Raspberry Debacle

12 September, 2007

Vegan chocolate-banana-coffee ice-cream: a food, not a hat

Filed under: dairy-free, gluten-free, icecream, summer, vegan, vegetarian — Holly @ 9:13 am

Vegan chocolate ice-cream in a wine glass, with spoon.

My problem with ice-cream has always been the drips, more virulent than any other foodstuff (except maybe tomato sauce on spaghetti, flung out in all directions as the strands are slurped up). It was years before I could eat an ice-cream without getting at least a few drops on my clothes; I’d hide beneath paper napkins while I ate and — if it was really nice ice-cream — surreptitiously suck the drips out of the paper when I was done.

I find it surprising that there isn’t (unless I’ve missed something) a bigger overlap between “food” and “clothes”. Obviously food-clothes wouldn’t last very well, but surely that means they’d be ideal for an ostentatious display of wealth, something that food and clothes individually have always been used for: “look, I have so much food I can dress in it, such vast resources I can afford clothes that I’ll want to throw out in a day or two”. But instead, food in clothes is generally fake, made from plastic or fabric.

There’s Adam and Eve and their (traditional) fig leaves, which you can stir-fry and eat. There’s Carmen Miranda, and other more muted versions of the “fruit on a hat” idea. But apart from that, there’s just occasional “look at those zany scientists/artists/bakers, making dresses out of wine/chocolate/cream-puffs” news stories, though to be fair the news stories wouldn’t exist if the zany scientists/artists/bakers themselves didn’t. The cream puffs were
for a wedding; the chocolate for a fund-raising fasion-show (”then there were those who feared it would melt, fall off and embarrass us and the model wearing it”), the wine for the causes of art. It was “inspired by the skin-like layer covering a vat of wine that had been contaminated with bacteria and gone “off”", it breaks easily, it tastes like “a kind of chewy, slightly alcoholic sludge”, and apparently further research could make it a “viable option” for commercial use (I’m beginning to understand better why food-clothes are uncommon; perhaps “further research” will involve replacing it with, eg, cotton).

Back in the realms of folklore, Scottish brownie-critter Aiken Drum started out as the Brownie of Blednoch, wearing a kilt of rushes; he worked hard on a farm until they tried to give him a pair or normal trousers, at which point he ran away in a panic. Alternatively, he was an aspiring soldier:

An’ his coat was o’ the guid saut meat,
The guid saut meat, the guid saut meat,
An’ a waistcoat o’ the haggis bag,
Ay wore Aiken Drum.

Nowadays, his children’s-song appearances have him wearing nothing but food: “his coat was made of good roast beef” and he played upon a ladle. In more recent variants he’s even given spaghetti hair, fish-stick pants (I don’t see how these would work), pizza eyes (ditto), and whatever other foodstuff the singer feels like adding in.

Beyond this, there’s nothing: bracelets with tiny candy beads, coconut shell bras, occasional flippant edible dresses or comedy underwear, rice-paper hats to eat and astonish your friends. And this, from a Scottish parish newsletter:

Tea and cakes were then served and the competition for ‘an edible brooch’ was judged as follows: 1 Barbara Robertson, 2 Maureen Simpson, 3 Margaret Leslie. Mrs Jean Morrison gave a comprehensive vote of thanks ending a very pleasant evening. Anyone wishing to join the guild, should go along on the first Thursday of each month.

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7 August, 2007

Ins, Outs, and Chilled Mulled White Wine

Filed under: drinks, fruit, gluten-free, summer, vegan — Holly @ 9:52 am

Three glasses of mulled white wine, with a bookcase in the background.

EDIT: Hello, everyone here from gluten-free forums! If you’re interested in gluten-free recipes, I have an archive here; about two thirds of the recipes on the site are gluten-free, and I’ll be posting another gluten-free cake recipe later in the week. If you’re here because you’re upset by the line about gluten intolerance in the post below, then I’m sorry to have upset you. The piece is intended as a parody of articles about food trends, written in-character by an imaginary food writer. However, I realise some of you recognise this and still find it offensive, and I don’t like upsetting people, so I’ve edited the joke to get rid of the line that seems to have been the specific cause of your anger. I should perhaps explain that I’ve been doing a lot of gluten-free cooking over the last year, and I do realise that gluten intolerance (and the specific subset of it that is coeliac disease) is a real, and serious, condition; but I can see that the tone of the piece perhaps implied that I’d just picked it as a random “funny” disease. Feel free to stick around for the recipes; the cake coming later in the week really is very very delicious. END EDIT

It’s always hard to keep track of which foods are fashionable. A few weeks ago, the Observer told me that strawberry cornettos are in, for example; who would have thought it? But at the same time, tiramisu is unfashionable despite its similar redolence of the 80s. It’s simply much too popular. Out: truffle oil, chocolate lava cakes, butternut squash, chicken breasts. In: foie gras speakeasies, bread. Oh, it’s all so difficult!

The main trouble with comprehensive in-and-out food lists is that everyone else reads them, so the “in” foods become popular, and then they’re “out” again, all within six months. To make things worse, the lists are usually published at the end of a year, so those of us in July or August are left without guidance. Fortunately, I’ve managed to get hold of an advance copy of next year’s Official Food Ins and Outs, and I’m ready to share them with you. Only with the help of the list can you can be safe from the risk of serving your friends pesto (in for quick-service restaurants, so out for the rest of us, I’m afraid).

IN: Portable pizza ovens. Back in the sixteenth century, many households had no oven. Instead, it was common practice to send a loaf of bread or a cake out to the local baker, who would pop it in his oven once he was done for the day. This is no longer necessary for most of us, but what are we to do about pizzas? It’s famously difficult to make home-made pizza that lives up to good restaurant pizza, simply because home ovens don’t get hot enough. This doesn’t mean you should give up on making your own! Once the weather has cooled down, ice-cream vans will take out their freezers and fit super-hot ovens instead. Consider prepreparing three or four pizzas in a range of flavours, and when you hear that tinkling Greensleeves you’ll know it’s time to run out to the street and get them cooked properly.

OUT: Putting cocoa percentages on chocolate wrapping. This used to be IN, but now it’s filtered down to Magnums and Cadbury. The thing to do with mid-level chocolate wrapping these days is to attribute abstract nouns and emotions to the different varieties; see Newtree’s FORGIVENESS, Chuao’s PASSION, Dagoba’s ECLIPSE.

IN: Truffle booths. At the moment the truffle booth is an underground movement, but it’s heading mainstream. Customers pay for a private booth in a restaurant, and a selection of truffles is wafted in front of them while they breathe deeply.

OUT: Food processors. It just tastes so much better if you chop it by hand.

IN: Remember perfectly spherical watermelons, square tomatoes, and all the rest of the “grow things in moulds so they’re a weird shape” fad? It goes back at least as far as the nineteenth century, when glass cucumber straighteners came into fashion. Relatedly: you know how corsets can deform the ribs and permanently change someone’s waist shape, if worn consistently enough? By 2009 you can expect cattle corsetry to be the big new thing: buckle in the young cows and wait for exciting rib shapes on your table come 2010.

OUT: Gluten intolerance. The Atkins people started eating bread again years ago, after all.

IN: Brownie intolerance. Brownies are cheap, easy and delicious, so they’re ubiquitous these days, and the only way we can get them off menus is to develop an allergic reaction en masse.

OUT: Truffle booths. Yes, already. It was a fleeting moment of popularity; you had your chance, and you missed it.

IN: Heritage cutlery. In the past, good cutlery was inherited; only an arriviste would buy her own. Look for heritage cutlery to make a resurgence soon, though due to changing standards of serving size, nineteenth-century salad servers may need to function as twenty-first century spoons and forks.

OUT: Vegetables. Vegetables are everywhere these days, which means top chefs are already looking elsewhere for inspiration. The behind-the-times tastebuds of the masses might mean that potatoes are still listed on the menu, but the with-it restaurants will treat you well if you ask, quietly, for a side-dish of mashed squirrel instead.

IN: Mulling. Give it a couple of months and we’ll be firmly into Autumn, and mullers will spring up everywhere. This may be your last chance to get some mulling done before the rush.

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4 April, 2007

Chocolate Mousse Cakes and counterfeit food

Filed under: cake, dairy-free, dessert, gluten-free, spring, vegan — Holly @ 9:29 am

Close-up of vegan chocolate mousse

Huckleberries are a real fruit!

This is important. Back in my first year of high-school, we played a class-wide game in a music lesson, and one round involved thinking of fruit that started with the same letter as your name. This is, okay, clearly not a great game anyway, since (1) you get into arguments about what constitutes a fruit and what a vegetable, arguments which music teachers and competitive twelve-year-old girls aren’t necessarily qualified to answer (but which they’ll be very keen to address anyway); and (2) people named, say, Beatrice (blueberries, blackberries, boysenberries, bananas) have an advantage over people named, I don’t know, Holly. Still, I would have pulled through the round, with “huckleberry”, if the teacher hadn’t deemed huckleberries entirely nonexistent, a character name rather than an actual fruit; and since I’d never seen one, I assumed she knew better than I.

But now it turns out they really do exist, and they really are a fruit. Bears like to eat them! There’s even a trade in fakes: “Al Hedman, who produces Larchwood Farms Huckleberry Jam, said an illicit trade in counterfeit huckleberry products has been going on for years with inferior blueberries or other farmed berries being substituted for Montana’s tart, wild bounty”!

It’s probably contrary to Mr Hedman’s intent, but my main thought on reading his complaint (after “they are too a fruit! I knew it! Every moment of success that Beatrice has had since 1994 should have been mine“, anyway) was “brilliant, I can make counterfeit huckleberry cake with blueberries.” I love the idea of food masquerading as other food, and surely counterfeiters — whose income and freedom depends on their expertise — must know better than most what works and what doesn’t.

Most counterfeit food is offputtingly unsuitable for cakes. It’s non-organic meat and vegetables substituted for organic, with surreptitious farmers “spraying ‘organic’ crops with chemicals under the cover of darkness”. It’s farmed salmon fed artificial colouring so it’ll look nice and pink. It’s counterfeit brand-name food, with Ferrero Rocher’s brand-name being trademarked in China by the rival company that was counterfeiting its chocolates, and brands like Coca-Cola and Kraft having similar problems. At the same time, it’s Kraft being sued for its guacamole dip that contained less than 2% avocadoes; it was eventually relabelled a “guacamole-flavoured dip”.

Tofu seems the best possible counterfeit food: inoffensive and pointless in itself, but confusingly good at pretending to be something different. Freeze and fry for a plausible chicken! Crumble it up for scrambled eggs! Dry it and tan it and wear it as a coat or hardy boots, for all I know, stretch it out and use it as violin strings, roll some in a pile of dust to make a charming pet hamster. And make mousse out of it: the vegan chocolate mousse at 101 Cookbooks is fantastic and resilient, absorbing pretty much any flavours you could plausibly want a mousse to have and just sitting there, wobbling gently.

Mousse, of course, is ideal for putting on cakes.

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30 March, 2007

Vegan Potato Salad and food colouring

Filed under: gluten-free, salad, spring, vegan, vegetables, vegetarian — Holly @ 1:15 pm

A kale-and-chickpea salad.

Salad is just rubbish, isn’t it? In the past five years I’ve shared a house with two vegans, two vegetarians, and three meat-eaters, and in all that time I’ve had one salad that tasted nice. I keep trying: I use recipes, I use “these vegetables all taste nice” logic, I order meals with salad in restaurants, and it just doesn’t work. I get a perfectly nice pasta dish… that somebody’s left to go cold and manky. Some delightful lettuces and tomato… that someone’s covered with a greasy slick of oil. Chickpeas and lemon and a load of crunchy stuff is still fundamentally going to taste like lemony chickpeas, and one mouthful of lemony chickpeas is enough for me.

Salad is the one food where almost every recipe includes something that you’re supposed to add “for colour”. There’s nothing wrong with colour; it might not affect the taste, but it affects our experience of the taste, and that’s the important thing. Fifty percent of us assume our cordial is lime-flavoured if it’s coloured green. The semi-arbitrary association of “blue” with “raspberry” developed partly because customers just couldn’t tell the difference between strawberry and raspberry flavourings without some sort of colour cue. I’ll put food colouring in orange cakes, and it does make them taste more orangey to me, even though there’s no flavour in it.

At the end of the nineteenth century the burgeoning margarine industry was famously kept in check by legislation controlling not the sale of margarine but its colour (which is naturally white); in the US, margarine that had been coloured an attractive yellow was taxed at forty times the rate of its uncoloured equivalent. In New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, West Virginia and South Dakota, margarine could only be sold at all if it was coloured pink (at least until the Supreme Court demurred). Even the packaging had to be unattractive, predating similar “smoking may cause lung cancer” labelling laws by decades:

In this connection, one state requires that a black band at least three inches wide be painted around the container. Another state requires the use of labels painted with lamp black and oil on all containers of butter substitutes.

And because people like things to look the right colour, this set the stage for profitable dodges:

Another man who made a highly profitable find in the food field in recent years is Leo Peters, originator of the “Pak” margarine package, made out of plastic and containing a capsule for coloring. By merely kneading the “Pak,” a housewife can give a pound of margarine the appetizing hue of butter. It took Peters a long time to put the idea across, but once it was accepted by manufacturers he began collecting royalties estimated at $1,000,000 a year.

So adding something for colour: fine. But salads don’t just have ingredients added for colour. They seem to exist at all just for the sake of that colour, to throw a pie or a bit of meat or something else that actually tastes good into relief. They’re not a decent food that I’d want to eat anyway, with a bit of adornment to make them more enticing: they’re a food that I keep trying because it makes plates look better, and because other people seem to approve, but which there’s never any point in eating. Salads aren’t horrible, they’re just pointless and dreary. They take up space on the plate, but maybe it’s time to start getting smaller plates, or saving money by having reusable crumpled cellophane, instead of wasting five minutes a day chopping up spring onions and radishes, both of which, frankly, taste of nothing at all.

The only reason I haven’t given up on salad entirely is… well, d’you remember I said that I’ve had one salad, ever, that tasted nice? Yes, well, that one tastes really really nice. It has spring onions. It has radishes. I taste the spring onions and radishes as I chop them up, and they still taste of nothing, but then I put them in this salad and they’re delicious.

It doesn’t even look very pretty, which, since “looking pretty” is the one thing most salads are good for (you can’t even throw them, they just fall into their constituent parts and get on your clothes), puts it at a disadvantage. But it doesn’t need to look pretty. It stands around on street corners and sneers at the pretty salads as they go by, and the pretty salads drop their heads and rush onward because they know it’s better than they are.

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