Savour Flavour

‘And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?’

How indeed. Proust and his Madeleine: the most famous food moment in literature, when food, flavour and memory fuse together. We all know of it, refer to it, but how many of us have actually read it, and remarked how carefully Proust charts with precise minutiae the psychological and physiological processes that marked the mouthful of food Swann took?

It’s all there, the moment of taste, the thrill of flavour, the sequence of sensations triggered by a mere mouthful. The same things happen to us each time we eat. Ok, that may be something of an exaggeration. Most of the time we’re too busy or too preoccupied (or too self-conscious?) to give each mouthful that kind of exact attention. And yet we all have had those Proustian moments, when we can recall with nostalgic intensity the flavours of something we ate twenty, thirty, forty years ago.

And yet, what is ‘flavour’? Is it merely a philosophical concept? Or does it have physiological manifestations? Is flavour the same as taste? If not, how does flavour different from taste? How does flavour work? Do our brains register ‘flavours’ if so how? What are the mechanics of flavour” Or could flavour possibly be an amalgam of all the above? Now there’s a thought.

‘Food & Cooking -An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture’ by Harold McGee is one of the few imperative books on food ever published. In it he says ‘The overall flavour fruit and vegetable is a composite of several distinct sensations’. He lists those sensations in the mouth and one the tongue, and then explains how the process of chewing releases hundreds of thousands of volatile chemicals that rise up the nasal passages to the olfactory bulb which sorts them out into some kind of order as flavours. Flavour, says Harold McGee is ‘part taste, mostly smell’.

I once shared a long car trip with Harold McGee. He was the most enchanting and illuminating of companions. In the course of the journey, he outlined the theory and practice of taste and flavour, and went on to describe how the olfactory bulb passed on the information to neural pathways, which in turn communicated with different parts of the brain and that allowed to sort out flavours and express ourselves on them. He made it sound all so logical and sensible that I could understand it. Then he spoiled it all by saying ‘Of course, the latest research suggests that it might be the other way round.’ Flavour, you might say is an on-going project.

NB. This blog first appeared as one of a series in Flavour First – http://www.flavourfirst.org/

Sweet reason

When it comes to coffee, I am something of a purist. I am a man for a single espresso. I’d rather drink two single espressos than a double. I’m also happy with a ristretto, but only in Naples, and preferably accompanied by a sfogliatella from Scatturchio. At a pinch I will drink a cappuccino, but really only enjoy them in the Tazza d’Oro in Rome, one of the few places that understand the precise texture of foam on a cappuccino (which should be just firm enough to hold your sugar before letting it slide into the coffee beneath). Macchiatos, flat whites, lattes, americanos and all the other bizarrerie of modern coffee culture I leave to others.

With rare exceptions, I always add sugar to my coffee. Unsweetened black coffee tends to be dominated by acidic and metallic notes. Just a touch of sugar rounds out the flavour, drawing out the fuller, more chocolaty notes.

Now comes the really vexing point. Sugar lumps. God, how I hate sugar lumps with coffee. It is astonishing how many restaurants, even some highly rated Italian restaurants in London, serve up sugar lumps with their coffee. Particularly odious are those white and brown Perruche lumps. You know they’re only doing this for aesthetic reasons, not because they are suitable for coffee.

If you give it a moment’s thought, you’ll know that, by the time the sugar lump has melted sufficiently to sweeten the coffee, the drink, itself, will be stone cold. It’s so bloody obvious. If you sweeten your coffee, use caster sugar. It melts right away, and you can drink your coffee hot.

PS. I will confess to a weakness for sugar crystals, which my parents were fond of. We were allowed to spoon up the semi-melted crystals from their cups, when they had finished drinking their coffee. It had a satisfying butterscotch sweetness and crunched in a very agreeable way.

Brasserie Chavot

Suddenly they’re everywhere. After years of rigorous suppression in favour of Italian/Spanish/Modern European/Contemporary British/Ersatz Japanese-effect pastiches, French brasseries and bistros (or is it bistrots?) are back in force. In the last fewish months the Brasserie Zedel and Cafe Colbert, Balthazar and Little Pollen Street have all opened and been packing in the customers. Most, I suspect, are drawn by ancestral, tribal memories of what French cooking used to be and is no longer, marking the cultural gastronomic tides that move quietly beneath the froth of contemporary hype and hyperbole.

And now there’s the Brasserie Chavot.

Eric Chavot is a pretty well-traveled chef – Le Manoir aux Qua Saisons, Harvey’s, The Restaurant, Chez Nico, Capital Hotel, America, Pierre Koffman’s pop-at Selfridges. He has tried a couple of solo efforts before, too – Interlude de Chavot and Chavot in the Fulham Road, These testify to his restlessness and to his talent. For the sake of the eating public, at last I hope he found the place to settle for years to come.

The Brasserie Chavot fills a wing of the Westbury Hotel, and fills it with something approaching fin de siècle (the fin of the 19th century that is) splendour: marble, mosaic flooring crystal chandeliers, mirrors and gilt, red velvet banquette seating. I love that kind of thing. They evoke happy memories, a sense of comfort verging on luxury, provide a reassurance that everything is going to be all right after all.

And all right it is. A brasserie the place may be, but it is Eric Chavot’s brasserie. The menu may be packed with old favourites – oysters with crepinette; steak tartare; choucroute; canette a l’orange; cod with lentils; daube de boeuf – but somehow M. Chavot imbues them with an individuality that year surpasses the staid originals. In most cases, he achieves this by cooking these dishes with a precision and technical brilliance that raises them to the standard of haute cuisine. Somewhat disingenuously, he says that he is only cooking the dishes that his old mother cooked. All I can say is that, if Mme Chavot cooked as well as this, I am very sorry I never got to sit at her table.

To be strictly truthful, the first time I ate the canette a l’orange, I found the duck part on the disappointing side. That was largely due to the fierce vividness of the a l’orange part. It was intense, balanced, profound, silky, penetrating and elegant, a cracker in anyone’s language. When I ate the dish a week or so later, the problem of the duck breast had been solved. It was a duck breast of inspired duckyness, a duck breast suitable to carry to fill majesty of that sauce.

The carpaccio of venison with pickled mushrooms that preceded it showed another side of M.Chavot’s kitchen personality. It was refined, graceful, and delicate, the gentle, ruminative quality of the deer lifted and heightened by the sharp punctuation marks of the mushrooms. The steak tartare which preceded that was another wonderful example of M. Chavot’s ability to re-invigorate a classic. Tiny cubes of meat were bound loosely in a mayonnaise souped up with tiny chunks of cornichons, capers, French mustard, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco. It was meaty, creamy, sharp and warm by turns.

Puddings show no slackening of standards. I could comment that the baba au rhum and coupe liegoise erred on the generous side, but that seems ungenerous on my part, and the Brsserie Chavot is the kind of place that encourages bigheartedness.

It’s still in its early days, and some things may change. The menu may broaden its scope. However, already the Brasserie Chavot shows an enviable maturity and confidence. The service is easy, charming and efficient. The food comes at a nicely judged pace. The wine list, and wine advisors, have a disarming personality. It would seem that Eric Chavot has put the lessons of all those travels to very good use indeed.

17/20

Brasserie Chavot,
41 Conduit Street,
London W1
Tel:020 7078 9577

http://brasseriechavot.com/

Taste Test

I’ve been contributing a column about taste and flavour to an admirable new on-line magazine called Flavour First (see http://www.flavourfirst.org). I thought I would recycle them in this blog just in case some faithful followers might have missed them.

At the Fat Duck, they used to serve a little nibble to kick off any meal. It consisted of a rectangular tablet. One side was orange and the other deep purple. One side was orange jelly and the other beetroot jelly, the solicitous waiter would explain, adding ‘I suggest you start with the orange.’ This being the Fat Duck, the orange jelly turned out to be beetroot, being made with yellow beetroot, and the purple side taste of orange, being made with blood oranges.

It was a classic case of misdirection, and produced a palpable sense of shock, just as you experience when you pick up a glass of water swig it and discover it’s really vodka, or, even worse, the other way round. Our relationship with taste and flavour starts long before we actually do any eating. It begins when we smell food and/or see it. At that moment our brains whirr into gear, setting up a series of responses and expectations.

Only after that come the responses when we actually put the stuff into our mouths. We push it around with out tongues, assessing texture chew on it a few times, releasing its juices, and that’s when we ‘taste’ things.

In easier, simpler days there used to be just four tastes – sweet, sour, salty, bitter. Then they were joined by a fifth, umami, natural MSG, best described as a savory facilitator for other tastes. We had known about it since being identified by Kikunae Ikeda in 1908, but Western experts remain skeptical about its existence and importance until 2001 when Prof Charles Zuker proved that we had taste receptors specifically for umami.

Taste receptors – there’s another area of debate and changing knowledge. I can remember the days when it was thought we only had about 300 receptors, and it was generally accepted that these were located on the tongue, around the mouth, and in the throat. At the last count it turned out that there are over 2000 to 5000 taste receptors (scientists is always revising the number upwards) dotted all over the place, including in our tummies, gut and pancreas.

It was also once thought that each receptor has specific functions in relation to the five basic tastes, i.e. 1:1. Now It seems that taste receptors are rather more promiscuous than we previously thought, in that predominantly bitter receptors, let’s say, also register degrees of sweetness, and ditto salt receptors for bitterness and so on. And if that weren’t confusing enough, taste receptors vary from person to person, and aren’t all switched on all the time. There are specific taste hotspots in the brain, too, which respond to specific tastes.

Once upon time, everything was so clear. We tasted tastes in our mouths and while our olfactory bulbs sorted out the flavours. Now no one seems able to decide where taste ends and flavour starts. As far as I can make out, most authorities treat them as if they merge one into the other.

But, but, but, it seems to me that there’s still some kind of separation. If you don’t believe me, try the old squeeze-the-nose test. Eat a pear squeezing your nose, and you’ll be hard put to tell whether it’s an apple or a pear. Then unsqueeze your nose, and the pear flavour will fill your head. But if you chew a lemon squeezing your nose, you can tell it’s a lemon by its acidity, because acidity is a taste. All clear now? Mmmm.

The Incredible Lightness of Being a Restaurant Critic

What is a restaurant critic but someone who a) can get a table in a restaurant when no one else can; and b) has someone else pay the bill? It’s a mystery why restaurant critics strut like peacocks and peahens through the food firmament. Cookery writers, food profile writers, folk who write about the ethics and politics of food, all of whom do more worthwhile work, simply do not have the glamour of the Restaurant Critic. It’s the job that everyone else would like to have.

Small wonder, then, that the turnover of restaurant critics in the national dailies is low. Once someone has got their knees under the table and their noses in the trough, they’re extremely loathe to give it up. Not only are they paid to eat, but they can hold forth on the subject at tendentious length afterwards. They become someone of note among their friends and family, a source of patronage. I never knew how many friends I had until the magic words ‘Expense Account’ became associated with my name. Above all, best of all, being a restaurant critic panders to a sense of self-importance, of being someone of consequence, the delusion of being loved and appreciated, and, oh, headiest of all, of being recognized.

Of course critics are recognised. How could it be otherwise? Restaurateurs aren’t fools. Well, not all of them, anyway. The photos, phone numbers, habitual booking names, companions, likes and dislikes of Restaurant Critics are catalogued and distributed among the trade. Would it be possible to disguise the features of Giles Coren, AA Gill or Jay Rayner? Not even the most artful makeup artist or plastic surgeon could do so. Anyway, most critics adore being spotted. The is nothing quite like being fawned over in front of other people to warm the inner ego.

And then there’s the illusion of power, of holding the fate of this eatery or that the palms of their word processors. Do they? Do they, buggery. It may be true in London that the word of a critic can put a few thousand customers through the door of a restaurant when it first opens, but that’s about it. In the final analysis, restaurants stand or fall on their own merits. I’ve lost count of the restaurants that I and other critics have praised to the skies, only for them to go onto receivership shortly afterwards. In one memorable case the restaurant went into receivership before my review appeared. Equally numerous are the places given a right drubbing by the arbiters of restaurant taste, which are still doing a roaring trade years later. In the end, people decide for themselves whether or not they will go to eat in a particular place.

That is even more true now that we’ve entered the age of the blogger and social media frenzy. The conventional restaurant critic, that figure of higher authority settled comfortably into the pages of the national newspapers, is being outflanked and displaced by their nimbler, frequently better informed, on-line rivals. Like the terrestrial newspapers for which they write, these gastro-grandees are a threatened species. Reading their encyclicals from their weekly pulpits is like witnessing hairy mammoths thrashing around in a tar pit shortly before their extinction.

One day we will wax nostalgic at their passing.

NB. This rumination, along with those of proper restaurant critics, appears in the spring issue of that admirable publication, XCITY for journalism alumni of City University London

Soldiers on parade

SOLDIERS ON PARADE

It was the usual spring weekday breakfast – soft boiled egg; soldiers + unsalted butter; coffee; blood orange juice (freshly squeezed, naturally) – and I started mulling over the question of soldiers – what is the proper bread out of which to make them? White or brown, sir Sourdough or plain? Rye or whole meal? Soda or risen?

I make and eat only one bread, Auntie Mary’s Super Soda Bread, about which I’ve written before, I think. It makes top-notch toast. There’s nothing better, in my view, for carrying a head of unsalted butter topped with jam or marmalade. Honey is another matter. But for soldiers for dipping into the brilliant yellow yoke of the sublime eggs I get at the Newark Farm stall at Stroud Farmer’s Market? Hmm.

I tasted them against some soldiers made from the Pain de Campagne from the equally local Hobbs Bakery, also decorated at the point of impact with a curl of unsalted butter.

As a result of this highly scientific process I have come to the following conclusions:

1. As a general principle, the more flavoured the bread, the less suitable it is as a vehicle for molten egg yolk.
2. The lighter, crisper (never crispy) crunch of white toast is more suited to egg dipping than the denser, more tightly knit texture of brown toast of whatever provenance.
3. The more neutral, wheaty flavour of white toast, with a hint of caramel marries with rich, creamy butteriness of a fine egg yolk better than toasts made with the more assertive breads,
4. Therefore, out go sourdoughs, ryes, spelts and other high-health, fashionable breads.
5. The right proportions for soldiers are 1cm thick x 2cm wide x 8cm long.

I think the same is probably true of scrambled egg, although the more fragile surface of white toast goes soggier more quickly than tougher brown toast, and therefore has to be eaten instantly.

At ease!

Leaves from my mother’s recipe file – 1: Haddock Scramble

In an earlier blog I wrote about my mother’s recipe file and the treasures in it – Beetroot Soup (Armenian), Biscuit Tortoni (frozen), Bent Biscuits, Blackberry Granita, Bloody Mary which includes a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters., fennel a la Greque and hard-boiled eggs in soubise sauce, panoche stew that begins in uncompromising style ‘Mutton cutlets, cut in small pieces’, kidneys Turbigo; pirozhki and tongue with almond and raisin sauce among them.

It’s one thing admiring recipes in the abstract. It’s another thing cooking from them. But I had a bit of left over haddock the other evening, and was looking for an easy-going snack for supper, when I remembered seeing a recipe for Haddock Scramble among my mother’s recipes. I took a look at it: haddock, butter, eggs, cream, chopped parsley – it looked suspiciously like a poor man’s version of the classic omelette Arnold Bennett. Only the grated Parmesan was missing (On further researches, I’m not sure, but I rather think the original omelette was made with milk and flour, not cream; and certainly did not contain chopped parsley). And then I noticed the grated lemon peel. I don’t suppose Arnold would have approved of that. On the other hand it would introduce a different emphasis into the basic combination. I tried it and it was wonderful, the perfect Sunday evening, any evening, snack, rich, smokey, creamy, with that subtle, allusive whiff of citrus.

I must confess to playing a bit fast and loose with some of the detailing of my mother’s recipe. I used crème fraiche instead of cream, because I thought the hint of acidity would work better in the voluptuous creaminess of the whole. And I added chopped wild garlic in stead of parsley because I had some of the former and none of the latter. In retrospect, I think the grassy freshness of parsley would work better.

Serves 4

8 eggs
55g butter
1 small cooked Finnan haddock (or any undyed haddock)
Grated rind ½ lemon
1 tbsp chopped wild garlic (or parsley)
1 tbs crème fraiche (or cream)
Pepper

Flake haddock (says my mother). Melt butter. Add haddock slowly until hot. Break eggs into a bowl and beat lightly. Add pepper, lemon rind and chopped wild garlic or parsley. Add to haddock and cook over a low flame until scrambled to your liking. Add crème fraiche or cream towards the end.