Tripadvisor and the Trots (unedited) - Published in the South Shropshire Journal 18/10/13

Oh heavens. It’s deadline day: 450 words on tasty food and I’ve left it to the last minute again. Normally I find this lark pretty straightforward, unless I’ve picked up some sort of horror-bug and spent the last what feels like forever on, in and around the lavatory, expelling tasty food at great velocity. Boy-oh-boy, just the thought of food makes me never want to look at it again, let alone write about it.

But, ever the consummate professional, loyalty to my small flock of readers will ensue and this week I offer you a recipe for a weak mug of tea with just a tiny splash of milk and two sugars, washed down with half a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

As if I would. While my stomach is turning and its bile rising in the back of my throat I’ll turn my numbed brain to the internet. Now, make no mistake, the internet has bought us many great things (unfortunately not this purely-on-paper column – big hint there Ed), but Tripadvisor is not one of them. Or more accurately, some of the people who use Tripadvisor. If you’re unfamiliar with this heinous website, it gives anyone with a grudge and access to the web, free-rein to libel the hospitality industry. Had a stale packet of crisps at your local? Pop on Tripadvisor and tell the world that their curtains are horrid and the chef tried to chat up your girlfriend, after he spat in your soup. Easy as that.

Negative reviews on Tripadvisor are almost always written by cowards and fools. Cowards, because it’s so easy to say mean things about other people when you’re hidden behind a computer screen and a pseudonym. Fools, because if you had big enough cojones to make a complaint at the time, you’d most likely have walked out of whichever place it was you decided to slam, with a free pud or bottle of wine, and a personal apology from patron. If at the time you thought the fish of the day was a bit stinky, but ate it all up, paid full price, didn’t complain then went home and wrote about it, well it just makes you a moron with the trots.

However, more hideous than those punters who write the reviews are the restaurateurs who make impulsive, half-witted and vitriolic responses to their adverse feedback. So-called professionals telling their customers where to stick it looks like a cry for help, desperation and always over-inflated egoism. Personally it puts me off visiting their establishment way more than any drunken fumble of a ‘review’ ever would. However harsh the criticism they receive, it shows that their views on hospitality, and customer service are way out of kilter and that they know the customer is wrong.

Hospitality is above all about generosity, with a smattering of humility. Tripadvisor, in the wrong hands, is the very antithesis of these great virtues.

Subway comes to Ludlow, and my Reuben Sandwich (unedited) - South Shropshire Journal 11/10/13

Recently our mother paper, the Shropshire Star reported that over the next few years the global jumbo-sandwich chain Subway is to open something like 645489982 new branches in our county, in turn creating 960930852098 new jobs. My figures may be slightly out - I didn’t read it - but it’s something along these lines.

In the north of the county this sort of news is not going to ruffle too many feathers. Telford, Oswestry, Wolverhampton, well they’re all kind of Subway-ish places.

But here in Ludlow, where Subway is to open within the next few weeks, the news is causing a bit of brouhaha. The mess! The frightful smell! What will people think? Our town is the gastronomic capital of all England! (Which it’s not, by the way. When will people get over it?) Well, I think we just need to suck it up. It’s just a little shop in a little shop (Ludlow’s branch is going to be a teensy franchise stuffed at the back of the existing Spar), selling a few foot-long ‘subs’ to spotty college students (a small minority) and hungover unemployed people (a slightly larger minority). I won’t be feeding the giant, but I’m not going to make a big deal over it. There are many perfectly good sandwiches to be had in this town.

However, the best sandwich in Ludlow, possibly in Shropshire, or even the whole world was the Reuben Sandwich that I made this week with my good friend Reuben. The Reuben was born in an American deli back in the 1920s. Many delis, and many Reubens claimed to be its creator. Quite honestly I couldn't care, because minor historical details shouldn't get in the way of a good Reuben.

So, Reuben being the most Jewish goy I know seemed like the most suitable person to build this bad-boy with. Because really the Reuben is so much more than a sandwich, that one builds rather than simply makes it.

It goes something like this: find a large, fatty rolled up piece of brisket (see your local jolly butcher), steep it in a brine to which you add your own secret blend of herbs and spices. Wait for a fortnight. Then, boil it up for a good five hours until it’s tender and sexy and whiffs a bit like tinned corned beef. Meanwhile find a Polish delicatessen and buy a big jar of sauerkraut (I went to west London for mine). Find some good Swiss cheese and make proper Thousand Island dressing. Make your own rye bread, or cheat and find a baker who’ll do it for you (thanks Peter Cook of Price’s in Ludlow).  And you’re all set. Unfortunately I’ve run out of inches, such is the Reuben’s complexity, but believe me, it’s worth the effort. I hereby expect dozens of letters demanding the recipe. We’ll see…

Teenage Kicks, and the Pleasure of Real Cider (unedited) - South Shropshire Journal 4/10/13

Christmas 1994. A disco or maybe a ‘ball’ – first time I’d worn a tie out of school - somewhere in Herefordshire, or maybe Shropshire. Around these parts for sure. A rugby club, perhaps a hotel function room. Can’t quite remember, but there was a girl who looked pretty under the winter moon, propped saucily against the flank of a hired minibus somewhere out the back. I’d persuaded her that the fresh air would do us both the world of good, and proffering her one of two Marlboro Lights that I’d stolen from my father earlier that day (chivalry was as important to me then as it is now) I promptly chundered up two whole pints of GL cider onto her best shoes. I don’t think I ever found out her name.

I discovered cider shortly before alcopops were born. For the underage drinker in the early to mid 1990s, cider was the go-to, default grog of choice. A bit appley, a bit fizzy, cheap and strong. Eminently vomitable. It tasted passable on the way back out. I wish I’d had a Laurie Lee moment: “Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer…” But I never did. I guess Laurie was on something better than GL.

I took a break from cider until there was another girl, years later, in Somerset who lived at Burrow Hill. She was crackers, but the cider from Burrow Hill was clear, pure, and tasted of sunshine. We collected it weekly in jerry cans and had a hazy summer that lasted long.

Cider is a drink that perhaps tells more stories than any other. The real deal – made by human hand and encased in bottles and barrels – encapsulates mists and mellow fruitfulness with more clarity than any other drink. Call it what you like (the French call it terroir) but drink honest, hard working cider at the right time and you’ll flood your palate with fruit, trees, and fertile soil. Good cider is produced in proliferation around here and right now the cider makers of the Marches are enjoying their best harvest in a decade.

The UK cider industry is worth £2.9bn at the moment and expectations are that it will hit £4bn by 2017. With 480 cider producers in the UK, and two million cider apple trees planted in the last 20 years, it’s looking pretty (Cider with) rosy.

There’s some funky gear in the supermarkets, with big name branding. They’re doing the legwork for the little people who are producing liquid genius, with provenance and soul and merrily cashing in on the big boys’ success. Shop around and try them all. You’re in the heart of cider country. It would be rude not to. 

Beef Cheeks, and how a Trotter will Improve Almost Anything (Unedited) - South Shropshire Journal 27/9/13

At some point, over the weekend of the Ludlow Food Festival I found myself in possession of a quartet of beef cheeks. You know how it is: one minute you’re tucking into your 18^th pint, the next you have a carrier bag full of cow face. Not wanting to look a gift-horse in the proverbial phizog I sobered up, took them home and slopped them onto a chopping board where they glistened all crimson and gristly whilst I poured myself a steadying beer and thought about things awhile.

Maybe it’s a boy thing, but I’ve always had a bit of a macabre obsession with knobbly wobbly bits. To a certain degree the more off-putting a piece of animal looks in the raw, the more likely I am to want to ingest it.

Naked beef cheeks look spectacularly nasty, but to the keen cook it is these extremities that get the heart racing. Cows don’t do much, but they chew all day long. Their maws are pistons for perpetual mastication, which means that in the wrong hands they’ll be tough as old boots. Unless of course like me, you treat them terribly gently to the point where they submit and yield with a sigh. Which is exactly what I did.

Into the pot they went with a bottle of rough red, plenty of garlic and a pig’s trotter hewn in half - There are few dishes, especially those that are slow cooked that will not be improved with the addition of a trotter – and they simmered at a mere blip for many hours. The progeny born of this mess of face and foot was one of such sticky, meaty savour that I took pride in calling it my baby.

Of all the animals that are killed for our greedy pleasure there are scary and oft-forgotten parts that need to be brought into our lives and tummies. Eschew them at your peril. The flippy-flappy ‘oysters’ on a chicken known in French as sot l’y laisse, roughly translated as ‘the bits that only a nutter would leave’; the brains of calves, pigs, and lambs, blanched, crumbed and fried in hot fat; hearts and gizzards of duck devilled on buttered toast. Balls too, should not be missed. I’ll draw the line at pigs’ ears though, and anything that retains the crunch of cartilage.

These bits will always be cheap or indeed free if you make friends with the right people but they will command attention and skills that are pleasurable to learn. They should not require a strong stomach to prepare or eat. If the hidden parts of edible animals cause you to shudder, then I would argue that perhaps you should reconsider your status as a meat eater. Arm yourself with Fergus Henderson’s seminal book Nose to Tail Eating, the bible of body parts, and get stuck in!

The Slaughter of Tiny Birds, Golf & Committees (Unedited) - South Shropshire Journal 20/9/13

I’ve got a bit of an issue with committees. Committee people, a bit like golf people give me the willies somewhat, all earnest and laughing at things that aren’t really that funny, not laughing at things that really are funny, odd clothes, a poor grasp of personal hygiene and that sort of thing. I’ve been on a few committees myself and never went the distance. Those that I’d like to be on won’t have me, so I’ll take a pop at all of them. Silly me, I’ve already probably alienated half of my readership and I’m only 87 words in to a 450 word piece (at least half the population of Shropshire are on a committee and / or play golf). Mneh, I’ll manage without them.

Anyway, long story short, I was reading about the Committee Against Bird Slaughter, and by heavens they’re a busy bunch. Based in Germany the CABS dash about all over Europe (sometimes the Near East too), causing havoc for all those who delight in, well, slaughtering birds. Most recently several members of CABS have been expelled from Les Landes in France by the local gendarmes for protesting about the trapping of the ortolan.

The ortolan (emberiza hortulana – should there be any classicist ornithologists amongst my remaining readers) is a tiny little thing – highly rated by greedy Gauls - that is force fed in a little dark box, then drowned in Armagnac and roasted before the whole thing is scoffed, bones and all. To get the most from the experience, one should apparently drape a linen napkin over one’s head to enjoy all the tasty birdie aromas.

I can kind of see what the CABS’s objection is, but if you’re going to eat miniature buntings, you might as well do it properly.

It’s around about this time of year when I turn my mind to personal gains that can be achieved from the mass slaughter of tiny birds and begin to drool unattractively in gluttonous anticipation. Within the next couple of weeks there will be young partridge in the local butchers’ shops, blasted from the skies above landed estates and perhaps the tastiest treat of early autumn. More affordable than the grouse, and with a less scatological flavour, this is a dickie-bird I really relish.

Woodpigeon too, shot over the stubble fields are available now. Plump-breasted, cheap, and plentiful (which reminds me of a weekend I once lost in Amsterdam – maybe an anecdote for another time), this is vermin worth seeking out. Braised whole for a long time with peas – frozen work fine, those grey-green French jobbies in jars are even better – or just the breasts sautéed quickly in butter with some fried field mushrooms…Oh my!

Sorry CABS members, I won’t be signing up any time soon, so I’m out. 

The Ludlow Food Festival (unedited) - South Shropshire Journal 13/9/13

One sunny Sunday in September 1994 I turned up – under familial duress - to help out at the first Ludlow Food Festival. I was fifteen years old and my parents with some of their friends had got this thing together in Castle Square.

My parents owned a small cookware shop on the High Street, Dad was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and a brand new Tesco was about to open up on the site of the old livestock market.

In the Church Inn one evening (you give me a properly Great Idea that wasn’t born in a pub, and I’ll give you a tenner), a bunch of likeminded people bashed their heads together in defiance, and decided that Ludlow had enough independent food shops and local producers to create a bit of a celebratory hoo-ha. Shaun Hill, who opened the legendary Merchant House restaurant at about the same time tells me, “It was obvious even to a blind man that a small town that could support three cheese shops, half a dozen world class butchers and two first rate greengrocers contained enough people who cared about food.”

It was a sort of  farmers’ market back in September 1994, but there had never been a farmers’ market, in Ludlow or anywhere else. I was there, reluctantly chopping up sausages for people to taste, not realising or caring what this would become.

It’s hard to imagine a time when food festivals didn’t exist, but truly they’re modern phenomena. Ludlow gave rise to the food festival and in turn to an epicurean awakening that exists and flourishes nineteen years on.

The impact that the Ludlow Food Festival has had on reviving artisan food production in this country cannot be underestimated. There are now many food festivals, and some are undoubtedly more highbrow in elite foodie terms. However, Ludlow’s independent traders all those years ago put a peg in the ground that has stayed put.

Ludlow Food Festival is a part of me, and it’s in my blood. I’m not a director, or even on the committee, but every second weekend of September I’ve been there. I’ll be there this year too, amongst other things co-hosting King Pong (a smell-off of the world’s stinkiest cheeses, brought to you by the Ludlow Food Centre). The sun will shine, and I shall beam with pride that I live in a small town where something as huge as this happens every year.

                       

In 2013, my Mum is still a director of this glorious event along with a few other stalwarts who were there in the Church Inn at the beginning. 2013 promises more demonstrations, tastings, workshops and – most importantly – local food and drink producers than ever before. Come one, come all, and enjoy the party.

This year’s Ludlow Food Festival runs from 13^th – 15^th September. For information visit www.foodfestival.co.uk or call 01584 873957

Blackberries and Foraging (unedited) - South Shropshire Journal 6/9/13

                                “At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

                                 Among others, red, green, hard as a knot…

…Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

        picking.”

Dear old Seamus Heaney had late summer bang-to-rights when it came to blackberries, and I’ve delighted in watching my eldest daughter tottering around inky fingered and crimson mouthed, foraging food for free. In my aspirational head it’s all so very kids’ section of the Boden catalogue, but in fact it’s M & Co down the passageway by Shropshire Building Supplies. I don’t mind revealing where we get our blackberries, because by the time you read this Bea and I will have had the lot of ‘em.

For me, blackberry picking is the very apotheosis of the childhood idyll, along with climbing trees, throwing sticks at conker trees, and attempting to buy rude magazines from petrol stations. The “lust for picking” however, is a thrill that I wish to instil in my children much in the same way it was passed on to me. I remember as a small boy at prep school taking unripe apples from a tree that was very much out of bounds, eating the lot of them and soiling myself within twelve hours. Those were the days.

Foraging is currently the Big Thing. Historically, foraging was a bit of a necessity because peasants didn’t have Tesco. Now it’s unnecessary but cool. And actually grubbing around for food from the verges (one reader recently warned against this – fie to them I say) and fields is jolly good fun, remarkably rewarding, totally free and often legal. My lovely friend Liz, based down the road in the Golden Valley is a full-time forager and furtles around in hedgerows turning her pickings into the most wonderful edible lotions and potions: www.foragefinefoods.co.uk

As much as I love a scrumped apple or a blagged blackberry, fungi is where the fun guys (geddit?) forage. My old Dad was something of the amateur mycologist and would often take himself off to ******* Common or ***** Hill (serious ‘shroomers never reveal their hunting grounds) armed with a small knife, a basket and Roger Phillips’ seminal book, Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Great Britain. I would accompany him from time to time in the woods, always on the search for the elusive boletus edulis, the penny bun, the cep. On our way to the hunting grounds we would find field mushrooms and puffballs to take back for lunch. It was only ever when Dad was foraging on his own that he’d find a cep that was always “eaten by slugs and not worth bringing home.”

Next week, a preview of the beautiful beast that is the Ludlow Food Festival. In the meantime, happy foraging!

Moments before filing this piece I heard on the news that Seamus Heaney died today (30^th August 2013). I dedicate this week’s column to the memory of Heaney, one of the greatest wordsmiths of the modern era.