Each Friday one of the students at Tante Marie’s gives a little 5 minute talk on a food person – a chef, restauranteur or food writer. This week it’s my turn to give a report on Elizabeth David, so I thought I would give you a little summary of it here.

Elizabeth David was probably the most influential english food writer of the 20th century. She was born in 1914, educated privately in England and then sent to study at the Sorbonne in Paris at 17. There she lived with a French family who gave her her introduction to French cuisine. When she returned to London, she pursued an acting career for a while, then in 1938 she left for Crete via Antibes. She spent the whole war abroad, first in Greece, and later in Egypt where she worked for the British civil service.
She returned to England in 1946, to a country just out of war and still in the depths of rationing. Faced with the shortage of meat and fresh food, and the array of substitutes that had been concocted to deal with rationing, she attempted to recreate her experiences abroad by writing down the food she remembered and could not recreate through lack of ingredients. This frustration with post-war English food and suppliers was to drive and inform much of her writing. Her writings at this time formed the basis of her first book, Medittaranean Food in 1950.
From 1950 to 1965, Elizabeth David published a further 4 books on French and Italian food, and countless magazine articles for the Sunday Times, the Spectator, Vogue, Food and Wine and Gourmet magazines, amongst many others.

She continued to write and travel throughout the sixties, as well as opening her own kitchen shop in London and in the seventies published two books on English food – English Bread and Yeast Cookery and Spices and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. Her trilogy on English Food was completed with The Harvest of the Cold Months, published after her death.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Elizabeth David’s writing. She brought the fresh flavours and simple preparation of Mediterranean cuisine to an England which had been making wartime dishes for 5 years and where olive oil was only available from the chemist. She was instrumental in persuading shops to stock such oddities as pasta, aubergines (eggplant) and courgettes (zucchini). As restaurant cooking made a resurgence in the sixties and seventies, she was often critical (to the point of cruelty) of the fashion for elaborate garnishes of lettuce leaves, curly parsley and carved vegetables.
She influenced virtually all British chefs who came after her and cooked Mediterranean-inspired food. Alice Waters (owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley) began cooking in California from French Country Cooking. The Acme Bread company (also in Berkeley) was founded on English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Jane Grigson called her “the greatest food writer of her time”.
And her favourite place to eat lunch in San Francisco was an Italian place called Vivande porta via, run by one Carlo Middione, who has been teaching us Italian cooking at Tante Marie’s in the past few weeks.

The american resistance to measuring ingredients never ceases to amaze me. I suspect that this has something to do with the original immigrants and pioneers travelling to a new land with as little as possible. As old-fashioned balance scales are very heavy, and require a series of weights, packing this in the suitcase would not have been an option. For some reason, in the centuries since, measuring by weight still hasn’t caught on. There is some sort of vicious circle in play where books and magazines don’t print weights because people generally don’t have scales, and people don’t buy scales because the recipes don’t require it!

For some ingredients, volume makes sense – sugar is pretty easy to measure in a cup. However, when it comes to something like flour, the room for error is huge. Even professional chefs have been known to fill a cup of flour with anything from 3.5 to 7 ounces of flour. It is a relatively safe assumption that most recipes mean a cup of flour to weigh 5 oz, unless they specify otherwise.

Butter is also measured in cups or tablespoons. This convention makes no sense at all until you realise that american butter is sold in sticks of 4oz, or half a cup, and marked on the wrapper into tablespoons. When interpreting an american recipe, use the following conversions:

1 cup = 8 fl oz = 32 tbsp
1/2 cup = 4 oz butter = 8 tbsp

2 cups = 16 fl oz = 1 american pint
4 cups = 32 fl oz = 1 quart

Now, armed with this information, you can have a look at some good American food websites. Epicurious is one of the best, containing it’s own recipes as well as those from Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines, two of the top food magazines in the U.S.

Tante Marie’s, where I am at culinary school, also has good recipes from Mary Risley’s book on the site.

The other major sites worth mentioning are Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen – the former being the magazine and the latter the TV show from the same people. These people exhaustively test recipes and equipment to work out the best way to do things. Some parts of the site require subscription, but it’s worth looking at the free stuff that’s there, and keeping an eye out for the magazine too.

So, I just promised that I wouldn’t talk you through everything we do each day – and now I’m going to break that rule, and tell you what we did today. What can I say – I make these rules so that I can enjoy breaking them.

Today’s workshop was on pasta – we made fresh egg pasta and 3 different sauces that we then had for lunch. Now, I’m sure you have heard this before somewhere, but making pasta isn’t hard. However, this time I want you to believe it – it really isn’t. In fact, it’s not much more difficult than making playdough.

Having said that, there is a caveat – you need a pasta maker. Nothing else will do unless you really want to get to work with a rolling pin. However, they are not expensive – John Lewis has one for £35, and in the US they are between $30 and $80 depending on how many accessories you get. Imperia is a good make – it’s has interchangeable cutting attachments, which is useful.

Pasta dough is a lot like bread dough – a very simple mixture:
1) The ingredients are flour, water, salt, plus optional fat. Eggs can provide both fat and water.
2) The dough is kneaded in both cases, to develop the gluten and make the dough stretchy. Fat in the dough gets between the gluten strands and makes the dough more silky.
However, in the case of pasta, you don’t have to worry about yeast, or rising, or baking, making things *much* simpler.

The steps in making pasta are as follows:

• Combine the ingredients into a dough. This can be done equally well in a food processor or mixer as on a counter. It’s better to leave out some of the flour, as it can always be added in later.
• Knead the dough (like kneading bread dough) until it is a smooth ball. Add extra flour to prevent it sticking, but not so much that the dough dries out. This can also be done in a processor or mixer.
• Rest the dough. This is important as it allows the gluten in the dough (which you just developed into nice stretchy strands) to relax, making the dough easier to manage later on.
• Knead the dough further to make it smooth and silky. For this use the widest setting of a pasta machine, feeding it through several times until it feels super-smooth. Dust the dough with flour each time to prevent it sticking in the machine. If you don’t have a pasta machine, you should knead it by hand for about 10 minutes until the same consistency is reached, and rest it after this instead. The dough should be quite stiff and solid.
• Roll the dough out by feeding it through the pasta machine one setting at a time, to make it thinner and thinner, or by using a rolling pin and plenty of elbow grease. If the pasta ribbon gets too long, cut it in half and continue one piece at a time.
• When it is thin enough (apparently fettucine and other flat noodles should be thin enough to see through when it is done), use the appropriate cutter attachment to slice into noodles or whatever other shape you need. Filled pasta is trickier and waits for another time.
• Dry the pasta for at least 30 minutes, with the pieces separated, before cooking just like dried pasta, but for a shorter time.

And that’s it. Smooth, silky, tasty pasta dough. Ideal for light, creamy sauces and delicate vegetables like asparagus. For a more complete description, try the links below, or your favourite recipe book. Italian cooking books will be a good starting place, and Jamie Oliver is keen on making fresh pasta (not surprising given his time at the River Cafe).

A recipe for fresh pasta from Epicurious.

Jamie Oliver’s basic pasta recipe on his website.

The recipe we used today at Tante Marie’s was 8oz all-purpose flour (plain flour is fine too), 2 large eggs, 1 tsp olive oil and a pinch of salt. We didn’t use all this flour, but keep the surplus to hand to flour things as you go.

The basic curriculum for us follows classical French cuisine, with Californian twists sprinkled throughout. But what Nathan wants to know is, why do the French always have to get involved?

One of the main reasons that we (and almost every other cooking school) follow French haute-cuisine is that it the only national cuisine that has been codified. The idea was to create a definition of what a French chef to be able to do and thereby create a profession. By ensuring that all chefs met this standard, they could maintain the quality and make sure that chefs were paid appropriately. The result of this was to generate a list of standard dishes, sauces and preparations that should be within the repetoire of a French chef. In this way, if a chef from Normandy were to say “Make me a mornay sauce” to a chef from Bordeaux (or Boston), he would get what he expected, and not some regional variation.

Many people were involved in the gradual codification and organisation of French cookery, including La Varenne, Antoine Careme and Brillat-Savarin. Auguste Escoffier simplified their work and out on the final touches, which he then recorded in Le Guide Culinaire – still used by chefs today.

Of course, a lot of these sacred rules and standards were overturned in the wave of Nouvelle Cuisine, but that’s another story.

So it has been 2 weeks at cooking school – and I have been very remiss in my blog posts. This is partly because I have been exhausted every evening after classes, and partly because I wasn’t sure of the best way to write about this.

One of the things about learning how to portion a roast chicken, say, or cook a stirred custard sauce is that these techniques are hard to describe, but much easier to learn by watching and doing. This is of course, one of the reasons that I am in cooking school in the first place! However, it would make for a pretty dull read if I just described everything we did each day. And I’m sure that many of you are not that interested in the ins and outs of the cooking in any case. So instead, I will try to write around what we are doing, to give you a flavour of what is going on, without all the detail.

Just so you know, I am at Tante Marie’s Cooking School, based in North Beach, San Francisco. They do evening courses and also let people come int o join in the cooking school classes on a one-off basis, so look them up if you are coming to visit. We generally cook in the mornings, and eat what we have prepared for lunch, then have a demonstration of the next day’s dishes in the afternoon.

Today, continuing the film theme, I thought I would give a little mini-guide to films and video on the web. This area has taken off in the last year or so.

First off, film trailers, to link in with all the Oscar-related stuff. Apple hosts a huge number of past and present film trailers on it’s site as a promotion for it’s Quicktime video software (which is free to download as a player). You can also access these through iTunes if you have it (although I actually prefer the web page interface). As it is mostly U.S. trailers on the site, this is a good way to preview films before they reach the UK.

Atom Films is a site showcasing independent films and animation, generally pretty short pieces. You can give you rating and write reviews, so it quickly reveals those that are worth a look. Some seem to generate a pretty cult following. This sort of site will undoubtedly be where the Oscar-winners (or at least Sundance-favourites) of the future are to be found. I’m currently enjoying This Land, a nice little summary of the U.S. election in the form of a version of the Woody Guthrie song.

Being deprived of the BBC (and believe me, 300-odd channels can’t make up for lack of decent content), one of the best ways for me to access it is through their new Player application. This is an extension of the Radio Player, which allowed you to listen to radio live online or to listen to previously broadcast shows. Now you can also access news reports, sports highlights and the weather forecast. It does require Real Player though.

I mentioned Weebl and Bob on a previous blog, as winners of the Yahoo People’s Choice website award for 2004. Having explored the archive of cartoons of their site now, they are pretty good and deserve their popularity. Student humour, but none the worse for that 🙂

If you don’t fancy professionally-generated content, you can always see your nearest and dearest live on a webcam (assuming you both have them). We have had a great deal of success with Apple’s iChat software interfacing with AOL 5.5 on our parent’s PCs, where video-conferencing operates as an extension of AOL’s Instant Messenger. As this requires Windows XP on the PC end, you can also use iVisit, which is a cross-platform application.

Being moderately short of inspiration (and sick) at the moment, I thought I would give you a quick update of my progress in attempting to watch all the major Oscar-nominated films before the awards. In the week or so since the last post on this subject, I have worked through Hotel Rwanda, Maria Full of Grace and Sideways – three *very different films.

Hotel Rwanda was very moving – but how could it not be, with such powerful and real-life subject matter. Nonetheless, it did a good job of telling the story, and I think the best actor nomination for Don Cheadle is certainly well deserved. Maria Full of Grace isn’t one that I was expecting much from. A slightly obscure Colombian film, and something of a surprise in the nominations, it has received a nomination for best actress for Catalina Sandino Moreno. It is a story of a girl trying to escape poverty and look for something more extraordinary. Catalina Sandino Moreno does an excellent job – I don’t know how old she is, but convincingly plays 17 in the film, and gives a phenomenal performance. If you get a chance, go and see it. Drugs in Colombia may not seem like an inspiring subject, but I promise you, it is an uplifting and often very funny film.
Sideways, as expected, was excellent. Yes, it is the only comedy nominated for best film, and it is very funny, but it is also more than that; it’s a sensitive comedy, with real depth to the characters rather than just a series of farcical situations and pratfalls. A genuinely enjoyable movie on every dimension, and I wish it would win best film, although, as it is a comedy, it inevitably won’t.

Should be able to get in Ray and the Aviator this week, and maybe catch up on some of the others when I get to the UK in the week before Oscars.

The Aviator
Before Sunset
Being Julia
Closer
Collateral
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Finding Neverland
Hotel Rwanda
The Incredibles
Kinsey
Maria Full of Grace
Million Dollar Baby
The Motorcycle Diaries
Ray
Sideways
Vera Drake

I’m sure it passed you all by, but last Sunday was Superbowl Sunday in the U.S. As you were probably spared any coverage at all, I thought I would give you a little guide to Superbowl XXXIX.

According to some friends of ours, the important things to do on Superbowl Sunday are, in order of importance:

1. Get together with a room full of people and get drunk
2. See the new Superbowl commercials
3. Watch the game
4. Watch the half-time show

Well, we weren’t a roomfull, but we did watch the game (and the commercials, and some of the show) with friends.

Like many American sports, American football is on a stop-clock, meaning that the clock is suspended while there is no play going on, e.g. between plays or when there is a foul called. So while a game is officially 60 minutes of play (divided into four quarters), the Superbowl took over 3 hours to complete. Including the pre-game and post-game ceremonies and programming, there were around 5 hours of programming dedicated to the stadium events!

The teams this year were the New England Patriots, who won the Superbowl last year and also in 2002, versus the Philadelphia Eagles. With this history, the Patriots were obviously the run-away favourites, with the Eagles playing the underdogs. The Eagles made a couple of purchases of players at the start of the football year with the specific intention of putting together a team to get to the Superbowl. One of these acquisitions was Terrell Owens, who became the star receiver for the team, taking them to a number of victories before becoming injured in a December game. The injury was a broken leg below the knee, and a torn ankle ligament. So, everyone was pretty sure that he was written off, and therefore the Eagles would get taken apart.

Well, in the event, Terrell Owens played the whole game (against doctor’s orders) made 81 yards (which is good for a receiver I think), and the Eagles only lost by 3 points. I can’t say that I’m any closer to understanding the game, though. There is a lot of stop and start, as the whole team is substituted every time they go from offence to defence and back again. Give me rugby any day – or maybe not after England’s performance at the weekend…

Being a lady of leisure, I thought I would make a serious attempt this year to do what I have tried a few times before, namely see all the major Oscar-nominated films before the Oscars ceremony. Usually, being in the UK poses a major obstacle, as several of the films aren’t released there in time. However, being in the U.S., the qualifying criterion is that it has been on release here sometime in 2004.

So I have compiled the list based on those films that have an acting, directing or screenplay nomination, and it runs as follows:

The Aviator – Howard Hughes biopic

Before Sunset – Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy sequel

Being Julia – profile of actress starring Annette Bening

Closer – adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play

Collateral – Assassin plus taxi driver in L.A.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – weird Charlie Kauffman screenplay

Finding Neverland – JM Barrie biopic and story of Peter Pan

Hotel Rwanda – based-on-a-true-story look at Rwandan genocide

The Incredibles – the latest Pixar animation

Kinsey – Alfred Kinsey biopic

Maria Full of Grace – drug mules from Colombia

Million Dollar Baby – boxing story

The Motorcycle Diaries – Che Guevara on a motorbike around Cuba

Ray – Ray Charles biopic

Sideways – vineyard comedy

Vera Drake – abortionist Mike Leigh drama

I have crossed off the list those I have seen thus far. Million Dollar Baby was this afternoon – a really nice little film, with two great turns by Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman as a pair of grumpy old men. It was a bit disjointed in a couple of places though – I suspect that there is a longer, and possible more complete film in the director’s cut.

The only ones that I think will be tricky are those that have been and gone at the cinema but are not yet on DVD – Kinsey and Closer, as well as Vera Drake, which I haven’t seen anywhere yet.

As an aside, they showed the teaser trailer for the new Hitchiker’s Guide movie before it started – due to be released on May 26th. Very exciting! For more information, have a look at Empire magazine’s profile.

I suspect that many of you have heard or been sent the link to the Underground song by now. I thought you should know that the authors and performers of this work have been revealed as a couple of doctor’s from Imperial. I discovered this from the Going Underground blog, a blog about, you guessed it, the tube. They have a whole album of songs that are being sold in aid of MacMillan Cancer Research. I heartily recommend you have a look. Some of them are particularly good for medics or those who know them. And if you haven’t heard the underground song, and have ever been through a tube strike, I suggest you proceed there forthwith (warning: it is quite rude. But funny).

Amateur Transplants