Confounding every flowery pinnied stereotype, Elisa Beynon, (who is known to cook in her high heels,) has wowed our judges including Nigel Slater, Waitrose Food Illustrated Editor William Sitwell and Louise Haines of 4th Estate with her submission. They felt that her entry, bursting with mouthwatering ideas from the vicarage kitchen displayed ‘enthusiasm, warmth, gentle humour’ and ‘terrific home cooking.’ You can read her winning entry in the attached PDF.
Elisa says her spinsterhood signature dish was broccoli and tomato ketchup, until marriage to husband Nigel (a vicar) taught her that ‘church and food’ go together like ‘PMT and chocolate.’
But only trial, ‘unsavoury error’, and a delight in the impact her food had on friends, family and her husband’s parishioners, has seen Elisa develop her winning recipes including The Great Chocolate Rescue Remedy (for Hormonal Girls,) Hot Halloumi Salad (for Social girls) and Sunshine soup (for post-baby blues.)
She says,
For me, food is all about ingredients and interaction and planning the perfect dish for the person or people who are coming over. Left to my own devices, I’ll eat from the fridge, but to see others enjoy my food is delicious. Friends encouraged me to write down my recipes a few years ago now, but only seeing this competition on the front of WFI galvanised me in to action and made me realise that writing down my recipes brings together the things I adore— food, writing and people.
Judge Nigel Slater says “Eliza’s entry shone with enthusiasm, warmth and gentle humour. A truly original voice.” Louise Haines adds: “She is a witty writer and a terrific home cook.”
The folk at 4th Estate will now start working with Elisa Beynon to put her book together, and we’ll keep you posted.
Thanks so much to 2500 of you who entered, and – even if you didn’t walk away with the top prize this time – I hope you’ll keep cooking, and posting some signature recipes up on to 5th Estate for us hungry readers.
]]>Every week, I heave open a supermarket skip and find therein a more exotic shopping list of items than I could possibly have invented – Belgian chocolates, ripe bananas, almond croissants, stone-ground raisin bread – often so much it would have fed a hundred people. A rummage in the bins of the local sandwich store yields another bewildering array, from granola desserts with honey on top to crayfish salad and tuna-filled bagels.
I can feel the hunter-gatherer in me grunting with satisfaction over another successful forage. But this atavistic reaction is weak alongside the outrage that really motivates my delving into the nation’s rubbish bins. I can perfectly well afford to buy food. “Freeganism” for me is a protest, demonstrating that much of this food should not be in the bin in the first place. There are simple, cost-effective methods of using surplus food for its proper purpose (ie eating it), and there are no solid reasons why these should not be practiced on a nationwide scale.
The food redistribution charity, Fareshare, specialises in collecting high quality food before it passes its sell-by date and passing it on to hundreds of charities that provide meals for the country’s most vulnerable people. Thanks to a £1m lottery grant, Fareshare is rapidly doubling the amount redistributed from 2000 tonnes a year to 4,000 tonnes, with a further 16,000 tonnes that will either be diverted into animal feed, anaerobic digesters, composting, or other modes of waste recycling. Companies as large as Kellogg and Marks & Spencer have climbed on board along with smaller retailers such as Petit Forestier. But this is still the tip of an iceberg. If we redistributed per capita as much food as in the comparatively advanced USA, we would be doling out 50,000 tonnes of free food each year. And with a staggering 4 million people in the UK suffering from food poverty without access to a decent diet, there will be no shortage of willing recipients.
Currently the vast majority of surplus food in the UK is trucked off to landfill sites where it decomposes into toxic effluent and methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The food industry has to fork out £50-60 for this ecologically disastrous facility, and if it contains animal by-products, under new legislation they could be looking at £200-£350 per tonne. Fareshare, by comparison, will charge an average of £10 per tonne for their services. Food redistribution is economically sensible, ecologically pressing, and socially responsible; it is high time food corporations woke up to it and governments started funding the organisations that facilitate it.
If eating food reclaimed from bins seems like an extreme action to make this point, then sit back and see how mild it is compared to the extremity of the problem as revealed in the latest set of statistics from Wrap, a waste-reduction organisation connected to the government. First a health warning: they are so appalling they might make you sick.
Britain currently throws away an unimaginable 15m tonnes of food every year. Wrap has tentatively calculated, after painstaking studies, that a whopping 5m tonnes of food are wasted annually by consumers alone: that is, more than a quarter of all food we buy goes into the bin.
The author of a similar project in the USA, Dr Timothy Jones, concluded that about half of the wastage could be avoided. Food production currently uses a large proportion of Britain’s dwindling water supplies; our consumption habits are responsible world-wide for driving soil erosion and deforestation. Furthermore, 20% of all Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the food cycle. If we currently waste nearly half of what we produce, and half of that waste can be avoided, then simply by sorting out this one problem we could slash our emissions by 5%.
It provides a free lunch for some, but discarding this precious resource is an insult to the alleviation of food poverty in our country and contributes senselessly to the destruction of the planet.
Tons of food wasted per year in the UK
Agriculture: 3 to 3.5 million
Manufacturing: 4.1 million
Wholesale: 0.2 million
Retail: 1.4 million
Hotel & catering: 1 million
Consumers: 5 million
Total: 15 million tons.
]]>5th Estate has a hot tip that the judges will now accept entries up to 25th March, so if your own entry has been, er, slow roasting, it’s good news.
]]>It was established on the south bank of the Thames when the Romans build the first London Bridge and people have been trading on this site for over 2000 years. It’s a beautiful undercover food market and a truly wonderful part of London’s history.
We often visit the market for research, photography and feedback for our books, and many of our food writing authors, such as Nigel Slater, Giorgio Locatelli and Joanna Blythman are fans.
Some bright spark (I would use another term myself….) has decided to expand the railway line running through the roof of the market, which will also involve knocking down 23 of the beautiful listed and unlisted buildings in the closely surrounding area.
They already have planning permission , but are waiting funding and there is a strong local campaign to put a stop to it.
If you know and love the market in its present state, please sign the petition to prevent this from happening.
The plans, photographs and the petition are on the following: www.sabmac.co.uk
Unfortunately not a lot of people are aware of it so please sign it and pass it on to anyone else you know who loves this great bit of London heritage… AND LOCATION OF MONMOUTH COFFEE AND THE BEST MOZARELLA IN THE WORLD and that’s only two perfect things about Borough!
]]>Budding Nigels or Nigellas can pick up a January issue of WFI in order to win the chance of a contract with our imprint, Fourth Estate, and the prospect of future gastronomic greatness.
Click here to see more information about how to enter the competition and where to send your entries.
Fourth Estate non-fiction editorial team say:
The competition invites candidates to impress the judges with an original piece of prose on food and cooking. Aspiring authors are being given wide scope to share their food passion, whether that is Christmas culinary creations or re-creating family food favourites, all of which must be written in an innovative, engaging and original style of not more than 1500 words. The competition is open to anyone who has been dying to share their culinary thoughts and experiences.
The judging panel sounds like an impressive line-up – exactly the people by whom you’d want to get your writing seen, kind of the epicurean equivalent to Simon Cowell and Sharon Osborne:
renowned cook/writer Nigel Slater,
WFI editor William Sitwell
literary agents Janklow & Nesbit
head of non-fiction at Fourth Estate, Louise Haines.
Says Nigel Salter:
The best cookery writer is inevitably one who sends you off to the kitchen to chop, stir, grate and slice. Their words are what gets you to the stove and gives you sweet, cinnamon-scented dreams at night.
The judges urge entrants to don their aprons and get scribbling in time for the new extended closing date of 25th March 2007 with the lucky winner being announced in the June issue of Waitrose Food Illustrated and on 5th Estate.
Good luck – here’s hoping a 5th Estate reader bags the contract.
]]>I’m talking of course not about members of the Tory cabinet c.1980s nor more recent members of government, but about David Cameron’s call today at the Oxford Farming Conference for a bit of ‘food patriotism’.
As I’m sure we’ll hear on this evening’s news, the leader of the opposition said today that Britain should follow the lead of other EU countries which had stood up for local producers more effectively than these shores:
While we were obliterating our local food heritage – often by heavy handed government diktat – countries like France and Italy were preserving theirs … People elsewhere in Europe are far more likely to treasure – and eat – food that is produced in their home region. Britain needs a revolution in our thinking to recover that habit.
We couldn’t agree more, Dave.
We’re pretty proud of our Sweet Stout here at 5th Estate (no that’s not the cuddly new Conservative nickname for him, it’s a dark headed beer from Guernsey).
Which is why we brought out The Taste of Britain this autumn. Feeling all patriotic and revolutionary at once, I sent him a copy of the book along with a letter today:
You might be interested to hear that this book first emerged out of an EU sponsored survey in the mid 1990s. Whilst the British volume remained a modest project…the French version ran to some 26 volumes and was a national bestseller. The hope is that we can now redress the balance a bit.
Hope he replies. Or even better, can now tell Mr Paxman the difference between a knob from Norfolk and one from Dorset.
]]>Over the last two decades, the Soil Association had managed to build itself a credible image as the gold standard for certifying organic food. By sticking to tight, rigorous standards, it had managed to distinguish itself from ‘Rent-A-Cert’ organisations less committed to deep green organic principles which operate a much less demanding, weaker set of organic standards. The Soil Association stood for integrity.
Recently, fearful of being left behind in the rush to get organic food on the shelf, the Soil Association seems to have lost its nerve and has made the mistake of relaxing some of its standards. The drift away from the Soil Association’s once core principles is exemplified by its decision to certify farmed fish as organic. All it has done here is to lend its name to a slightly less malign version of intensive aquaculture. This is the sort of muddled, compromised, pragmatic approach one expects from bodies like the RSPCA’s Freedom Foods, not the Soil Association.
Why is this ? Perhaps the Soil Association has become unhealthy flattered by its growing influence. It seems to measure this in terms of volumes of organic food sold and is pleased to see organic food being accepted into the mainstream. But the pursuit of mass distribution means getting into bed with the supermarkets. Their interest in organic lines is purely commercial. It makes them money and it greens their corporate image. They want organic food because it sells, but they want it on the cheap. Dealing with the traditional, high-minded organic grower with smallish quantities of product is a pain in the backside for them. So they put pressure on their conventional producers to diversify into organic lines. Then these opportunist producers, who share few or none of the organic movement’s founding values, simply shop around for the most dilute set of organic standards they can find. Make no mistake that when Tesco boss, Sir Terry Leahy says that the organic movement has got to become more ‘professional’, that is shorthand for dropping standards.
Worldwide, the industrialisation of organic food is speeding up. Organic food production is gradually being moved away from principled people who believed that organics was an all-round radical alternative to a globalized food system predicated on pesticides, environmental damage and animal suffering, to Johnny-Cum-Latelys who want to get in on the organic act.
This is why the Soil Association should stick to its cherished, fundamental principles. Consumers need the Soil Association to stand by its founding ideals and operate irreproachable, clear-cut standards that differentiate it from the organic stampede. If it doesn’t, it throws away all the goodwill and trust that it has so carefully nurtured in the organic brand. Already, that old Groundhog Day chorus, ‘Can we REALLY trust organic food?’, has started up again, a chorus that the Soil Association will now find harder to answer than ever before.
]]>At the global summit meeting in Russia, the French president noriously declared that the only thing the British have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease, and he reportedly added “You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that. After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.”
Now any visiting diplomats to the British Embassy in Paris will find it is fully armed with a copy of The Taste of Britain, a celebration of regional British produce such as red grouse, gulls’ eggs, and native oysters.
John Holmes, the British Ambassador, commented today to our Publishing Director, Arabella Pike, “I applaud your initiative, and my wife will be particularly interested, having published two books in France recently on British cuisine and the art of a good sandwich”.
Chirac said at the time “I don’t know English – or Scottish – cuisine well enough that I could really talk as an expert.” We’d say now’s his chance to find out more.
]]>The perfect pizza oven is a work of art, heated to 500? Fahrenheit, designed to give a combination of air rolling over the top of the pizza, while the bricks underneath seal the base immediately and it becomes so crisp that when it comes out of the oven and you cut a slice, it will be completely ?rm. I’m not saying anything that has a thick base of dough topped with tomato and cheese is bad — in fact, the kids love it; it’s just not pizza.
I am very proud of the pizza we introduced to London when I worked at the Red Pepper, and later during the time I was at Zafferano, when we launched Spiga and Spighetta, and though we don’t serve pizza at Locanda, we often serve these little pizzette to our guests with aperitifs, while they are waiting for their table. If you want to make big pizza instead of little ones, this recipe will make three — just bake them for about 10 minutes.
Bagna cà ôda (anchovy sauce) is a very typical sauce in the North of Italy. Not everyone likes anchovies, I know (in which case, serve the pizzette without the sauce); but, if you do, you can make up bigger quantities of it and store it in a squeezy bottle in the fridge, then just shake it up before you use it and drizzle it over pasta, or toasted bread rubbed with garlic, whatever you like … Though I would normally say buy anchovies in salt, this is one recipe that is traditionally done with anchovies in oil.
Pizzette
Makes around 24 small pizzette for serving with drinks, or 12 larger ones
For the bagna cà ôda:
For the topping:
Put all the ingredients for the pizzette, except the salt, into a food mixer with a dough hook. Mix for 3 minutes on the ?rst speed, then add the salt and mix for 6 more minutes on the second speed. The dough should be very soft and sticky. If working by hand, mix with a wooden spoon, rotating the bowl as you do so for about 5 minutes, then work it for another 5 minutes with your hands until the dough is smooth.
Turn the dough out on a work surface (you don’t need any ?our), dimple with your ?ngers and fold (see page 140) and leave to rest for 20 minutes.
Lightly ?our your work surface and roll out the rested dough thinly. Have ready 2 upturned baking trays.
With a 5—6cm diameter biscuit cutter, cut the dough into rounds. Lay them on the baking trays and put into the fridge for at least 4 hours — but no longer than 8. If you like, you can roll the trimmings of dough into rough grissini and bake them (see page 142).
A good hour or so before you are ready to bake, preheat the oven as high as it will go. If you have a baking stone, put it into the oven as soon as you turn it on; if you don’t have a stone, use a baking tray.
To make the bagna cà ôda: put the garlic in a small pan with the milk, bring to the boil and then turn down to a simmer and cook until the garlic is soft, about 10 minutes.
While the garlic is cooking, put the anchovies with a little olive oil and butter into a small bowl over the top of the pan and stir to ‘melt’ them — it will only take a few minutes. (Alternatively, what I often do is just put the closed tin of anchovies into boiling water for 8—10 minutes, then take it out carefully, open it up and discard the oil.) Push through a ?ne sieve. Crush the garlic with a little of the cooking milk and mix into the anchovies. Loosen, if necessary, with a little more extra-virgin olive oil.
Remove the dough from the fridge and, with your ?ngers, prod each circle of dough, starting from the centre and working out and around in a circle, then back to the middle again. Prick the tops with a fork, and add your tomatoes, sprinkled with a little sea salt, and the olives.
Slide on to your hot baking stone or baking tray in the oven and cook in batches for 7—10 minutes, depending on the thickness, until golden brown and shiny. Drizzle with a little bagna cà ôda and serve.
]]>The previous publisher of the book, Tom Jaine, has been whisked around various radio stations to record interviews on the topic of Britain’s food traditions — he even made the news on Wednesday night.
Listen again to Tom Jaine’s very entertaining appearance on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight.
Once interviewers have got over the initial shock factor of there being an identifiable British food heritage worthy of note, a question that crops up regularly is: what is our culinary tradition? Who are we?
Tom has suggested that, from a historian’s perspective, one can look to food culture as a means of broadly determining what the nation’s identity was, and perhaps still is. To nations such as France food tradition and the idea of AOC goes some distance to carving out an idea of what it has previously meant to be French. Could it be that the stuff we eat could help define the future fabric of the British Isles?
The Taste of Britain is a compendium of foods whose origins on these shores date back at least three generations. I wonder if in another three generations time, the book will look very different. Personally, I think that The Taste of Britain 2106 would be an exciting prospect. But I also suspect that it will be a far harder thing to pin down.
So, in a week that saw Jack Straw write in the Lancashire Telegraph that he’d rather women constituents lifted the veil (apparently 93% of Britons polled agree with him), the question of a common cultural identity lifts its head again — perhaps these days it never goes away.
The voices of those sceptical of multiculturalism are sounding louder — in fact, next week Michael Burleigh will post at fifthestate on the subject
The government’s predictable response to this on-going emergency is to form yet further committees of the likeminded, where the voices of anyone sceptical of multiculturalism are unrepresented…Let’s have some ‘unity’ officers, versed in what makes this country sufficiently attractive for the huge numbers of people seeking to live here.
Nevertheless, if you concur with former Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins, that integration is “not a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity accompanied by … an atmosphere of mutual tolerance”, you’ll join me in the hope that The Taste of Britain a hundred years hence will be able to stretch to the 27 volumes that France made on its first edition.
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