We tend to skirt around the subject or problem foods. I’m not talking here of liver and lites, of monkey’s brains and sheep’s eyeballs, chickens’ feet and rams’ testicles, the kind of food that causes the gorges of the more sensitive to rise. I want to deal with foods that are perfectly acceptable on the surface, but which, on consumption, turn out to be booby=trapped.

Take a plateful of spaghetti, for example. What could be more placid, more submissive than a plate of pasta? But in the wrong mouth, spaghetti takes on a violence all of its own.

Almost everyone can get a decent wodge of spaghetti into their mouths, but no matter how masterful and spaghetti hand you are, there are always a few trailing ends hanging from your mouth that need to be tidied up, and that’s where the trouble begins. The experienced spag hand knows to hold his or her head over the plate, and to bite off the ends so that fall back where they came from. The unwary, on the other hand, try to suck up the recalcitrant strands into their mouths. The previously docile strands are suddenly convulsed into life. They thrash around like the tentacles of an octopus in its death throes, pebble-dashing anyone within range with blobs of sauce. It makes you realize how little there is between us and the lower primates.

I used to have an elderly aunt. She was well advanced in years, sans her own teeth, but not sans taste. She was very partial to pudding. I learned, through bitter experience, not to give her that favorite of her – and my – youth, gooey treacle tart, particularly topped with chopped, toasted hazelnuts, once a modish touch. The sight of her as her dentures got to grips with the gooey treacle, lifting them away from her gums, will be with me for the rest of my life, as will her fulminations when the chopped nuts got in underneath. They might just as well been ground glass. My mother always said that the reason she gave up eating figs, fresh or dried, was because they had the same effect, if the seeds got in between denture and gum.

It’s not just the old who suffer. I was once almost moved to tears by the story of a friend, who, as a young cub reporter, had been sent to interview Cary Grant over lunch. Cary Grant was the epitome of suave charm, the George Clooney of his generation, only more so. My friend was bowled over, and spent a good deal of lunch dazzling him with her smile. Until she went to the loo to touch up her lipstick, when she realized the spinach soup she’d had as a first course, had cloaked her teeth with much the same effect of that brilliant green seaweed you see wrapped around the pilings of a water-break.

I, myself, have fallen foul of a salad of endive frisee aux lardons et aux croutons which made me look as if I had showered in fat by the time I’d finished it. That may not say much for my eating habits, but have you ever noticed how springy a leaf of frisee is when you disentangle it from the plate, and then find it’s too large to get into your mouth?

Which reminds me of the open Danish sandwich smart bomb. They were once immensely popular, open sandwiches, all the rage at smart drinks parties. Most of them were fine, but one, in particular, was a social IED of the highest order. It was the prawn sandwich, a slice of slightly friable rye bread piled high with pink prawns, dusted with paprika. Anyone who has ever tried to eat one will remember them, because, by an exquisite refinement of design, the pyramid of shrimps was always slightly too high to allow you to get the damn thing into your mouth in one piece. You’d see people making the most extraordinary gurning maneuvers as they tried, opening their mouth like hippos, tilting their head over sideways, attacking from the top. The results were always the same – a cascade of pink shrimps onto the floor, where you had the choice of either picking them up, and so attracting attention to your faux pas, or grinding them into the carpet with your food, and hoping no one would notice.

But even the Danish open prawn sandwich pales into insignificance compared with problem of flatulence. St Augustine had something trenchant to say on the subject, and that great and good man, St Jerome, abjured nuns from giving vent on the grounds that in partibus genitalibus titiliones producunt. Go on, look it up.

It turns out that there are several causes. We swallow air when we eat and drink. Anaerobic bacteria produce a mixture of hydrogen, methane and hydrogen sulphide. All bacteria help to put together highly odiferous indoles and skatoles. As the American found out, when they were investigating this problem in the course of putting a man into space (they were afraid that a spaceman in a sealed space suit might asphyxiate himself with his own methane), different people are susceptible to flatulence in different degrees. The cause, it seems, are pesky things called oligosaccharides, which, as we can guess particularly prevalent in dried beans. As usual when called on to do something really important, scientists have yet to come up with a solution to flatulence.

So the next time you’re rustling up a dish of delight, pause and give a thought to the law of unintended consequences. And avoid Jerusalem artichokes as you would the plague.

So when I unwrapped What to Eat, up—to-date companion to her The Food We Eat, her 1996 classic, I felt that thrill of pleasure you get when you know you’re going to read something worth reading. The name ‘Blythman’ is a guarantee of quality in a way that few names are these days. I’m not going to say that I was unfamiliar with a lot of what Joanna has to say, but it is still refreshing to re-acquaint myself with the truths she writes. She writes with such lucidity and crisp authority. She never obfuscates, never blurs the lines. Her acumen and passion shine out from each sentence. It’s like a walk through the Cheviots on a crisp day in the company of a delightful, thoughtful, probing, bracing intelligence.

Joanna has the gift if illuminating the essence of food matters. Like many food writers, I am easily distracted from the path of true virtue, my tendencies to indulgence too easily outweigh my instincts to righteousness, but with Joanna they have equal weight. Local ingredients, small producers, independent retailers, skilled professionals are woven together to make a consistent tapestry of pleasure. Good food for her is not an elitist luxury; it is one of life’s essentials.

What to Eat by Joanna Blythman (4th Estate; £16.99)

I hate to be a member of the awkward squad, but I’ve got a profound philosophical objection to this form of lemon tart. There’s a fundamental contradiction between the plush, unctuous, wobbly nature of the filling and the clean, austere zing of the lemon. The inherent creaminess is out of keeping with the fruit, and masks its flavour. No matter how well made, I never feel happy with it.

Then there is my sister-in-law, Dilou’s version, another kettle of lemon tart altogether. The very thought of it makes me happy, brings a smile of memory to my lips. The pastry is thin and crisp. Yes, the filling is rich – eggs, butter, sugar and lemons – but it’s no more that a couple of centimeters deep. It has the golden beauty of a sunflower, freckled here and there with little brown flecks. The balance is refined and precise. The lemon sings through. It leaves the mouth clean and the tummy well satisfied. What more can you ask?

Pastry
150g flour
70g well chilled butter
6tbsp cold water

Put the flour into a bowl. Grate the butter into it. (This is a brilliant tip, if you didn’t know it). Mix lightly with your fingertips until the butter is well worked into the flour. Add the water tablespoon by tablespoon until you have a nice coherent mass. Wrap in Clingfilm and leave in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Turn the oven on to 180C/350F/Gas 4.

Grease a flan dish generously with butter. Roll out the pastry and line the flan dish with it. It should be thin, but making sure there are no cracks or holes. There’s no need to blind bake the pastry.

Lemon Filling

300g sugar
2 whole eggs
2 lemons
120g butter

Melt the butter in a pan. Put the sugar into a bowl or food processor. Grate the lemon peel into it. Add the eggs. Add them juice of the lemons. Whiz everything. Continue whizzing as you add the melted butter.

Baking

Pour the mixture into the pastry shell and bake for 25-35 minutes. Check to see if the tart matches the description above. If not, you can continue baking or pop it under a grill until it does. I would put a tray underneath the tart because, no matter how hard I try, melted butter always seems to leak out and end up on the floor of the oven.

A. Are you cooking them over a medium high heat, and shaking them or stirring them as they change colour? If that doesn’t tame them, you could try clapping one of those generally useless devices for preventing fat spatters over the top of the pan when you start heating the sesame seeds. Or spread them over the base of a roasting tray and toast them in the oven for about 15 minutes at 325 F.

A. Circotherm is just a fancy name for our old friend, the convection oven. In other words it blows a lot of hot air around your oven. In theory, this means that heat is maintained very efficiently throughout the oven, and this in turn, leads to quicker and more efficient cooking. That, as I say, is the theory, and reviews of ovens using circotherm technology are pretty positive on the whole. Therefore, cook at the temperatures you are used to, but keep an eye on the time involved. If it is quicker and more efficient, then the Yorkshire puds, Victoria sponges etc should cook quicker. As always, it’s also a good idea to have separate oven thermometer. Those that come with ovens are notoriously unreliable.

However, that is not the point of my enquiry. Have you ever thought of what the consequences for European gastronomy might have been had we lost, and we got booted out of India, and the French been cocks of the walk?

For a start those ‘Taj Mahals’ and ‘Stars of India’ that have brought gastronomic colour to the dark streets of the Readings and Basingstokes and Fort Williams of this country for a generation or more, wouldn’t be there. They’d be Le Taj Mahal and L’Etoile d’Inde of Montelimar, Clermont-Ferrand and Arras.

I suspect that most English travelers, who go to France for what, in effect, are eating holidays, head straight for their favorite curry house as soon as get back to base. It’s something to do with being greedy, of course, but it’s also something to do with a complete change of bowling, or, rather, change back to bowling that is familiarly unfamiliar and the wholly different associations that a bowl of curry conjures up.

These days we’re encouraged to look for regional emphasis and ethnic authenticity (about as reliable in the UK as ‘authentic’ performances of period music). This is quite a new thing. In the days when India was part of the Empire, the Indian meal you got in London was a very basic affair, a simulacrum of the meals the servants would run up in Poona or Bangalore under the eagle eye of the culinarily conservative memsahib. But just suppose the memsahib had learned her culinary onions in Dijon rather than Cheltenham, had in fact been a femmesahib, what might she have coaxed out the kitchen?

Wherever the French did build their Empire, they seem to have assimilated rather more readily than we did. There is a lot of North Africa and Vietnamese food in France, most of it pretty unspoilt, if that is the mot juste. But India would have been a bigger mouthful to swallow. There are Indian restaurants in France. The odd one or two actually make honorary appearances in the Guide Michelin, but they no more represent the great traditions of Indian cooking than do the vast majority of Chinese or Thai restaurants in Britain.

No doubt the scholar cooks of ‘Petits Propos Culinaire’ could dig out what the employees of the French East India Company actually did eat in its day. They seem to have been based mainly in the South, where curries tend to be of the more furious variety. The French, nowadays, choose to regard out fondness for the nuclear-hot curry as just another manifestation of our gastronomic barbarism. Madame de St-Ange, the French Mrs Beeton, wrote that ‘le curry est un plat emporte par les Anglais, grands amateurs de mets exceptionnellement epices’. So if the British found a taste for searing hot curries, the French would surely have cultivated something else.

It’s safe to assume, for example that whatever they ate, they would have drunk wine, not beer, with it. Instead of India Pale Ale brewed to stand the long voyage round the Cape from London and Burton on Trent, wines would have had be made sufficiently sturdy to survive the same journey, and that actually got better as it was tossed around on the billows. Perhaps the need to find food that matched wine might have brought about subtle changes on the curry culture, itself. Perhaps it had, but the secret died on the battlefield of Wandewash.

Of course, there is a dish you used to come across quite commonly in France, Poulet a l’indienne, chicken in a bland veloute sauce, containing the most fugitive hint, the merest whiff , of curry powder, like vermouth in a proper martini. It certainly does not overpower a glass of wine, but it’s hard t imagine such a dish being eaten in India with relish.

That seems about all we have to go on at the moment. The superstars of contemporary cuisine, who gave drawn so deeply on the inspiration of Japan and China, have largely ignored India’s equally diverse and splendid culinary culture. Perhaps it’s just a bit too earthy and full of distinctive flavours for the high disciplines of haute cuisine. But had the Battle of Plassey gone the other way, it might have been so much more.

I remember an old friend reminiscing about a trip he had made to Michel Guerard’s establishment at Eugenie les Bain some years ago. He said that when you take your aperitif in the cool green shade of the terrace, it came with a plate of tiny amuse bouches, looking uncommonly like the plaster food in a toy butcher’s shop. On one visit there, among the goodies was a round thing, thin as paper. It was quite small and herby fragments were embedded in it in a regular circle. ‘Like a discretely floral dinner plate’ as he put it. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘it was an authentic provincial French poppadum’.

Anyway, I ended up with a dozen pheasants, which I hung for a decent period in my garage before I set about plucking them. About halfway through my spirit and patience failed me, and I skinned the rest. A skinned pheasant isn’t quite as tempting to the eye as the plucked variety, and anyway, I didn’t have enough room in my freezer for them. So I dissected the carcasses. The thighs did go into the freezer; the legs went into the stockpot, along with the main body of the bird, after I had removed the breasts.

And the breasts – well, I turned them into pheasant ham. This was an idea I nicked from the timeless Cuisine Gourmande by Michel Guerard. In it there’s a recipe for duck ham, and I thought, if you can do duck, why not pheasant? I did, and, do you know, it’s pretty damn good. I slice the breasts and use them to deck out salads (see pic of pheasant ham with puntarelle, orange and olive oil) and as nibbles. It makes for as interesting a talking point as it does a tasty morsel.

I’ve given a recipe for 8 breasts, but you can do them in any number, one to one hundred. It’s almost the end of the shooting season, and pheasants should be very cheap. If you’re going to use a load of salt every time you make pheasant ham, you might as well get a few done at the same time.

NB. There’s no need to go fancy with the salt. It makes no difference to the curing what you use. Therefore, the cheaper the better.

8 breasts
1 tsp coriander seed
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp juniper
2 tsp black peppercorns
½ star anise
4 bay leaves
1 kg + salt

Thoroughly crush all the spices in a mortar. Chop up the bay leaves quite finely. On a non-reactive tray or one covered with foil spread a good layer of salt (about 5mm thick). Sprinkle half the crushed spices and chopped bay leaf over it. Lay the pheasant breasts on top. Sprinkle the remaining spices over the beasts and then cover with the remaining salt. They must be well covered, looking like hills with a good fall of snow on them. Leave in a cool place for 24-36 hours. Rinse off the salt very thoroughly, but try and leave some of the crushed spices sticking to the breasts. Dry. The hams are ready to use right away; or you can wrap them in muslin and hang them somewhere cool and dry to age some more; or you can wrap them in cling film and freeze for future use.

My mother belonged to that generation of middle class English women who did little cooking before the war and a lot after it. It had been usual to have a cook, most of whom were not properly trained. This is probably the reason why so much of the food in private houses in this country was so bad. My mother was lucky in that her grand had a large house and employed an exceptional cook; and she traveled extensively through Europe before the war By the time she married my father, a greedy man with a wide-ranging culinary curiosity, towards the end of the war, and began to cook in earnest herself, at least she knew what good food should taste like.

She eventually gave up cooking altogether at 95. She rarely, if ever, cooked the menu twice. There were some landmark dishes that reappeared by popular demand. Her cold rice pudding is the standard by which all rice puddings, hot or cold, are judged. The same is true of her marmalade. Then there was a lamb stew with lamb’s kidneys in it, which is a particular favourite of mine; and tinned apricot halves, on buttered bread and sprinkled with sugar and baked in a hot oven; and her potato salad (new potatoes, preferably from the garden) dressed with vinaigrette when warm so that they absorbed some of it as they cooled, with snipped chives; and, as memory unspools, more and more dishes spring to mind.

We may believe that our generation (whichever that may be) was the first to have discovered global culinary exploration travels, but this is complete nonsense. Looking through Mother’s recipes cards under B, I find Beetroot Soup (Armenian) followed by Biscuit Tortoni (frozen), Bent Biscuits, Blackberry Granita followed by, best of all, Bloody Mary which includes a couple of dashes of Angostura batches. I knew that it made complete gastronomic sense. There are recipes for fennel a la Greque and hard-boiled eggs in soubise sauce, panoche stew that begins in uncompromising style ‘Mutton cutlets, cut in small pieces’ and kidneys Turbigo; pirozhki and tongue with almond and raisin sauce.

She was an adventurous cook, and she had a magpie’s eye for good recipes. Mastering the Art of French Cookery by Louise Bertholde, Julia Childe and Simone Beck was the cookery book to which she referred most frequently. But there was Fanny Farmer’s Boston School Cook Book was up there on the shelf in her kitchen, and Jane Grigson’s Pork Charcuterie, and Elizabeth David, of course, French Provincial Cooking and Italian Cooking, but she was forever purloining recipes she thought worth trying out from any source – ‘It’s a Katie Stewart recipe I got from The Times’. (She never read another newspaper; she was addicted to the crossword). Of ‘It’s by a cook called Jamie Oliver. I found it while I was waiting at the hairdressers.’

She wrote out her recipes neatly on cards, which she kept in a fire-engine red box, which I appropriated when she moved into a home two years ago. The first recipe I’ve tried out from the cards in her recipe box is credited to Katie Stewart, once the pillar of The Times cookery. It was one for red cabbage with the grated peel and juice of 2 oranges, 2 oz caster sugar, 3 tbs wine vinegar, 1 small, finely chopped onion, 1 clove garlic ditto and 1 oz butter. Shred the cabbage very finely and then marinade it in all the ingredients except the butter for 24 hours. ‘Melt the butter in casserole. Add cabbage. Bring to simmer and cook gently 1 ½ hours. Liquid should evaporate’ It was Ginger Rogers to a mallard’s Fred Astaire.

These recipes add up to a time-line of culinary experience. I can tell by her handwriting that some of them must date back 50 years or even further. Some are credited to the house her grandmother kept 80 years ago. She always claimed that the food there was amongst the best she ever ate. One or two must have been added in the last few years. I have just noticed that, with characteristic thrift, at the back of the recipe box are all the cards with recipes she either re-transcribed or discarded, still leaving one side of the card clear and ready to be filled up with fresh inspirations.

My mother died last week at the age of 97. She retained her engagement with food until almost the end. She was vigorous in her complaints: ‘They gave us what they called scampi. Completely inedible.’ ‘No one EATS pork pie and PICKLES in the evening.’ ‘They don’t know how to make a PROPER Irish stew.’ Nor was I exempt from her critical rasp. Last year I proudly awaited her verdict on my first ever batch of marmalade, which I had made according to her recipe. ‘Very nice darling, but it doesn’t taste like marmalade.’ “What do you mean?” ‘It’s too orangey.’ I have yet to recover.

But her mind was still open. Just a few weeks ago I went to see her. ‘They gave us something called jumbo garlic,’ she told me, ‘I’ve never had that before. Roasted. It was quite mild. Rather nice.’

It’s the marmalade season and I’m having another crack at it. Her recipe, of course, blurred and blotched from use. The house is full of that bitter-sweet, smokey fug, the sensory eiderdown of warm fruit and sugar. I’m sorry she won’t be here to deliver her verdict. Too orangey, indeed.

A. I know what you mean, although I’ve always thought that that divine, oil-sodden squidginess of the aubergine is the whole point of it. However, I do appreciate that not everyone sees that slick that oozes down the throat when you eat a forkful of the fruit (technically speaking an aubergine is a fruit, not a vegetable, by the way) in quite the same light. You can always drain your aubergine slices on kitchen towel after frying, which will soak up some of the surplus. I have also consulted a very useful little book called Don’t Sweat the Aubergine by Nicholas Clee. Mr Clee has researched out most of the methods recommended by various authorities. He reckons the salting method makes no difference to taste or texture. He recommends cutting the aubergines into cubes; putting the cubes onto a roasting tray; pouring oil for over them (1 tbsp per medium-sized aubergine) and roasting them at 200C/Gas 6 for 20-30 minutes until tender. On the other hand, Harold McGee suggests pre-cooking the aubergine in a microwave to collapse the spongy structure before frying it.