Real Flavours: The Handbook of Gourmet & Deli Ingredients

By Glynn Christian

Gourmand World Cookbook Award winner: An “elegantly written, amusing and engaging” reference for chefs (Country Living).
 
Real Flavours is an entirely rewritten and updated third edition of Glynn Christian’s Delicatessen Food Handbook, described by Nigel Slater as “one of the only ten books you need.” It’s a handbook of specialty ingredient information, from salt and pepper through olive oil to caviar: It not only tells you what an ingredient is and what it should look and taste like, it also tells you what it goes with and how to use it.
 
Born in New Zealand and renowned in Britain for his BBC appearances, Glynn Christian offers plenty of wit and anecdotes from a life spent traveling, cooking on TV, and writing for magazines and newspapers—in a reference book you’ll end up reading like a novel.
 
“One of the best ever compendiums of gourmet and deli foods.” —Manchester Evening News

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781909166905

Glynn Christian

Best known in Britain as a pioneering and innovative BBC-TV and radio chef, New Zealand born Glynn Christian is also an acclaimed food journalist, lecturer, public speaker and the author of over 25 books mainly about food and cookery. His UK journalistic career includes writing weekly for The Sunday Telegraph for four years for which he was nominated for Glenfiddich Food Writer of the Year, Elle (5 years) and magazines such as OK, House and Gardens, and Gardens Illustrated. He co-founded iconic Mr Christian’s Provisions on Portobello Rd, helped found the UK Guild of Food Writers, named the Great Taste Awards and is the holder of a prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild of Good Food. He lives and works in Battersea, London.

Book preview

Introduction

Switching the Labels

For all the interest in organics and health foods and nutrition, real flavour is getting harder and harder to find. The dishonest culprits have sneaked into our foods with barely a mention, but can be flushed out simply, by reading labels properly. One of the achievements I most enjoyed during BBC TV Breakfast Time was introducing the ‘supermarket switch’ that is switching everything you pick up so you can read the label on its back. Here’s where you find out how much disguised sugar is there, whether or not hydrogenated oils and trans-fatty acids lurk, and if the flavour you thought you’d bought is a sham.

These are a few of the tricks manufacturers play on food labels. They are jokes at your expense if you don’t do the switch and know what you are buying.

Fat: many low-fat products have a greater energy content (calories/kilojoules) than the full-fat original, particularly yoghurts. Fat gives comforting mouth-feel to food, making it seem rich and luxurious to eat. Take away the fat and it often seems thin and miserable. To make up for the reduced fat manufacturers add their other mouth-feel fall-back – sugar, and plenty of it. No wonder so many hips remain hippapotamoid.

If you want to control your weight by controlling your energy intake you must look at what the back label says about the calorie/kilojoule content, rather than at what the front label seems to promise.

All fats and oils have the same calorie/kilojoule count. So-called ‘good’ fats and oils have exactly the same rating as a ‘bad’ one. The health difference is in their make up.

Simplified, we are recommended to eat less saturated fat, generally made from animals; lard and dripping, fat in sausages or from roasts, butter, cream and milk, and cheese. This is because saturated fats tend to clog the arteries of some people; in others it has little effect and anyway much if not most cholesterol in bloodstreams is actually manufactured by our own bodies and not directly related to diet at all. Plant-derived oils, like olive oil, have less saturated oil or none at all, and some can also actively reduce saturated fats already in the bloodstream. But this is only while they are in their natural liquid state, and not all plant oils are so useful – palm oil is highly saturated and thus not recommended, even in its liquid form.

image1

The market is overwhelmed with ‘spreads’, essentially substitutes for butter made from vegetable oils. But to make oils into a solid fat, they must be hydrogenated, and this process creates something called trans-fatty acids. Trans-fatty acids have now been identified as much worse for the human body than any animal fat. Not only do they clog the arteries, like sand in clockwork, they also actively reduce the good cholesterol we have in our veins and arteries. And they are considered to be carcinogenic. It has been estimated 100,000 US citizens each year are hastened to an early death because their doctors have advised them to switch to margarines and spreads made with hydrogenated oils.

This is the food scandal that has been waiting to explode for decades. Food manufacturers have used everything in their power to prevent it being discussed or believed, because hydrogenated oils deep-fry better, keep cakes and pastries seeming fresh longer – in fact they are a major player in modern food production. But their time has come. The US Food and Drug Administration has declared war and soon food labels will have to state hydrogenated oil content. And wouldn’t you know it, US companies are already playing the label game, saying on the label they have reduced hydrogenated oils and trans-fatty acids, but failing to point out they are using palm oil instead. Palm oil!

Hydrogenated oils are found in far more places than you would expect. Take an internationally recognised Table Water biscuit. You’d expect to find the ingredients include water. There’s not a drop, but there is hydrogenated oil, which will make them last months and months. It must be wrong for a product to pose as something traditional, to use the traditional name, but to be made with modern chemistry, chemistry that can harm each of us.

The rest of the world must follow suit and also start to get rid of hydrogenated vegetable oils. Just as has been suspected, the substitutes for real food are worse for us, in this case killing us. Take off your blinkers. Switch everything you pick up and put it back if it contains hydrogenated oil or vegetable fat – a clever way of saying the same thing but an obvious contradiction in terms. There are now spreads available that clearly say they contain no hydrogenated oils or trans-fatty acids. Well goodie. But why eat a substitute for butter, that could hardly be more pure or more natural?

Buy butter but perhaps eat less of it, or enjoy olive or any other safe plant-based oil and leave ‘spreads’ where they are. It’s not worth killing yourself or your family to save a little – and anyway can you honestly say any of them is as good tasting as butter? Better eat butter. Sugar: a great deal of processed or bought product contains hidden sugar. Oh yes, you may find ‘sugar’ on the label – but that’s not necessarily all the sugar. There’s not just one kind of sugar, but many.

White sugar is sucrose, but any other ingredient that ends with ‘ose’ is also sugar. Glucose, lactose, galactose, levulose and more. Often a manufacturer will use two or more types to hide the actual sugar content – but the information is on the label if you look.

Don’t think honey is any better or different. Honey is simply a mixture of simple sugars, a nicely flavoured solution of them, and its concentration makes it very calorific. The worst sinners for presenting honey as a healthy substitute for sugar when it is essentially the same thing are ‘health’ bars and snacks. Look at the labels; they might self righteously contain no animal fats but have far more sugar content and energy content than many branded bars and snacks. They particularly show just how hollow many ‘healthy-eating’ claims really are.

But is sugar really bad for you? Of course not. Other than poisons, no food is essentially good for you or bad for you. What counts is how much of them you eat. You’d think water and carrots were both very good for you, but people have died from drinking too much water and from eating too many carrots.

My biggest gripe concerning sugar and energy content is the international switch to publishing kilojoule count rather than calorie count as an indicator of energy content. What the hell is a kilojoule? I reckon it’s yet another ploy by manufacturers and nutritionists to bamboozle the public. There’s never been a public information or education programme to introduce kilojoules or to publish comparative tables. Most of the world still speaks of the ideal calorie intake per day per man, woman or child, and many of us have some idea of what this should be – but not in kilojoules. But if not just how do you convert from one to another?

In the UK, responsible manufacturers include both calorie and kilojoule counts and there you’ll see the relationship is about 4:1. To work out an approximate calorie equivalent, divide the kilojoule count by four: to work out an approximate kilojoule value, multiply the calories by four. So simple when you know how.

Flavours/flavors: the names of many products give you a clue that something is not quite what you might think. Any fruity beverage described as ‘drink’ rather than as a juice is water based. Strawberry ice cream will contain real strawberries, but strawberry-flavoured ice cream contains none of the fruit. As obvious as this is, the majority seem never to have thought about it. Still, at least the information is there right on the front label.

image1

There are worse flavouring iniquities that you only find buried deep on back labels.

The culprits are ‘nature-identical’ oils, a misnomer if ever I heard one. These factory-produced oils, thousands of them, do have an identical chemical make-up to those flavours found naturally. But none of those natural oils occur in isolation. An essential rosemary oil comes with dozens of other aromas when you cook with rosemary leaves, from the twig, from the bark, or from the leaves themselves.

Organics: I could write a million words about organic food, but this isn’t the place. What is important is to know that labels guaranteeing organic production are meaningless if you want flavour and quality.

Whatever the organization guaranteeing the organic source of fresh produce – and surely it’s suspicious there has to be so many different ones, now we have the official 2004 Organic Produce Regulations - they aren’t doing much more than saying the food is grown without artificial fertilizers or insecticides.

What they don’t guarantee is that they have chosen fine-flavoured varieties or what happens to the produce after it is harvested. Many worthy organic farms are run on a shoestring, for even though the costs are lower than modern commercial farming, the crops are usually lower, too. Tight budgets do not allow for refrigerated storage and transport and, if there is one universal rule about fresh garden or orchard produce, it is that these deteriorate nutritionally from the moment they are harvested: the only way to slow this and to keep maximum nutrition is to store the produce out of sunlight and as cool as possible.

What actually happens is the produce is driven to shops on the back of open trucks and then displayed in whole food and health stores or at markets, at ambient temperature inside or outside. In mid-summer the deterioration is rapid; you might not be eating fertilizers and sprays but you are eating damned little else either! Oh yes, and paying extra for it.

Infuriatingly to many, this means the supermarket is the most reliable place to buy organic fruit and vegetables if you feel they are important, for at least they will have cooled transport lines and will sell the more fragile produce from chilled displays. Or should.

It is true that some organic produce tastes a sight better than mainstream produce. This has nothing to do with the way it is grown but what has been grown, what variety of lettuce or plum or parsnip. Some organic farmers grow old-fashioned or heritage varieties and they will taste great even if grown totally artificially, by hydroponics. They were only superceded because they did not react to modern farming techniques, not because someone produced a better flavoured variety.

Once you know the above, you have choices. One of them is to shop for maximum nutrition and flavour. In this case head for the supermarket and their organic produce or to choose frozen vegetables. Frozen vegetables cooked without added water in the microwave are by far the most nutritious way to eat them: they have been processed and frozen within hours of harvesting, and because you microwave them without water none of the goodness is leached away. Boiling and steaming both give far less nutrition, unless you steam the oriental way, on a plate and in bamboo. Otherwise steaming does give marginally better texture, but the water vapour dripping back onto the food dissolves goodness away and that falls back into the water. A bamboo steamer absorbs the water vapour so this can’t happen. Belief in the nutritional superiority of vegetables steamed in colanders or in those expandable French thingies is the single most wide-spread misconception about food.

So, it’s frozen vegetables for nutrition but not always flavour (because of the varieties they grow) and perhaps some residues. Or it’s residue free produce that will have lost nutrition on its way to you. It’s fresh but more expensive organic produce sold by supermarkets, or it’s frozen organic produce, which is starting to appear and should be encouraged as much as possible. The American Cancer Society believes use of refrigeration for storage of vegetables and other food was possibly the greatest health advance of the 20th century, not just because fruit and vegetables stored at ambient temperature lose so much nutrition and flavour, but because mouldy food is always a great health risk and associated with many types of cancer. Refrigeration keeps this in check.

So, my advice is not to spend extra on organic fresh produce because you think it’s good for the land and for you and because the combination gives you a warm fuzzy feeling. The warm fuzzy feeling might be a symptom of nutrition lack. Stock up on frozen veg the next time you are at the supermarket.

Never put anything ino your mouth that doesn’t bite-back

Food that shimmers with flavour, that fills your mouth with gratification, is the only food you should eat. Fatty food coats your taste buds, so they can’t assess how much you have eaten, so you eat and eat, both your palate and your stomach waiting for something to happen so they know when to stop. What does happen is you over eat.

The same goes for bland food, like sliced white and a butter substitute - because nothing much happens in your mouth, the stomach thinks it’s not getting fed and so hunger pangs continue long after you have had enough nutrition.

The bigger food tastes, the sooner both mouth and stomach agree you have had enough: you eat less but feel more satisfied.

There’s a rather nice way to prove this and you have probably done it already. Have you noticed how much you drink of cheap quaffing wines? You never do that when the wine has quality, when it has flavour that lights up your eyes as much as your mouth with sheer pleasure. I’ve seen four people drink six bottles of cheap wine over dinner. I’ve also seen eight people take an hour and a half over one exceptional bottle. Guess who actually spent less, and who had a far greater and more gratifying time?

So clever are the manufacturers they even offer variations that will do exactly what a food producer wants – there are more than 300 different strawberry flavours available, for instance. What’s the problem? These substitutes are used to trick us, because neither they nor their function are fully described or fully explained on the label.

Buy a pastry or cake that tastes buttery and you’ll be delighted (and lucky) – if you could look at the label you will find there’s not a dot of butter in it, but there is hydrogenated oil and ‘flavour’. I bought some raspberry shortbread recently, fooled by the appearance of raspberry jam: too late I realised there was only a smear, hardly enough to give the over-raspberry flavour I tasted. The label gave it away – the shortbread contained ‘flavor’. Note it didn’t say what flavour, so there’s not the slightest nod to transparency.

This labelling loophole allows manufacturers to sell something that looks and might even taste right, but that isn’t.

These introduced flavours always appear way down on the ingredient list, which are always published in descending order of quantity. This means there is very little in your food, and so you could be lulled into not caring. They are there in such small quantity because they are so highly concentrated - another clever disguise by the manufacturers.

I don’t buy any food I find with flavour/flavor in the list of ingredients. This iniquitous ploy might well bring us cheaper food, but that’s become such a hollow self-justification. Give us real flavours, and if you don’t, tell us so on the front label.

To summarise

Eat as many different things as you can each day -the Japanese try for at least 17 every day

Eat little and often so you are never hungry

Ignore anyone who tells you not to eat any food category

Take note of what you eat today and try not to eat the same thing tomorrow, not the same amount, anyway

Balance your food over the week, not the meal or the day – except it’s good to do the day if you can

Give yourself treats: there’s no point having chocolate in the world if you don’t eat it.

But eat only the very best, so you eat less of it

There, now you have all you need to know about good diet and weight control.

Welcome to my world of real flavours, and real enjoyment.

image1

These most ancient of foods, cheap and nourishing, are sadly still looked upon with suspicion in the UK, particularly by the hard-up; those in fact who would most benefit from them. Earnest perpetrators of characterless lentil rissoles have only themselves to blame for the failure of their regimen to grip our imaginations. If only they could be as original with these foods as they are with their clothes.

The other oft-heard complaint against beans is wind. This is a very real and at times painful problem for many people, but sound knowledge will sort it out in most cases. First concentrate on the thin-skinned varieties of pulses, which cook faster, as they cause fewer side effects. Then, although lentils cook well and fast without the added bother of soaking, you do reduce wind-causing content by always soaking, rinsing and parboiling before cooking in yet more fresh water.

The wind problems will not always be lesser, but if you introduce these products to your diet slowly, as side dishes rather than main courses, you will find the bowel will adjust and in a month or so without it going – or blowing – against the grain.

In just a few weeks you will be able to enjoy a red kidney bean stew or a chickpea salad with barely a grumble. Thus with a little care and patience when you begin it is possible to eat spectacularly well as a vegetarian, almost thoughtlessly obtaining the high fibre, low fat, low sugar ideals of modern nutritional theory. Milk, cheese or eggs each day, or some soy product, or a proper mixture of grains and pulses and you are safe and very well indeed.

Beans, peas and pulses are excellent sources of protein and carbohydrate but are not as balanced as animal protein, including eggs, milk and cheese. This does not matter if your diet includes such animal protein but ovo-lactarian vegetarians, who eschew everything from an animal source, should take care to balance the imbalance by also eating grains, done without thought if you pour a lentil dhal onto rice, eat baked beans on toast or scoop up hummus with pitta bread.

None of these ingredients has a fat content but it’s difficult to find enjoyable recipes that do not add it in some form. They also have plenty of dietary fibre, and this is most important to those of us getting old, when a general trend towards eating soft food means it might take several days to pass through the alimentary canal, something that exacerbates any illness and contributes to general ill-health, too. Even small amounts of beans, peas, pulses or grains in the diet can make a major difference to the health of the elderly and is a good habit to start young, too.

You could cook these ingredients a different way every day, but I generally end up cooking them the same way – with tomato, lots of garlic, fresh herbs in a bundle and plenty of fat: bacon, olive oil, duck or goose fat. Butter is good but not as good as the less sweet fats and oils.

Often much of the fat, pork and garlic will come largely from chunks of something like Polish boiling sausage q.v. But be brave with peas, beans and lentils. With chickpeas, use cumin and coriander and tomato paste and olive oil when they are warm – just enough tomato paste to bind them together – and serve sprinkled with chopped chives as a salad. But not for me, as I never serve or eat chives because of their dominating onion flavour: I’d sprinkle the chickpeas with toasted cumin seeds. Serve cold tuna fish with cannellini in vinaigrette as a starter. Mix leftover butter beans with chilled orange slices, black olives and segmented tomato. See how easy it is?

To make a succulent sauce for any hot beans, take up to a quarter of cooked ones from the saucepan, add water, stock or tomato purée to them and cook to a mush or purée them. Return to the drained beans and cook on. A real chili should have a sauce of softened purée-like beans like this. Beans in their own sauce are excellent hot or cold, and reheat well, too – witness the famous refritos of Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking.

Whenever a bean recipe fails to excite you, and you have added enough salt and extra fat and more garlic, then add red wine vinegar teaspoon by teaspoon. Or sherry or Chinese or balsamic vinegars, of course. The difference will be wondrous, and fast.

Neither should you overlook the flavouring possibilities of oil. Olive oil is almost de rigueur unless you have very fatty bacon or a tin of goose fat. But beans cooked simply with tomatoes and then finished with a splash of walnut oil make a superb accompaniment to poultry and, after sitting in a refrigerator overnight, the most memorable cold salad. Better with garlic, it goes without saying.

Lamb, especially the cheaper fattier cuts, goes well with beans. I like to cook neck of lamb in tomato with garlic sausage and some fresh thyme, then to add in cooked haricot or butter beans and cook on for enough time to allow some of the beans to melt into the sauce and absorb the fat. Just put the pot on the table and let your family and friends help themselves.

For all I have said about the boring way these foods are generally seen, nothing can quite equal the feverish grip with which lentils hold our great chefs in thrall. From something to sneer at, lentils have become an essential accompaniment. Their affinity with fish is the most surprising discovery, but pigeon and every type of bird now seem naked without them and even aristocratic beef is served with lentils perfumed with herbs and glistening with pork fat.

Cooked beans in cans are a godsend standby. Heated and drained and dressed with oil and garlic as a salad base, puréed, or drained and reheated with a herb-rich garlic-laden tomato sauce, they make a fast vegetable stew appear to have taken you days to make. Of course, they instantly bulk out a soup, casserole or ready-made salad, too, if someone should come knocking upon your door whom you do not wish to send away. I think beans and lentils are good hot or cold but never at room temperature.

Storing

Although good keepers, all peas, beans and lentils will toughen with age and many reach a stage where even the most determined soaking and cooking will never soften them. It is better to buy them in smallish quantities from shops you expect sell enough to have a regular turnover of stock. Do check, if they are in bulk, for excess dirt or insect contamination, but expect some. Don’t bother with stock that is broken. Store cool and dark.

Adzuki/aduki beans: small, ochrous-red and sort of pillow-shaped, these are an Oriental bean and have long been regarded as the best of them all in Japan, China and Thailand. The bean is the seed of a bushy plant that grows up to about 75cm/30 inches high. Juice made from the beans is still prescribed by Oriental herbalists to help kidney problems. Cook at least 30 minutes, perhaps longer.

Unknown to the West until George Ohshawa introduced the macrobiotic diet in the 20th century, they are now much favoured here because they are the most ‘yang’ of beans, and because they have an appealing, strong, nut-like flavour.

Adzuki are one of the most important ingredients in Oriental sweet cookery. I’ve always preferred these beans whole, eaten as sweets covered with sugar but they appear far more commonly as a red-bean paste and used as a starchy filling to spoil nice dumplings and steamed buns or to stuff those relentlessly dull and leaden Chinese desserts. But they are also served savoury: the most famed version is Serkhan or Festival Rice from Japan. Rice is tinted with the pink cooking water of adzuki beans, then the two are mixed together.

Begin with a proportion of about one part adzuki to eight of rice. This mixture is similar, of course, to the rice and beans of Jamaican cooking.

In macrobiotic cookbooks you will find suggestions for soups and desserts; I like the sound of one that cooks together adzuki and dried chestnuts, makes a purée of the mixture flavoured with cinnamon, and bakes that in a pie crust that is served with cream and almonds.

Black-eye beans/peas: these beans are actually peas, a variety of cow pea, and this is why they are also called black-eye peas in the United States. To add to the confusion, they are the seeds you find in the yard-long bean. I find I like the rather savoury flavour and interesting appearance of these more than most haricots. They cook comparatively faster too and I believe many people find them lighter on the stomach. Essential to Creole cooking and the related soul food. Soaked beans take 30-45 minutes to cook.

Broad beans: one of the few beans native to the Old World, dried broad beans have kept their honoured place in many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries, but are rather over-run by new-comers in the rest of the world. They are different, bigger and with a tendency to flouriness, but that is also their appeal, together with a bit of a chew sometimes, particularly if you leave the tough skins on each individual bean. You either have to skin them after cooking, or buy the more expensive ready-skinned variety.

Easily recognized by being flatter and broader than New World beans, they are the fava bean, the horse bean, the ful and countless other names, and when dried are most often a brownish colour. These should have a good long soak and will then need about 1½ hours cooking – less, of course, if you are using those without skins.

Ful medames, a stew of dried broad beans, has been fundamental to Egypt for countless centuries. Its rough, hearty flavour comes with the welcome vigour of garlic, oil and onion and is usually served topped with hamine eggs, whole eggs simmered in a spicy liquid for many hours so the spices penetrate and colour the egg white, which softens in an especially appealing way.

In some countries of the South Pacific, where frozen vegetables might come from China, I have found packets of gorgeous, small broad beans already shucked of their outer skins. Perfect for adding to salads, for dressing with oil and vinegar or for serving hot any way you can imagine. Triumph.

Butter beans/lima beans: many books divide butter beans from lima beans but I’m sure they are the same thing. If they aren’t, it doesn’t matter for they are both large, white, flat and aristocratic of flavour. They should not be cooked until pulpy, but must be very well pre-soaked and cooked otherwise they have some rather unpleasant constituents. Smaller ones will take 45- 60 minutes to cook; bigger ones will take 15-25 minutes longer.

Baby lima beans are pale green and usually sold fresh or frozen. Fresh baby limas are quite the best for mixing with sweet corn to make succotash, even though I have seen recipes that require cooked, dried ones. In the US you will also find the Chestnut Lima, which has a genuinely nutty flavour and mashes to give the texture of mashed potatoes.

Chickpeas/garbanzos: with their spicy, peppery flavour, appealing golden colour and hazelnut shape, these are amongst the most attractive of all dried pulses from any point of view.

They are the main ingredient in hummus, that standby dip of Middle Eastern, Greek and Cypriot restaurants, but one also found in Spanish and Latin American cooking, and make excellent additions to soups as well as fascinating salads. They mix well with other vegetables, too, and I always like to have some on hand in cans.

Cooking times can vary enormously. Older types may take up to three hours or more but newer varieties, the ones most likely to be bought today, should be cooked in something over an hour. They rarely go out of shape and are much nicer, I think, when rather floury, for then they absorb somewhat more easily the oils, spices and flavours with which they can be mingled.

But a warning if you plan to travel in the Eastern Mediterranean. Hummus has officially been recognised as a major cause of serious stomach upsets – a few years ago it was specially rife in Jerusalem and laid out its victims for almost a week. Best avoided in restaurants unless you know when it was made and that it has been refrigerated since that time.

Kidney beans: this is the biggest group of beans and one that causes much confusion. Simply, all beans that are kidney shaped without being flat are kidney beans. There is a variety of colour and flavour – but they are all kidney beans. The average time for cooking these beans is one hour, but haricots can be stubborn and need longer so be prepared to exercise patience.

Don’t be confused if you don’t find a bean you know here, throughout the United States there are local names as well as local varieties. When beans first crossed the Atlantic they were given new Spanish or Greek or Italian or anything names, and then when they adapted to their new homes they changed both their characteristics and their names again. Only if you are in pursuit of insanity should you consider tracing each bean to its original name. They won’t taste any better when or if you do. Haricots Tarbais IGP are French and found fresh or dried.

Black beans: very popular in the Caribbean and in the southern United States, these shiny, very black beans are the most like better-known red kidney beans. They cook to a firm satisfying texture and have a meaty, full flavour. Used by themselves or with other beans they make an attractive change to the look of your cooking.

Borlotti beans: also known as rose cocoa beans, these are streaked with rose or crimson, and all the better for being pale of colour. These are particularly popular in Italy and excellent tinned examples are available. They seem usually to require little soaking when dried, and they have a rather sweet, soft texture.

Cannellini beans: a small white kidney bean that is absolutely interchangeable with haricots. In Italy cannellini might mean other white beans, too. These are almost always the right bean to use with rugged Italian sausages and with lots of garlic and tomato of some sort and they make excellent cold salads dressed with good olive oil. Sorana beans, fagioli di Sorana IGP, are milky white and almost flat or cylindrical and red: both colours have a full, elegant flavour and very tender skins.

Flageolet beans: these are very young haricots removed from the pod before they are ripe. Thus they are a delicate green, sweet and tender. They are far the most expensive of beans and a very special accompaniment to fatty birds, to young lamb or to hot ham.

Great Northern beans: a small white haricot bean that’s thought to be the most popular in the US. It could be the navy bean with a different hat.

Haricot beans: these creamy kidney beans are perhaps the best known of all, for they are the beans for baked beans. Extraordinarily adaptable, they are the basis for the varying versions of cassoulets in France, cooked with bacon or goose fat. Some say they are called haricot because the French included them in their stews called haricots, but the late food writer Tom Stobart says `haricot’ is really a corruption of the Aztec word ayecotl, which I am romantically inclined to believe.

In America they are known as navy beans; and just to add to the confusion they are often shaped more like a cushion than a kidney.

Pinto beans: a shorter, fatter, squarer version of the borlotti, speckled and savoury of flavour. Rattlesnake beans are the same bean and so named because their pods grow into snake-shapes. Traditional in the US Southwest and in Mexico, they are the best choice for re-fried beans, refritos

Red kidney beans: because delicatessen counters discovered they were nice to eat cold as a salad, and because chili con carne has proliferated, these are as well known as white haricots now. Their rich colour and texture and full flavour make them worth the popularity, but they can kill. Red kidney beans must be very well soaked and very well cooked until really soft; during cooking they should actually boil for 15 minutes or can indeed be fatal.

Their uses abound throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean; they are the basic chili bean and, like their black brothers, add considerable flavour when mixed with white ones.

Lentils: one of the first-ever crops, lentils are richer in protein than other pulses, except for soy. They have a very high calorie content too, so even though lacking some essential amino acids they make an important food staple, especially in Third World countries. There are two basic types but both have many names:

Green or brown lentils: also called continental lentils. It is generally these lentils that are used in European cookbooks, old or new. They keep their shape when cooked and have a stronger, earthier taste than the red ones, which blend very well with smoked meats, fatty pork, herbs and onions, but quickly cook into a mush. Green and brown lentils take about 30-45 minutes to cook.

You would have to be a particularly zealous hermit not to know that from their long-standing association with weirdos, lentils have moved up to spearhead trendy cooking. These will generally be green ones, and inevitably lentilles de Puy, a greeney-blue variety from central France that have an especially delicious smokey-sweet tang, plus the snob appeal of DOP/AOC status. Almost the same status are lentilles vertes du Berry IGP. Italy offers Lenticchia di Castelluccio di Norcia IGP, notably small and with a very fine skin and rich colours in the yellowbrown spectrum. They are grown around Perugia and Macerata, and those lucky enough to have eaten enough of both reckon Norcias are tastier than Puy lentils.

Well-cooked lentils provide a surprising way to make all kinds of fish more gratifying for big eaters, indeed they were always part of the Indian rice dish kitcheree, which ended up as kedgeree without lentils. Lentils make far more sense of game than those infuriating potato crisps, and when really soft and lightly puréed make a sensationally good sauce for vegetarian lasagne. But, and it is a big but, they must be well-cooked and not served crisp and individual, no matter how aesthetic this seems. For me, the point of lentils is rich, comforting smoothness, with at least some of them mushed and emulsified with rather more fat or oil than you care to know about; a pile of individual lentils is as pointless as eating dry toast, and sometimes quite as parching unless they have been cooked until each has a moist creaminess.

Perhaps the single most comforting dish I know, Greek in style, is soaked green lentils then cooked in stock with plenty of vegetables, plenty of olive oil and a good handful of fresh mint stalks – mint is very fugitive and so you need masses to get any value. Cooked gently for hours until some of the lentils have mushed and perhaps with separately cooked sweet vegetables added – carrots particularly – it perfectly bridges the gap between a soup and a stew. It’s the mint and olive oil that make the difference, so don’t stint. Ham, bacon, garlic sausage etc can also be added.

Depending on the texture you prefer and how fresh they are, lentils take from 25 minutes to over an hour. They don’t really need soaking and salt or salty bacon should not be added until they are quite well cooked.

Red lentils: also known as Egyptian or Indian lentils. These look reddish but are the ones that cook into a yellow-gold mush, and are the basic dhal of India. They are vital to all sorts of winter soups and go extra well with contrasted sharper vegetables like garlic, onion and green peppers. They take 15-30 minutes to cook.

Mesquite beans: flour is made from the bean pods of this desert tree, the one with the aromatic wood used for aromatic smoking. Harvested by the endangered Seri Indians in late summer and autumn, the beans are dried and ground into naturally sweet flour, increasingly used as an addition to soups, muffins, breads, tortillas, cakes and biscuits. The actual seeds are very high in protein and the flour seems to help stabilise blood sugar in people with diabetes.

Mung beans: entrancing dark, frosted-olive green mung beans are one of the basics for making into bean sprouts but can be cooked as any ordinary pulse. Like the red adzuki, they are quite soft and sweet when cooked. Cook between 25 and 40 minutes.

Peas: provided you can suspend both belief and memories of what other people may have done to them, dried peas can be an excellent, honest and sustaining food. They are available whole or skinned and split, green or yellow; the green seem harder to find but I prefer them. Peas rarely hold their shape, which is why they are put into soups or made into soups. It is always a surprise to taste how sweet they are, a good reason why they have always seemed a natural accompaniment to salted meats.

Cook for about 45 minutes. If you want to keep some semblance of shape, use a minimal amount of water and watch carefully.

Soy beans: God’s worst joke. That’s the verdict on soy beans by the late Tom Stobart, surely one of the greatest but least rated food writers. In The Cook’s Encyclopedia, he acutely points out that on the one hand soy beans are the richest and most sustaining vegetable food on earth; on the other they are terminally boring to the point of being inedible. The only exception I ever found were small green ones available for just a few weeks in early July around and about Nanjing, and thus unlikely to change the world’s perceptions.

But what I want to know is, who bothered to work out that if you made milk from soy beans you could make almost anything else? Which Chinese person worked out it was so good for you it should be called the ‘meat plant’? We’ll never know that and are still finding extraordinary facts, most importantly that soy beans are the only vegetable product that exactly replicates the complete spectrum of the proteins (amino acids) of meat. In fact, soy is a far better provider even than meat. Stobart says an acre that grew soy beans would keep a man alive for 2,200 days, but the same acre of grass would sustain him only 75 days if he ate the beef it produced.

The United States is now the world’s greatest grower of soy beans and virtually all of it is genetically engineered, something constantly to remember if this is important to you. So also is most of the world’s soy crop, and non-GE soy beans are thus particularly hard to source. Most of the US crop is for margarines, after hydrogenation of course, but the East is still the greatest consumer of soy products, as bean curd or tofu and myriad other products including soy sauce. In the West, we are also beginning to take soy milk seriously, use soy flour to add protein to breads and baked goods, make non-dairy ice cream-style products and, less successfully, spin its protein into threads which we stick together and pretend is meat, but less than we used to do, thank goodness.

There are thought to be a thousand varieties of soy beans, in most colours of the rainbow and sized from petits pois to cherry size. Their oily blandness make most of them pretty awful to eat, for they neither absorb other flavours nor contribute anything of their own, no matter what their culinary companions. But once they are cooked (probably after chopping) and then pressed and drained, the result is soy milk and that opens a new world. But before you start on it, beware.

The soy bean harbours the most gas-inducing ingredients of all. Introduce soy bean curd slowly into your diet, over several months, or your good intentions will be just so much hot air.

Soy milk can be made instantly at home from dried pre-cooked soy powder or other products of the beans. The end result will look like milk and should have rather less soy taste than the beans. But not always. Some soy-based products are frankly inedible, too distinctly bean-tasting, others are good enough for second helpings. In some cases the cause of the horrors is bad production technique, but it is much more likely to be the use of inferior bean varieties, which leave a lingering, raw, green bean taste. At least that is how the problem was explained to me in Japan, where I tasted wonderfully creamy tofu, and in Sweden, where an ice cream-type product comes without the slightest clue to its soy bean origin.

Bean curd: probably best known as Japanese tofu, but this is actually an invention of the Chinese, as most things seem to be. They call it dau fu. Like dairy milk, soy milk can be curdled with lemon juice or vinegar, giving a slight welcome acidity and flavour. Commercially the curd may be obtained with a whole range of substances. Calcium sulphate, gypsum, usefully increases the calcium content but can give a slightly chalky consistency – hardly surprising as the substance is related to plaster of Paris. Calcium chloride may also be used and this is often accompanied by emulsifiers which bind in the liquid whey that would normally separate out, thus giving a higher yield and softer, wetter curd; the addition of simple sugars (not sucrose) add sweetness and a smoother mouth feel. The Japanese also use an extract of sea water to obtain soy curd, and there are other ingredients which will do the curdling.

As with dairy cheese making, the exact texture and firmness of the curd will be affected both by the amount of curdling agent and by how much pressing and draining there is of the curd. Generally the softer curd is used for steamed dishes or for adding at the last moment to wet dishes. The firmer curd is chosen for frying, often done to give extra strength to pieces of curd before they are added to a braising or boiling stock.

Although made from a liquid which has been boiled, bean curd must be treated as though it were a fresh milk product and kept submerged under water and refrigerated for safety, where it will be fresh and safe for a few days – up to a week if the water is changed daily. It should be virtually odourless and tasteless, but has the invaluable chameleon virtue of absorbing other flavours, making it a great extender of other foods. Soy curd/tofu is a complete replacement for animal protein, but is commonly used as a complementary extender of meat, particularly in south-east Asian and Oriental cookery.

Apart from its invaluable protein content, bean curd is high in B vitamins and iron, but the latter is in a form difficult for the body to absorb. Vegetarians are recommended always to eat or drink something containing vitamin C with bean curd, as this helps unlock the iron.

The growing interest in south-east Asian and Oriental produce and flavours has brought tofu firmly out of the cold and into the chilled cabinets of many supermarkets.

It is important to introduce bean curd gradually into your diet and best to mix it with other foods rather than eating it in large quantities or on an empty stomach. When you are used to it, treat it as a bland white cheese, and serve it with bright condiments, or add it to highly flavoured foods, giving it time to absorb its surroundings. It may be fried, deep-fried, roasted, toasted, marinated, microwaved, crumbed, stir-fried, chopped, cubed, sliced, whisked into ‘cheesecakes’, whipped into creamy desserts, frozen into ices. Frozen tofu/bean curd products run the gamut from beany to amazing.

There are, famously, food writers who claim they would put anything but tofu into their mouths. But as the choice of products and standards grow it is increasingly difficult to avoid doing so. Bean curd is no longer an alternative, but a pleasure to pursue for itself.

Bean curd sheets: also called bean curd skin, because this is how they begin and how they can feel in the mouth – like skin. They are made from soy milk rather the way clotted cream is manufactured; the milk is heated until a skin is formed, which is taken away and dried flat. They must be soaked to soften before being used as a wrapper for other foods, and are then deepfried or fried and poached in a rich stock of some sort, which is when they soften up to the texture of skin. Funny thing for vegetarians to want in their mouths, but there you are.

Milk: soy milk is a godsend for thousands, for it is cholesterol free and lactose free. But it can have a vegetal flavour that is either disconcerting or downright horrid, to say nothing of the internal problems caused by those indigestible leguminous sugars, problems that are not a million miles away from those of lactose malabsorption, which many are trying to avoid.

A comparative taste test of soy milks in Good Food Retailing magazine was not flattering on the whole: many manufacturers over-sweeten their product to counteract the intrusive soy flavour and, unsurprisingly, the soy milks liked best had no soy aftertaste. Still, at least soy milk is taken seriously enough to be listed by supermarkets and manufacturers are trying hard to get it right, offering a choice of organic, sweetened and unsweetened. It’s a product worth watching, but in the meantime, you are more likely to enjoy using it in hot drinks only if you also sweeten them.

How anyone believes the difference in fat content – or anything else - between cows’ milk and soy milk justifies ordering soy milk in espresso coffee is stratospheres away from my understanding. If you don’t like cows’ milk, drink black coffee, the way it is supposed to be.

Miso: a Japanese product that looks like thick, dark, grainy honey but is a paste of soy beans fermented with malted grains. The precise grain added determines the colour and flavour of the result, and some versions are traditionally more salted than most. The most important basic use is for miso soup, miso diluted with dashi or plain water, a highly nutritious and delicious soup with a malty, salty flavour, which is basic to the Japanese diet. In my experience, it is much more digestible and causes far fewer intestinal problems than other soy bean products such as bean curd: indeed a bowl of miso soup seems to settle everything down.

The basic flavour of miso is warm and sweet, with overtones of honeyed fermentation and when diluted there is a nuttiness rather than beaniness. Once you discover miso there are thousands of ways to use it to flavour food before, during and after cooking, as well as to enjoy it for itself. Excellent for making marinades. Chinese (brown/yellow) bean paste is related but not as comfortingly flavoured. Miso should be refrigerated when opened.

Aka: a red, rice-based miso, generally highly salted and will last without refrigeration; any mould may be removed and ignored.

Hatcho: made only of soy beans and aged in wood for at least three years. It is rich, dark and complicated in flavour and although it may be mellowed with shinsu-miso, q.v. may be used by itself as a tonic drink or in a soup.

Mugi: made with barley to give a peasant and gratifying flavour, but is said to be more popular in the West than in Japan these days, where it is expensive.

Shinsu: yellowish, young, all purpose and cheapest.

Shiro: made with rice, white and rather sweet.

Soy protein: the protein content of soy beans spun into strands, which are like meat fibres and may be shaped this or that way to imitate meats. Like bean curd, TVP is characterless but absorbs any flavours with which it is cooked and thus conveniently extends meat dishes, especially chopped or minced ones, to reduce costs or increase profits. That seems reasonable if labelling rules are strictly observed.

Soy protein mixed with meat in sausages is an important advancement in nutrition for lowincome families with children. Vital, accessible protein gets into their bodies without excesses of fat and low-quality meat usually associated with cheap sausages. In fact, if soy protein were used as an extender even in high-quality sausages, we would all win, eating less animal fat, and supporting an agricultural industry that makes far better use of land than meat production.

What makes me uncomfortable is the use of TVP as a meat substitute for vegetarians. You find it flavoured with all manner of manufactured ingredients, as bacon or chicken fillets and commonly in some ‘healthy’ frozen foods for instance. If you are a vegetarian it follows you are looking for better nutrition, more honest nutrition. So why would you eat soy masquerading as meat, and only be able to do that because of perfectly unnatural additives? There are hundreds of millions of the world’s inhabitants who would share their proper, honest soy-based vegetarian recipes. Why reinvent the wheel if you have to add ingredients from factories?

image1

I encourage both vegetarians and meat eaters to enjoy more soy products of all kinds. Growing soy for human consumption is an excellent and more productive use of natural resources, offers countless fascinating ways to vary the diet, helps balance our budgets – and you do get over the wind problems. But vegetarians eating fake meat? That seems very second rate.

Tempeh: essentially, yet another form of fermented soy bean. Generally made with cubed bean curd injected with a specific yeast that creates a white mould and turns the curd into a creamy texture, like ripening cheese. May also be made with cooked and lightly crushed whole soy beans. Like cheese, it should be avoided if ammoniacal.

Tepary beans: in the legends of the Tohono O’odham peoples of the US South, the Milky Way is made of white tepary beans scattered across the sky by their coyote deity Ban. These small beans, native to the Arizona desert and thereabouts, are one of the most drought and heat resistant crops in the world and varieties are being introduced into Africa to help ease food shortage problems there.

As well as their capability to flourish in blistering desert conditions, the tepary is particularly high in protein, more so size for size than most bigger beans, and so is also valued as a practical food to carry – less is indeed more. The two most valued varieties, marketed throughout the US, are the rich earthy brown bean and the sweeter, lighter white. Both are prepared like other beans and can be used as the basis for stews and casseroles, for bean salads, for soup or in soups, puréed as dips, in fact, can be used wherever any sort of bean would appear.

There are many other colours and flavours of tepary bean, and my bet is this most ancient food is poised to become one of the saviours of the 21st century.

General cooking advice

There is continuing discussion about whether beans, peas and pulses need to be soaked, and certainly if the soaking is not done properly fermentation can begin, which gives an unpleasant flavour. My experience is that soaking in cold water can sweeten and enhance the flavour by starting the germination process, the malting process and it certainly cuts down on cooking time, a saving of expensive energy. Generally speaking, overnight, or from morning to afternoon, is enough soaking time – allow plenty of room for expansion, especially for chickpeas, and keep everything fairly cool.

If you have forgotten the cold water soak, it is possible to plump them relatively fast by bringing them up to the boil in water, simmering for five minutes then turning off the heat and leaving until cold – for at least two hours.

It’s vital soaking water should not be used for cooking if you are a-feared of digestive wind problems. Drain off the soaking water, rinse under running water and then use fresh cold water for cooking. If you have persistently bad digestive problems you can add a blanching stage, bringing the soaked produce to the boil in fresh water, simmering for five minutes, draining and then rinsing before cooking in more fresh water.

Salt should never be added to the cooking water until everything is thoroughly cooked or they will be tough; this includes not adding bacon. Acid in the water also toughens, making tomatoes or onions in any form a bad choice too. The age-favoured technique is to cook your beans, peas or pulses in plain water. And only then to drain and add them to a rich stock or vegetable-based liquid that has been prepared separately. This is when herbs, onion, tomato, bacon, ham, pancetta or prosciutto shank might be added too, and beans, for instance, would then be baked on for some hours, so some disintegrate to help form a sauce. It is acceptable technique with whatever you are cooking to mash up to a quarter to thicken the sauce.

Pressure cooking gets beans really tender or cooked in a short time. My advice, gleaned from Rose Elliott’s The Bean Book, is that you should use 6kg/15lb pressure, cook for a third of the usual time and always include a few spoonfuls of oil as this prevents foaming up, which might clog the valve.

Sprouting grains and seeds

Sprouted seeds and grains are invaluable nutritionally, but are no more packed with goodness than the fully matured seed or grain crop. Their real plus is as a reliable crunch when you want texture contrast.

Today mung beans are the most commonly used and you’ll also find sprouted alfalfa and adzuki beans. Alfalfa is the finer smaller one, and mung are the ones coarsely used to excess by mean vegetarian restaurants and by Chinese takeaways. Both should be eaten before there is a tinge of green apparent, for at this stage they develop bitterness and lose vitamin vitality.

They are best eaten raw or barely cooked. So add them to soups or stews just before serving. You can add them to nut loaves, omelettes, scrambled eggs, stuffings or vegetable purées – and to salads of course. It’s worth trying them tossed in lots of butter with garlic and lemon juice as a vegetable.

It’s so easy to sprout your own grains I thought I’d tell you how. As well as the mung, alfalfa and adzuki, you might also experiment with chickpeas, whole lentils, peas, soy beans, beans, whole rices, wheat, fenugreek, barley and sesame seeds. Chickpeas and fenugreek usually give home growers the fastest results.

This is what you do:

Put 50g/2oz of seeds or grains into a jam jar.

Cover the seeds with luke-warm water.

Tie a piece of muslin or very coarse cotton over the mouth of the jar.

Let the seeds absorb the water overnight, adding more water if required as some seeds will more than double their size. Chickpeas swell so fast they get jammed, so free them gently.

After eight hours, drain off the excess water and leave the jar to stand.

Twice a day rinse the seeds with cold water. Then invert the jar and gently shake it to prevent sprouting roots tangling. Leave for a few minutes to allow water to drain thoroughly, then invert again. When the shoots are three times the length of the seeds but before tiny leaves appear, the sprouts are at their peak.

If you don’t want to eat them immediately, put the rinsed sprouts into the refrigerator, which inhibits but doesn’t stop further growth.

image1

It is a simple, honest, satisfying food, yet bread represents such an emotive part of our heritage that it is always at the mercy of social fashion. It is a reflection on living standards in much of the western hemisphere that we should have to go to a speciality store or farmers’ market to buy bread that is honest, well made and unadulterated. In other parts of the world, sense has long prevailed and bread making is just as it was ten, one hundred or two thousand years ago.

In the villages, towns and cities of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, for instance, the unleavened chapatti and its relatives are still regularly hand-shaped and baked over open fires. The slapping sound of the dough being shaped between the palms of squatting women is an integral part of daily life. Some families may buy the coarse wholemeal chapatti flour but most will grind their own as they need it. Similar breads, sometimes made with flours other than wheat but also baked on griddles, are made further north. In Afghanistan the dough is rolled out to be a metre or more in diameter. Armenians make smaller, even thinner chapatti-type breads and Sardinians still make ‘paper bread’ in their mountain villages. Further west these thin flat breads have been discovered by sandwich shops, and are now rolled around fillings, cut into smaller sizes and sold as ‘wraps’.

In the lands of Islam, yeast has long played a part in bread and pastry making. The most common types of bread there are flattish discs, often spiced, and the oval envelopes known widely in Europe as pitta. These are also common in Greece, Cyprus and have become the national bread of Israel. Eaten fresh and warm – whether Israeli, Greek or Arabic – it is perfectly delicious.

Countries of the eastern and southern Mediterranean still offer the interested tourist a chance to see a sight once familiar throughout Europe. In the tight alleyways and up the steep-stepped lanes of bazaars and medinas you will see single loaves of leavened dough being carried to a central baker. Each family identifies its loaves with its own mark, a custom that prevailed in some areas of England right up to the turn of the 20th century.

Countries with a traditional high regard for their food forbid their flour to be tampered with, by omission or commission. This is certainly true of France and largely why the French enjoy such