Food

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Why it’s fine to crash funerals

Q. Regarding the writing of ‘no presents’ on an invitation (Dear Mary, 6 July), my own experience is that many people ignore ‘no presents’ anyway. Some will not even ask for ideas, and you are likely to be inundated with cushions with ‘Still sexy at 60’ embossed on them and huge mugs yelling ‘Keep calm and carry on’ in bold colours. To pre-empt this, your correspondent’s wife might do better to send a round-robin email to all those invited saying she forgot to write ‘no presents’, but should anyone like to, they could donate to a charity of their choice. I think Ukip might ruffle a few feathers. — J.F.,

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 11 July 2013

Andrew Mitchell was forced to resign as the Tory Chief Whip last autumn because he called policemen at the Downing Street gates ‘plebs’. Then it turned out, as this column suggested at the time, that he had not done so. It emerged that there was a conspiracy — quite how deep has not yet been made public — by police and accomplices to attribute to Mr Mitchell words which he did not speak. People pretending to be by-standing members of the public said how shocked they were by Mr Mitchell’s remarks, and then it turned out that no bystanders had been within earshot of whatever it was that Mr Mitchell had

Thursday

Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes’s diary: David Hockney, Bridlington lobster, and the risks of a third martini

I began my week with a trip to Bridlington, the closest seaside town to my childhood home. ‘Brid’, as it’s known to the locals, has a special British charm, comprising miles of unspoilt beach, beach huts, a pretty little harbour, fish-and-chip shops galore, rows of guest houses and The Expanse, a splendid old-fashioned hotel. The council are, however, missing a trick. Brid’s main fishing industry these days is lobsters, as delicious as any you will ever taste. You wouldn’t know it, however, as, apart from a few expensive ones kept in tanks at the Blue Lobster on the harbour, they all go to Europe. So, come on Brid, how about

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Owen Paterson’s thoughtful GM revolution

Bravo to Owen Paterson for making such an extensive and detailed case for the value of genetically-modified crops today. That he gave this speech to Rothamsted Research at all is provocative, but if you read it in full, you will find a thoughtful and far more equivocal argument than the debate surrounding it suggests. The Environment Secretary did not, as some of his critics would have us believe, say that GM crops will solve all the world’s troubles and answer all the problems facing intensive farming. Instead, he said: ‘I believe that it’s time to start a more informed discussion about the potential of genetically modified crops. A discussion that

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold reviews STK London

STK is a steakhouse at the bottom of the ME Hotel on the Aldwych. (This is a real name for a real hotel. The cult of individualism has finally reached its apogee in the hotel sense, and, if you are curious, it looks like a piece of St Tropez that fell off and hit the Embankment.) The restaurant itself looks like a love ball, or a stupid person’s idea of what is sexy, or Hugh Hefner’s personal imago. It is dark and made of MDF in varying degrees of glisten and smear; if STK were a movie it would be Showgirls, in which the protagonist writhes like a dolphin in

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

The Spanish understand the pig and the sea

Spain: an easy country to enjoy; very hard, even for Spaniards, to understand. I remember a dinner party, sitting next to a girl who seemed to want to talk about what had been on television the previous night. She was pretty enough, but I feared that I was in for a long evening and a complete unmeeting of minds. Spanish, she was also dark-complexioned, so in desperation I asked for further and better particulars. She was from Andalusia, which helped to explain the duskiness, and she was the cousin of a duke, who bred fighting bulls. Oh good: something to discuss, a long way from trash TV. In 1936, the

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold reviews Potato Merchant

Exmouth Market is a small collection of paved streets near the Farringdon Travelodge, which specialises in monomaniacal restaurants and has a blue plaque dedicated to the dead clown Joseph Grimaldi. We are near King’s Cross, the least magical of London’s districts, and the early summer air chokes the dying trees. There are restaurants that ‘do’ hummus, restaurants that ‘do’ sausages and now a restaurant that ‘does’ potatoes, opened, I suspect, by some mad -potato fetishists for whom I have developed something like love. It is called Potato Merchant and when I first saw it advertised I thought it was a bag of potatoes with a restaurant loitering somewhere within. I

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Labour ignores reality with its political hunger games

There are few things more frustrating in politics than attempts to shut down a valid debate about a real social problem using the speaker’s personal circumstances. Today’s victim appears to be Richard Benyon, scalded for suggesting in a low-key Westminster Hall debate that Britain has a food problem. The environment minister told the debate on Wednesday that the government would set targets for helping families cut the amount of food they waste, saying: ‘We all know that we ought to be wasting much less food, that food wasted means fewer pounds in our pocket, that the energy and water used to produce the food has been wasted, and that the

Thursday

Camilla Swift

After the bute revelation, what’s the government doing to prevent another horsemeat scandal?

When shadow Defra minister, Mary Creagh, first raised the possibility four months ago that the veterinary drug phenylbutazone – aka bute – might be found in horsemeat in supermarket products labelled as ‘beef’, both the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the agriculture minister David Heath were quick to rubbish her statement. Heath placed his trust in the FSA and their testing procedures, safe in the knowledge that the FSA ensured that all meat was fit for human consumption, with tests for bute carried out regularly, and any positive results thoroughly invested. But then, in February, it was discovered that British horsemeat containing the drug had been exported to Europe and

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold reviews Attendant, London

I love metaphor, and now metaphor has led me to a toilet near Goodge Street, in that thankless patch of London idiots call No-Ho. Because this is not a toilet any more; it’s an espresso bar that used to be a toilet, and it is called Attendant, and it was in the Daily Mail, because the Daily Mail, while seemingly robust, is easily frightened by things that seem strange, and crack the curve of its happy universe. I am here with an architectural historian, which is good, because I can now imagine him six inches high, and declaiming, like Nikolaus Pevsner, from the toilet bowl — by far the best

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold reviews Balthazar

Balthazar is a golden cave in Covent Garden, in the old Theatre (Luvvie) Museum, home to dead pantomime horses and Christopher Biggins’s regrets. It is a copy of a New York restaurant, which was itself a copy of a Parisian brasserie, and it is the first big London opening of the year. This means diary stories and reviews and profiles of the co-owner (with Richard Caring), Keith McNally, the most ludicrous of which was in the FT, and was an interview with his house, which is in Notting Hill. It wasn’t quite as ridiculous as: F.T. What are you proudest of, Keith McNally’s House? Keith McNally’s house Guttering. But it

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 February 2013

Two pedantic nerds should not be allowed to come together in a small space. In any case, the guy who runs quiz night at The Black Swan and I have a history of locking horns. On Halloween, we had a terrible row about Greek semantics. He asked, ‘What animal would you turn into if you were suffering from lycanthropy?’ I wrote down ‘wolf’ and assured my team that we were on firm ground as I happened to be an avid reader of period horror stories. But when it came to the marking, the pub quiz compère said the answer was ‘werewolf’ and that we couldn’t have a point for writing

Dot Wordsworth

Contamination

A shrouded skull flanked by serpents above a tureen inscribed with the words, ‘There is death in the pot’ (2 Kings 4:40), ornaments the title page of A Treatise on the Adulterations of Food by Frederick Accum (1820). Accum details hair-raising additions to food in the pursuit of profit, not just alum to bread but lead pigments to anchovy sauce and laurel berries to custard (which made three little children in Yorkshire fall insensible for ten hours, and lucky to survive). Alum is a mineral otherwise used as a styptic. Three decades on, Tennyson in Maud wrote: ‘Chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread /

Bruce Anderson

The tastes of temptation

There ought to be a wise adage: ‘If invited to do good works, always procrastinate. A better offer is bound to turn up.’ About a month ago, the phone rang. Would I attend the Oxford vs Cambridge wine tasting, sponsored by Pol Roger, which would also include a wine hacks vs wine trade contest? Festivities were to continue over lunch. The likelihood of a wooden spoon did not deter me. I was joyously accepting, when a horrible thought occurred. I checked the diary. My forebodings were justified. I was already engaged, to speak at the King’s School, Bruton. There was one possible solution: do both. Get thee behind me, Satan.

Olivia Glazebrook

ITV’s Food Glorious Food is under the curse of Simon Cowell

I sometimes worry that ITV — the middle child — doesn’t get enough of my attention and so this week I have decided to redress the balance: I devoted myself to episode one of Food Glorious Food (Wednesday, ITV). It’s a nine-part quest, hosted by Carol Vorderman, which aims to discover ‘Britain’s best-loved recipe’. O jubilate deo! This is how it goes: treasured family recipes are cooked up at regional events and tasted by one of four judges who choose a favourite and submit it to be tasted by the other three. The judges are Loyd Grossman (smooth), Anne Harrison (stern), Stacie Stewart (bubbly) or Tom Parker Bowles (apologetic). One

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Don’t ban Frosties: teach children the life skills they need to make choices

What a very sensible idea from a group of more than 200 MPs in today’s FT: teach children about personal finance. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Financial Education for Young People wants financial education to become a compulsory part of the curriculum, with banks visiting classrooms. The idea that Natwest and Barclays could send their representatives into classrooms is obviously not enormously palatable to everyone, with critics arguing that this is just another route for big business to indoctrinate innocent minds. But consider this: research from the Centre for Economics and Business Research found a lack of financial education costs the taxpayer £3.4 billion a year in debt, mis-sold financial

Saturday

Matthew Sinclair

Why do-gooding ‘sin taxes’ always stink of politics

Nutella may have been created by Italians, but it is the French who really love it. The hazelnut spread is a fantastically popular accompaniment for everything from bread for breakfast to crêpes for a delicious dessert. Yet the French Senate, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Nutella should be taxed. The proposal was voted through the Senate, before being stopped by a very unlikely coalition of Communists and conservatives. The plan to impose a ‘sin tax’ on Nutella in France was obviously ludicrous; but it was also full of politics. Sin taxes and green taxes may look like an efficient intervention on an economist’s blackboard; but they never live up

Thursday

Steerpike

Wareing and peace

It’s strange how coy the rich and famous can be. Roger Moore never watches his own films, and celebrity chef Marcus Wareing never eats in his own Berkeley Hotel restaurant. The second of these facts changed on Wednesday night, when Wareing broke a nine year habit to mark the launch of a new limited edition Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle designed by Porsche. He put together the menu, then joined a select crowd that included Ben Fogle and Otis Ferry. Wareing managed to stay out of the kitchen all night, which is a new record for him. He was far calmer and cooler than the image presented at the height of his fall out

Tuesday

Jonathan Mcaloon

Review – John Saturnall’s Feast, by Lawrence Norfolk

Lawrence Norfolk has always liked to centre his novels around a mixture of existing and constructed myth, and then let the action which happens centuries later be informed by or feed back into this network. His first book in twelve years, John Saturnall’s Feast, explores how the Civil War affected the career of a 17th century chef, the kitchens of great country houses and the symbolism of food. Its mythic centre is a pagan rite belonging to a pre-Christian British people, in which serving and eating food was the basis of an egalitarian community. In Charles I’s reign the one person left alive with the key to this feast is

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Food prices, and predicting riots

The cover story of last week’s Spectator was about the political impact of rising crop prices: John R. Bradley, who alone predicted the Egyptian revolution, explained how the same phenomenon is happening again. His piece speaks best for itself but today HSBC has released some research making the same point. I thought Coffee Housers may be interested. The picture above shows how much of the US is hit by drought now, and given that it’s the number one exporter this has hit world prices. The price of wheat, corn and soyabean has rocketed by 30 per cent, 25 per cent and 42 per cent, respectively since the start of the