July 2010 Archives

Your menu can be an ethical minefield. We're proud at Le Manoir that we try to source all our ingredients (even caviar, which we get from French members of the French Marine and New Fish Farming Syndicate, near Bordeaux) from firms committed to sustainability. But there is one so-called "luxury food" that worries me especially.

In 1993 I was invited to Japan, where I made it my mission to learn about the famous buttery, marbled Kobe beef, which I then believed came from specially pampered Wagyu breed cows, massaged by beautiful geisha girls, one per beast, who gave them beer and sake to relax them, while the geishas' nimble fingers redistributed the fat within the muscle tissues. I even believed that a trusted adviser to the emperor chose for slaughter only the finest cows. When we arrived in Kobe, it took me five days to convince the polite hotel manager that I really did want to see the Kobé beef farm.

It was horrible. The cattle were not grazing lazily; they were kept in wooden boxes. They were dirty, their rumps covered in their own excrement. My executive head chef Gary Jones and I had arrived just in time to witness the slaughter of fifteen steers and heifers. The abattoir was in effect a large pen divided in two; the beasts were herded into half the pen, and taken singly into the other side for slaughter, where a gutter ran with their blood.

I could see fear in the eyes of the beasts in the safe half of the pen. Why would they frighten their cows? For one thing, it is well known that fear lessens the quality of the meat. It was hellish. See http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2007/12/kobe_beef_estabrook.

Later I discovered that geography explains a good deal about Kobe beef. If you go back a couple of centuries, the Japanese ate no beef, and kept cattle only as working beasts. Japan has very little unrocky, flat land suitable for grazing, so the cows are kept in confinement, have little exercise, and get fat (massaging may help the arthritis they commonly suffer). Their diet is perforce mostly grain and cereal rather than the grass that the cow's four stomachs are designed to digest; the protein-rich feed increases the fat content of their meat, helped along by the beer that they are indeed fed. The Wagyu is a crossbred animal, and is now farmed successfully (and more ethically, with much more care for its welfare) in the US, Latin America and Australia. Real "Kobe beef" comes from Wagyu cattle raised within the borders of Hyogo, which includes the city of Kobe. Until it is proved to me that it is reared ethically, I shall not be eating or offering genuine Kobe beef on any of my menus.

An attention-grabbing article in the Sunday Times on 11 July warns that there may be no more of our favourite sea fish by the middle of this century. That's right, total extinction of the world's most prized fish: cod, tuna, haddock, flounder and hake, by 2050. "Mankind," the article says, "has consumed 95% of the large fish in many seas."

There's not much point in repeating the familiar scary stories; even if there's disagreement about the statistical extent of the crisis, between Professor Daniel Pauly's estimate above, and that of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, there's no disputing that there is a crisis.

There is obviously a vicious circle here: we chefs still order and serve these popular, endangered species because the consumer demands them, and the fishermen supply what we order. Or maybe the circle starts at another point. Maybe chefs only order these fish because the fishermen make them available; or maybe consumers only demand them because we chefs don't offer them any attractive alternatives?

Last weekend was the 29th annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery at St Catherine's College, on the topic Cured, Fermented and Smoked Foods.  I am proud to say that I have been attending this annual get-together on and off for more than 20 years; at the same time, I was saddened to see so few chefs participating in these exciting discussions.

​On a personal level I would even say that the Symposium was instrumental in changing my life. I met three great men at this Symposium, Harold McGee, Alan Davidson and Nicholas Kurti. The word molecular gastronomy had not yet been coined, but these great men were already delving into the mysteries of cuisine. I was a self-taught young chef and Nicholas especially was crucial in teaching me enough science to empower me, by understanding the chemical and physical processes that control all manner of techniques, such as emulsions, roasting, frying, boiling, steaming and even low-temperature cooking.

​For many years, he took me deeper and deeper into these same questions, I remain most indebted to Nicholas Kurti (1908-1998), who retired in 1975 as Professor of Physics at Oxford University. He used to bicycle to visit me in my kitchen - a wonderful sight, with his white hair flowing in the breeze.

Nicholas must have liked my cooking - he certainly helped me improve it. He loved cooking himself: in 1969 he gave a talk at the Royal Society (of which he was, of course, a most distinguished Fellow) called "The Physicist in the Kitchen", where he amazed his scientist-audience by using a newly invented gadget called the microwave oven to make an inside-outomelette norvegienne (Baked Alaska), cold on the outside and hot inside. He also performed this culinary miracle - and several others - over the years at the Oxford Symposium, of which he was an early participant who became an elder statesman. This connection resulted in my book "Blanc Mange" (1994, followed by my BBC2 series Demystifying the chemistry of cooking.)

Last week I renewed an old friendship with one of this year's speakers, Harold McGee, the author of McGee on Food & Cooking, a book that belongs in every chef's kitchen library.

My other great influence was one of the founders of the Symposium, Alan Davidson (1924-2003), whose life's work,The Oxford Companion to Food, I consult nearly every day, as I do his several books on fish. Though his own tastes ran to ice cream and trifles, Alan also encouraged me in my pursuit of the scientific understanding of my own cooking.

That is why the Symposium is so central for much that I was doing. I have gained so much knowledge and made such important friendships at these meetings, that I was thrilled at being able to give something major back to the Symposium last year, when my executive head chef Gary Jones and our team joined St Catz' chef, Tim Kelsey, and prepared a splendid, multi-course Saturday night banquet for the 200 Symposiasts. It was quite a feat to use someone else's kitchen to prepare a meal that was up to Le Manoir standards, and I am proud and delighted to say that we succeeded! 

You have to wonder what the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, thought he was doing when he attacked Jamie Oliver school dinner campaign last week. Shot himself in the foot, I'd say. His remarks that "people did not want to be lectured" about healthier eating, that Jamie's efforts to reform school meals have flopped, and that he, Mr Lansley, was going to introduce "an evidence based approach", all show a talent for putting his own foot in his mouth by opposing the first, most promising steps to improve our kids' diets and the quality of their future lives.

Mr Lansley will have done his own career no good, as he seems to have contradicted what his own, wiser boss said about Oliver in a Party Conference speech: "We need to understand that cultural change is worth any number of government initiatives," said David Cameron. "Who has done more to improve school food, Jamie Oliver, or the Department of Education? Put another way, we need more of Supernanny, less of the nanny state." Whomever Mr Lansley thought he was aiming his buckshot at, most of it really does seem to have peppered his own pedal extremity.

Let's look at Mr Lansley's claims. First: the lecture. Lansley wants to change the name of his department to the Department of Public Health. How much will it cost us to insert the single word "Public"? I'll wager it's at least enough to give every schoolchild a portion of fresh fruit or veg for a week or two.

Lecturing? Hectoring, more likely: the Health Dept. spends a king's ransom on advertising campaigns, and supports wretchedly expensive quangos such as the Health Protection Agency (£155.9 million budget) and Healthcare Commission (£61.4 million). Is Mr Lansley really prepared to argue that either of these nanny-statist bodies has had a hundredth of the influence of Jamie on schoolkids, their parents or the professionals responsible for school meals?

Nowadays "spider crabs arrive in their thousands, crawling along the sea floor" to Cardigan Bay, says Dean Parry, a spider crab fisherman based in Aberystwyth, in an article in the Western Mail on 18 June. I have a glorious, sci-fi image of them crawling along the bed of the ocean, like an army pillaging everything in its path.

But it's not imaginary that they're invading Britain. Scientists believe that the species is moving north owing to climate change, as Welsh coastal waters grow warmer, "Spider crabs used to be confined to the coast off France," Mr Parry said, "and 40 years ago my father would have been lucky to catch just one in Cardigan Bay. But now we catch hundreds of them in a single day" .

Le Manoir was one of  the first restaurants to serve this delectable, absolutely fresh spider crab- simply because some enterprising Welsh fishermen turned up out of the blue at the kitchen door with a load of live spider crabs in a tank of Cardigan Bay seawater. What a fabulous idea to bring these live to the chef, so that even in landlocked Oxfordshire we can give the very best seafood experience to our guests! (Crabs - and lobster - need to be live when prepared, as they spoil so quickly, either because of the effect of oxygen on their highly unsaturated fatty acids, which makes them pong; or because spoilage bacteria work on them at even very low temperatures. See Harold McGee in Food and Cooking, p.1989, a book that belongs on every chef's shelves.)



Not only that, I was amazed to realise that we in the UK don't generally eat this superb crustacean - around 80% of spider crabs go to restaurants in Spain and France where they are considered a delicacy, while only 20% stay in Britain. In France it has always been considered a truly great tasting crab, especially when you just cook it in a little lemon bouillon, and serve the split legs slightly chilled, with a homemade mayonnaise and a generous helping of crisp freshly dressed salad. And it's great used in any crab/pasta sauce recipe.

The Welsh spider crab is Maja squinado - "Maja" for May, the month in which they begin to come inshore to warmer waters, and "squinado" from its Provençal name, we learn from Alan Davidson's great Oxford Companion to Food, and that the "spider" part comes from the arrangement of the legs, which makes this crab the largest found in our coastal waters - the EU minimum size is 12cm but they can grow as large as 20cm (8 inches) across their prickly carapace, with their legs stretching to as much as a scary three feet. 20-30 male (cock) crabs at a time will march across the sea bottom in search of a  single female (hen), and some can have 4-5 broods a year. The fishermen who supply M&J Seafood return females to the sea, to ensure the population stays steady.