba? Of Christmas when they smell mulled wine? Or floating in a sea of deliciousness when they taste Tabasco? OK, that might just be me. As well as changing their associations with flavours, your taste buds die. Part of spice tolerance is your taste buds kicking the bucket. They are a pain receptor, too, so when you can handle that vindaloo, it means game over for your taste buds.

So how do we know what goes with what?

When I reached for the habanero sauce to use as a relish on my sweet pancakes this morning, how did I know it was going to go together like birds of a spiced feather? “The knowledge of tastes going together is experience as much as everything else,” says Chetiyawardana, “But having a good sense of taste comes down to having a good memory. Like, you know what an orange is going to taste like before you taste it. But taste is a massive arena. There are programs that map which flavours go together, but it doesn’t mean that they would work in a dish together. For example, cloves and basil are basically the same thing, although basil leans towards the citrus oils. But if you broke them down they are incredibly similar. You can’t imagine an Italian pasta dish garnished with cloves, though, could you?”

Keen to dip a toe into this arena of taste, Auchentoshan Single Malt Scotch Whisky is holding a series of taste experiments, where participants can experience the language of taste and aroma and discover which side of the proverbial tongue their preferences lie. Rachel Barrie, Auchentoshan’s Master Blender, has recruited Chetiyawardana to curate the education on taste, drinks and accompanying dishes, with coffee experts Dunne Frankowski and Rebel Dining Society.

Rather than just distilled twice to remove impurities, Auchentoshan is triple distilled in oak casks, the whisky is lighter and brighter. “You put it in a light cask, and it will take up the characteristics from the wood and the bourbon that was in there previously,” says Chetiyawardana. “Because of the higher alcohol strength, it takes more notes from the wood, and you can break it down to floral and grapefruit molecules. We want to show people that, once you focus on something, your senses tune in on it, almost like listening to music. Whisky has a lot of flavour you can talk about, plus there’s what’s happening in your nose as you drink it, too.” He goes on to explain the concept of “finish”, you know, the way a flavour lingers in your mouth. Like Jilly Goolden might say, “this wine has a wonderfully botanical taste, like a herby Body Shop shower gel, with a Victoria sponge finish”. “What happens is that, when you swallow, the volatiles rise back up your throat and go up your nose, that’s why you get a ‘finish’ taste in your mouth,” Chetiyawardana explains. And whether it’s the hot tang of Tabasco or the taste of whisky, there is truly nothing nicer than a lingering aftertaste of a delicious mouthful.

here is a smell in our house. Eleanor says she can taste it, that it fills her mouth with a metallic tang. I smile and nod when she moans about it. “Of course I can smell it!” I can’t smell it.

I can only taste the cotton fresh room freshener she’s heavy handily sprayed around the house.

It chokes me with its sweet tang. “But I can still smell that bad smell,” she trills, marching the can around the room, leaving me feeling like I’ve eaten a freshly laundered hand towel.

Taste is the sense that people fixate on. It’s in your mouth. It’s literally on the tip of your tongue.

But, really, it’s smell that holds most power over you, over emotions, memories and associations.

It’s the most primal of the senses. The others, sight, touch, hearing, are fed into the brain and then processed. But the receptors that detect smell stick out the top of your nose and are an arterial route into your brain. It’s right there, unfiltered. When you walk into a room and smell your grandmother’s perfume, you are reminded of her before you’ve realised that the room you’re standing in is a modernist kitchen, or wherever you hang out. And it’s this very nature of how emotive smell is that makes any one person’s sense of taste unique, why someone, say, might adore hot sauce, and someone else gags at the thought of it.

Hi, my name is Hanna and I am an addict.

I’m addicted to hot sauce. I’ll giddily slosh it on anything – eggs, meat, vegetables, even sweet pancakes – you name it, and I’ll merrily douse it in Tabasco. Before I became a slave to this sweet capsaicin nectar, all I could taste in Tabasco was a chemical afterglow, and it reminded me of my mum dropping it into her afternoon Bloody Mary.

Capsaicin, the compound responsible for “hot”, actually makes your body release endorphins, in a controlled danger sort of way. You know you’re not going to be hurt (until the next morning, maybe) by throwing ten thousand jalapeños on your pizza, but your body doesn’t understand it and tells you you’re enjoying it at the time. Much like going on a rollercoaster or jumping out a plane. It’s also oil based, so you need a fat to wash it away, hence the cooling yoghurt that’s often served with hot food.

“Taste is really unique, and it changes throughout our lives,” says Ryan Chetiyawardana, aka My Lyan. He’s an award-winning bartender who, after studying biology at Edinburgh University, has become an expert on taste and flavour. “Part of it is nature and part of it is nurture. You also have certain dispositions to stuff, which is a genetic thing. There’s a gene known as the Brussel sprout gene.” That’s right, the Brussel sprout gene.” Genes can form in four ways,” he continues, “some people can only taste the bitterness of a leafy green and not the actual flavour – those are the people who say that sprouts taste terrible.”

The tongue obviously plays a primal role in taste, too. We all know babies navigate life by jamming what ever they can in their mouths, and things that taste bad (in nature, bitter means poison, despite modern crop production changing this) are a basic warning against danger. Your taste buds grow and change, too, and over time

www.facebook.com/auchentoshan uchentoshan’s Taste Experiments are at Bethnal A Green Town Hall Hotel 23rd, 24th and 25th July

Image by Nick Scott (narcsville.com) 22

Illustration by Kate Merry 24

dreams of life

Frida Kahlo was not just compelled to paint. She had to cook, too

By Eleanor Morgan

Nothing is worth more than laughter.

It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.

Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

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f Frida Kahlo could see the vast, global influence her paintings had nearly 60 years after her death she’d be amazed. Probably laugh. Although her reputation and international interest continued to soar right up until she died, Frida painted mostly small, intensely personal works for herself, family and friends. The world she created with her work, or, the world to which she gifted it, was far bigger than her own.

Frida’s life ended where it began, at The Blue House in Coyoacán. Here, her much-documented marriage to painter Diego Rivera, which she described as “the marriage between an elephant and a dove”, swelled and rumbled like a storm.

But it was also here that she exercised another of her true loves: entertaining. Frida was, despite a lifetime of physical and emotional pain (she once said she felt “murdered by life”) a party girl, and adored cooking. For as many people as possible. This is the woman who, on her 47th and last birthday, after a series of debilitating, painful operations on her spine, was carried, dressed in a traditional white Yalalag huipil, fully made-up with flowers in her hair, down the stairs into a dining room full of 100 guests who she entertained until late in the evening. Nothing stood in the way of her laughing, smoking, drinking tequila and telling wild, dirty jokes to shock her guests.

Frida’s love of cooking and entertaining is chronicled beautifully by her stepdaughter, Guadalupe Rivera, daughter of Diego and the writer Guadalupe Marin, and who lived for a time with Frida and Diego for a time, in Frida’s Fiestas, Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo. Reading the book, it seems every occasion was, for Frida, cause for rejoicing. She celebrated fiestas, birthdays, saint days, baptisms and all popular holidays with

an elaborate feast, cooked in the infamous tiled kitchen, surrounded by chattering parakeets in their cages. You can imagine her joy in truly immersing herself in scent and flavour, being able to step outside herself by feeding all five senses at once. While the book – ostensibly a cookbook, with more than 100 recipes – doesn’t paint a complete picture of Frida’s life, it provides a happy, evocative insight into the events that connected a family. Here, re-printed for the first time in the UK, are two of her recipes.

“Living with Frida was an education in itself. I learned about cultural values I had been ignorant about until then. Frida would talk about Freud and psychoanalysis or Garcia Lorca and poetry as easily as she spoke of painting and music. In order to keep up with her, I had to read quite a few of the books in her library and others that she and my father gave me. She accepted me without reservation into the heart of her daily life, teaching me how to get along with the people who took care of the house, people like Eulalia, Chucho, Rosenda and Inés the carpenter. She also introduced me to the people who came to visit her from Paris, London and New York. It was a world of contrasting feelings and emotions.

A few days before her birthday on July 6, Frida decided to give a big dinner party. As was often the case, she did not have much money to spend on the celebration, so the first thing she did was finish a painting that Marichu Lavin had commissioned, a magnificent portrait in which Marichu appears in the center of a great medallion-like frame, dressed in a huipil embroidered with brilliantly coloured flowers.

With the payment in her pocket, Frida invited half of Mexico to the party. She hired mariachis and asked Concha Michel and Chabela Villaseñor to arrive dressed like Tehuana women, guitars in hand. The guests were advised to come ‘ready to eat every kind of food, to let their hair down and to sing their hearts out,’ since the party would last well into the night.” – Guadalupe Rivera Frida’s birthday supper menu SHRIMP BROTH TABLECLOTH STAINER SHRIMP ESCABECHE CHICKEN ESCABECHE PORK STEW FROM PUEBLA PORK WITH NOPALES FISH BAKED IN ACUYO LEAVES MOLE PABLANO CHILLED PIG’S FEET BEAN, RADISH AND CHEESE SALAD SWEET POTATO-PINEAPPLE DESSERT MAMEY MOUSSE PINE NUT FLAN

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TABLECLOTH STAINER (8 servings) ★★ 1 pound/500g pork loin ★★ 1 pound/500g pork neck bones or country ribs ★★ 1 bouquet fragrant herbs (hay leaf, thyme and marjoram) ★★ salt ★★ 3 ancho chiles, de-veined and softened in hot water ★★ 3 mulato chiles, de-veined and softened in hot water ★★ 1 large onion, chopped ★★ 2 pounds/1kg tomatoes, roasted and peeled ★★ 2 tablespoons lard ★★ 1 tart apple, peeled and sliced ★★ 1 pear, peeled, cored and sliced ★★ 1 quince, peeled and sliced ★★ 2 peaches, peeled and sliced ★★ 1 thick slice pineapple, peeled and cut in pieces ★★ 1 plantain, sliced ★★ 1 tablespoon sugar ★★ 3 tablespoons white vinegar Place the pork and bones in a large saucepan with water to cover. Add the herbs and salt to taste.

Simmer until the pork is tender. Remove from the heat, strain the broth, discard the bones, slice the meat, and set broth and meat aside.

Puree the chiles with the onion and tomatoes.

Drain the puree and sauté it in hot lard. Add the pork broth and simmer for 10–15 minutes to blend the flavours. Add the meat and all the fruit except the plantain. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the plantain, sugar and vinegar. Simmer for 2 minutes, correct the seasoning and serve very hot.

PINE NUT FLAN (8 servings) ★★ ½ cup/100g sugar ★★ 1 cup/180g pine nuts ★★ 1 cup/250ml sweetened condensed milk ★★ 4 egg yolks ★★ 2 whole eggs, beaten ★★ 1 cup/250ml milk Heat the sugar in a 1-quart baking dish, stirring constantly, to caramelise. Puree three-quarters of the pine nuts with the condensed milk. Mix with the egg yolks, whole eggs and milk. Pour into the prepared dish. Place in a larger pan of hot water.

Bake in a preheated 350°F/175°C oven for 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven, let cool and garnish with the remaining pine nuts.

Frida’s Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo 1994 by Guadalupe Rivera & MariePierre Colle. Used by permission of Clarkson Potter/ Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

mexican chicken buns Or, The Art of Looking Mexican

By Dan Biddulph

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’ve never been to Mexico. There are no tales, no long winding dirt roads that led me in any way to discovering a chicken bun in Mexico. This is not that.

I guess this could be a street food consumed mid-adventure. I wouldn’t want to eat it in any sort of formal dinner or lunch setting. But I would want to be hungry, and reasonably fit, because from my experience, it seems to slip down pretty well, but may cause some mild health-related paranoia. But don’t worry about that. Worry about how you get one of these bandidos. Here’s how: First, get yourself into an adaptable frame of mind. Like, the art of looking sideways but instead of sideways, Mexican. The Art of Looking Mexican.

In fact that is the new title of this piece.

I once bought a huge baking tray and neglected to coordinate it with the size of my oven, and apart from a few open-doored grilling sessions, it never saw the darkness of my cooker. But it’s turned out to be a great makeshift street skillet.

I like to imagine this made-up chicken bun being prepared in a dusty roadside abode with low-tech seating and two big metal frying skillets heated by second-hand butane gas canisters. One skillet has corn oil for frying the masa cakes and the other for frying the chicken and making the hot chilli jam. The mayonnaise would be a bit shit and the salsa would be chopped on a highly inappropriate bit of wood from the 1970’s.

If that makes no sense, you will need a big lowsided roasting tray that can be used on top of the stove. Or, failing that, a large frying pan (sadface).

And another for frying the masa cakes.

For the masa cakes: ★ Masa or semolina flour ★ Warm water ★ Salt Inside: ★ Chicken off the bone (breast) ★ Shredded little gem (or whatever)

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Chicken marinade: Good quality paprika Smoked paprika Cumin seeds Coriander seeds Fennel seeds Fenugreek seeds Cayenne pepper Cinnamon bark Salt Corn oil

Hot jam: ★ Sliced red onion ★ Sliced red pepper ★ Sliced assorted Mexican chillies (even though I used Nagar) ★ Sugar ★ Vinegar

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Salsa: Tomato Red onion Coriander Limes Salt

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

For the mayo: Corn oil Egg yolk Squeeze of lime Salt Pepper

Start by making the masa dough. Masa seems to be at the core of most Mexican eating extravaganzas and is made from maise. In a mixing bowl, add the masa, some salt and warm water to form a dough, which you’ll end up with after kneading with your hands. Mine was quite doughy (fine) but a proper masa would be more dry.

Set this aside, wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate.

This will form the basis of the buns. Next, marinate the chicken. Marinade timings can be excessive sometimes but it’ll help to give it 20 mins while you do other stuff.It’s more of a dry rub, but oil makes it a marinade. For this I fried off and then stone ground (pestle and mortar) the whole seeds and cinnamon bark and then added that to a majority mix of paprika, with a bit of smoked paprika.

To prepare the chicken you need to double back the breast, so to speak. Cut it in half lengthways, open it out by drawing through with a knife and score on both sides. This maximises marinating and helps it fry off nice and quick.

Throw it all in a bowl and mix well with the oil and a generous amount of salt.

Next comes the salsa. Simply, a finely diced large tomato, half a (finely diced) red onion, a bunch of coriander chopped, a good squeeze of two limes and some salt. That is all.

For the mayo, you need to vigorously whisk up the egg yolks while adding the corn oil to form something that resembles, err, mayo. Squeeze a bit Photographs by Ivan Roberto

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of lime and season with salt and pepper towards the end of the mixing. I actually use a bowl over some simmering water for this.

Now you’re ready to cook. Start by taking the masa dough and rip off a baby’s fist-sized chunk.

Form the cake with your hands without rolling the dough. The size to aim for is roughly 2cm high, 10cm wide. It’s important to get the oil hot before frying them - if it’s too low they’ll end up being a bit stodgy. You need to shallow fry them (about 2cm of oil), which is like deep-frying with a starved amount of oil. Still shit loads, but not a whole pot full.

There should be a good amount of noise and bubbles in the pan. Let them brown nicely before carefully turning and repeating on the other side. Take them out prop them up vertically to cool on some paper. Could be the sides of a bowl or something.

Now you need to get your skillet or car bonnet or whatever you have fashioned for this purpose ready for the chicken and the jam. These should take around the same time to cook. You are basically pretending that there are two frying pans on one surface, and this is the most fun part. You don’t need as much oil as the buns, but still a generous amount that coats the skillet well.

Get the oil to the point of smoking and lay the chicken flat in the pan. It should really sizzle and turn the oil around a volcanic, red-y orange. Now just leave it. Let it cook and colour and, on the other side of the skillet, start the hot jam. Throw in the sliced onions, red pepper and chilli, and give it as much surface area to fry as possible without it mixing up into the chicken.

As the peppers, onions and chilli start to colour, pour some sugar directly over, followed by some vinegar. You could use regular caster sugar and malt vinegar and it would still be good, but I used white balsamic that I had leftover and some good quality brown sugar.

Mix this up a bit, and it should turn sticky, the sugar and vinegar mixing into the hot oil. My finished product was crispy, sticky, spicy and sweet.

The chicken is done when it is nicely browned and crisped on both sides. The scoring and flattening will make sure of this. Now the bun is ready to assemble. Well, almost. Get your lettuce and shred it real fine: now you are ready.

Assemblage: On a suitable surface (I suggest trendy greaseproof burger paper on broken wood) slice open one of the masa buns, get the bottom half and actually throw the lettuce on top, doesn’t matter if some of it goes all over the place, that adds to the taste. Next get one of your chicken bits.

You can either chop it up with a machete or just leave it whole. Whack that on top of the lettuce.

Now you can pile on the rest. Get a good scrunch of the crispy jam thing, and on top of that a dollop of salsa and finally the mayo. Locate the top of the masa bun and lid it. You have yourself a completed bun. You should eat that. You should enjoy that.

Try it with a beer. Eat it in the shade near some sun. There isn’t much else to say.

divorced eggs

Despite the name, these eggs are a perfect marriage

By Stevie Parle

H

uevos divorciados is a common Mexican breakfast dish and is basically jazzy fried eggs. It’s so named because the eggs are served with two conflicting sauces: one red and spicy and the other green and cooling. The green apple salsa would usually be made with tomatillos (a relation of physalis), though it works really well here with apple and herbs. Or, you could make a more simple salsa by smply dry-roasting guajillo chillies and blending them with water and a garlic clove. For a more substantial meal, serve with refried beans (frijoles refritos) and a slice of avocado.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Serves two For the spicy tomato sauce (salsa ranchera) Olive oil ½ red onion, finely chopped ½ garlic clove, finely chopped 1 green or red chilli, seeded and finely chopped ½ tsp ground allspice 1 x 400g tin plum tomatoes, drained and rinsed sea salt and freshly ground black pepper For the green apple salsa ½ Granny Smith apple, finely chopped ½ cucumber, finely chopped a handful of coriander leaves, roughly chopped 2 spring onions, finely chopped ¼ tsp finely chopped green chilli juice of 1 lime sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

To serve ★ 4 slices of toast, or 4 corn tortillas ★ olive oil, for frying ★ 4 eggs To make the spicy tomato sauce, add some oil to a large pan and gently fry the onion and garlic until soft. Add the chillies and allspice and continue to cook for another minute before adding the tomatoes. Break the tomatoes up with the back of your spoon until you have a smoothish sauce.

Season to taste, then leave to simmer with the lid off for 20 minutes until sweet and thickened.

To make the green apple salsa, combine all the ingredients in a small bowl and season to taste.

Add a drizzle of oil to the pan and fry the eggs, either all together or one at a time, depending on the size of your pan. For each serving, place 2 slices of toast, or tortillas, on a plate and top with 2 fried eggs. Spoon the red sauce over one egg and the green sauce over the other.

Extracted from Spice Trip by Stevie Parle and Emma Grazette, published by Square Peg at £20.00. Copyright © Emma Grazette and Stevie Parle 2012.

Photographs © Jason Lowe 2012.

27

buen provecho 28

peter & rona Your favourite new foodie columnists are back with a grab bag of stonking recipes!

TORI AMOS’S GENTLE MEAT SPREAD Despite my string of high profile lovers throughout the years, I long to be faithful to Peter and nothing re-ignites us more than a picnic in the wind.

A wicker hamper, though pretty, is hefty so Peter used his somewhat blotchy memory of his days with a British Aerospace (before the attack) to design a Picnic Suit which means one need not scrimp on either style or content. (Heal’s do a version of Peter’s Picnic Suit in Angry Brown for £1500, and this works just as well on stout or dumpy women).

The suit accommodates most necessary picnic accessories without giving the game away. One can mix and match but a portable gas-hob is a must and sits nicely in the small of the back with minimal chafe, helf in place by a confident leather climbing belt.

(Heal’s do this in Rhino Grey for £349 with detachable picnic-pants). A bundle of bobberty bowls will not bulge the trouser inordinately and merely hints at a well-worked bottom. The summertime long-sock (which comes already attached to the suit with satin ribbon) will house most adult cutlery.

We were fortunate enough to enjoy both the colourful conversations and wonderfully emotional vocal acrobatics of Tori Amos on Blackheath last year when we found her somewhat dazed and pantless in a bush. After several mugs of cider, she shared with us the type of Baptist-style picnic she might have enjoyed with her preacher father as a child, which at first Peter found erotic and then became tiresomely weepy.

Take 11 Wiltshire pig cheeks and pack tightly between the raisin and kidney-web curtains described in my Easter Resurrection Recipes.

Swaddle in clingfilm and force the sweaty package into the trouser pockets of the picnic suit. Force two crusty flutes up each sleeve then run about for twelve minutes. Any drinks should really have been thought about earlier but river water can work very well provided one has antibiotics.

Once one’s destination is chosen, take off the Picnic Suit and follow instructions to convert it into table and pouffes. Remove the now crumbled flutes and shower over the warmed-through kidney packages (the cling film should have rolled itself up into an easily disposable pellet). Toast the cheeks until tough. Enjoy with limited conversation. If one decides to make love, be sure to switch off the hob.

This can be deftly done by the man or by a largetoed woman if one is already ‘underway’.

ETER SAVERNAKE AND RONA CLAY’S P SUMMER BRUISED PORK IN A PARSLEY COFFIN I love this recipe. It’s something one can toss together, hungover or not, in less than half an hour. Peter and I would often rustle this up when our friends were over from the Middle East.

Start by shocking the parsley between two icecubes. Smash and rinse the pork then set aside under a leather cloche for between one and nine minutes. If you don’t have access to a leather cloche, a well-worn trilby will do. Peter always has several on the go, and there’s nothing more comforting than the warmth of just-worn-trilby on damaged pork.

Puzzle the cream on a medium heat and just as it’s beginning to bloat shoot the parsley into it with a kitchen-rifle (Heals do a wonderful one for £225). Upturn immediately onto a hot glass dish christened with any of the larger oils and leave in an upstairs room for 12 minutes.

Blind a duck egg with a screwdriver, hard-boil it, then slice thinly and erect it around the hardening pile of cream. Try not to look at it too much. Blacken the egg-house with a traditional egg-blackener (Habitat do a fun one for £28.50 in electric beige) and serve with a mug of warmed water. I would usually follow this with a round cracker in a sock.

TREVOR NUNN’S COLEY HELMET I’ve always been a Trevor nut because he’s so bloody clever. I’m so glad Trevor still has the same hairstyle. Albeit dyed. But it does have that wonderful aubergine hue that comes with black on grey, which I find terribly attractive and renders him rather beatific. Peter tried it when the balding really caught up but he ended up with a very stained scalp and people started offering him money. He’s since saved up for a transplant and we feel it’s money well spent though he’s doing it in stages so, at present, he only has a fringe.

I was always amazed Trevor didn’t try it on with me as I’m sure I was his type, but I’m told I’m too much for some men and I think he felt guilty that he didn’t allow me to play Rosencrantz in the all-women version at Hampstead. I invited him into the ladies ponds but unfortunately he lost his trunks almost immediately. None of us knew that the ponds had pikes in there at that point, and Trevor had to walk into the Kenwood House café in just his jumper and Hush Puppies.

Trevor first told us about his coley helmet when we were on one of our Hampshire jaunts.

We knew he was in a gypsy van near ours and soon became on waving terms. By the Friday we were playing swing-ball with him and Peter hinted we would love to stay for supper. He said we could have whatever we wanted and we felt so crass wanting fish and chips but Trevor swiftly marveled at the working class-ness of it all and promptly brought our his wonderfully cheesy helmet.

I’m always baffled about the number of hams on offer, but Trevor plumped for the honeycrumbed ham from Shropshire and suggests you mump the cheddar around the coley, before placing it under the grill. To achieve the helmetting, one must curve the half-cooked coley around a sieve and bitch it into shape. Finish off with a coriander radish muddle.

KATE WINSLET’S OOZY JUICED PORK It’s not often that I fall in love, but when I do, I fall hard and this dish just has me in tears at every mouthful. It’s not dissimilar to Peter Bowle’s Moany Pork but a lot more assertive. Kate would always begin by preparing the lamb sleeves in the bath, scooping out the fat with her boots to accommodate the quite considerable plait of pork. Peter recommends one start with the nightslackened onions so they have time to come round.

Trouble the onions across the pain using an old fashioned fiddlin’ pipe and fry until they pucker. I find three winter ladles of Juftin, a splash of lemon and a bulb of rustic botty-butter the ultimate fry.

Tumble the remaining pork into the funnel guns and force into a large toaster. Leave ‘til smoky. I would usually serve this in a sugared tumbler with beef-trumpets and crisps.

29

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COOLCHILE.CO.UK

less guilty. more pleasure.

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Illustrations by Donald Urquhart, thatdonald.com

SHRIMPY’S, KING’S CROSS FILLING STATION, GOODS WAY, N1CN1C 4UR 4UR SHRIMPY’S, KING’S CROSS FILLING STATION, GOODS WAY,

Illustrations by Donald Urquhart, thatdonald.com

Brunch, lunch,lunch, dinner and the Brunch, dinner andbits theinbetween bits inbetween