Chewing it over
Elfreda Pownall
FOOD FOR THOUGHT by Simon Courtauld Think Books, £9.99, pp. 176, ISBN 1845250206 THE SAVVY SHOPPER by Rose Prince
Fourth Estate, £7.99, pp. 452, ISBN 0007219938
✆ £6.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Ispent many of my school holidays with a kind great-aunt, a deeply religious maiden, most of whose friends were nuns. Beside my bed, as well as Lives of the Saints there was always her favourite book, Jottings from a Gentlewoman’s Garden. Not ideal reading for a nine-year-old, but how glad I am now that I did occasionally dip into it before getting down to reading Bunty under the bedclothes. Otherwise I would not have appreciated the gentle pre-war style that Simon Courtauld seeks to reproduce in Food for Thought: A Culinary Tour of the English Garden. In this collection of his columns from The Spectator Courtauld chooses three vegetables or fruits for each month of the year, supplies some historical anecdotes and some cooking suggestions as well as clever tips for the kitchen gardener: keep whitefly from a pot of basil by putting a clove of garlic in the pot and plant apple mint among raspberry canes to keep raspberry beetle away. His tip about keeping walnuts ‘wet’ by covering them with a mash of crab apples was particularly welcome until I wondered, would ordinary apples do as well? How long does it work for? Do you keep it chilled? Does the crab apple mixture go bad? And there is the rub — the book is a bit short on specifics. Courtauld’s ‘recipe’ for summer pudding, for example, makes no mention of the proportions of fruit, or that the bread should be a day old and also specifies that the pudding bowl be ‘greased’ — I wonder what sort of grease would taste good with cold wet bread, and whether any grease would help it unmould. This book will strike a chord with readers who dislike aspects of modern life, from menuspeak — Courtauld loathes the words ‘coulis’ and ‘floret’ — to slimming recipes — most of his suggestions use cream. Many readers will admire his magnificent self-confidence: ‘cultivated mushrooms are grown from mycelium spawn, which I know nothing about’ and most would like, as I would, to share his delicious-sounding meals. Though some of his musings are inconsequential (‘I was looking at my apple trees and thinking we should take some of the remaining fruit to church for Harvest Festival next weekend’), others are amazing: ‘My motherin-law used to insist that a couple of turkeys’ heads buried under the [raspberry] canes will do wonders for the size and sweetness of the fruit.’ Courtauld wonders if pork tastes good with apple sauce because pigs like eating windfall apples. Rose Prince in The Savvy Shopper shows how few pigs get a taste of windfall apples as 70 per cent of British pigs are, she tells us, reared indoors on such fodder as industrial biscuit waste, GM soya and fishmeal. Her introduction provides a pithy summary of food’s big issues: food miles, bird flu, genetic modification, fair trade, additives and chemical residues. These topics have been aired in such books as Charles Clover’s The End of the Line which tells of the depletion of our seas, Shopped by Joanna Blythman on the pernicious power of the supermarkets and Not on the Label, Felicity Lawrence’s shocking revelation of what happens to our food before we buy it. The problem has been that, alerted to these concerns, most of us have not known where to shop for safe and ethically produced food. Prince takes 74 shopping basket items, from asparagus to vegetable oils, baby food to yoghurt, and answers the questions of concerned shoppers, summarises each supermarket’s practice and recommends stockists of the good, wholesome version of each foodstuff. Many of her facts are worrying: far from being ripe for the Harvest Festival, there are apples on sale in our shops which have been preserved for up to a year, stored in cold rooms or shipping containers pumped full of a potentially carcinogenic gas. Rose Prince occasionally cooks The Spectator’s legendary lunches; her book is a sign that the magazine can look forward as well as back.
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