The New Yorker

Food, Glorious Food

The New Yorker, August 6, 2001
By REBECCA MEAD

The British cow has suffered terrible image problems in the past few years, owing to the fright of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and the blight, last winter, of foot-and-mouth disease. Yet at Borough Food Market, which takes place every Friday and Saturday in Southeast London, cattle are objects of reverence. There are, however, no actual cows at Borough. The marketplace is appropriately dank and rough-hewn-a cavernous yard underneath the arches of a commuter-train track-but it is not the kind of market to which cows come, except in the form of extremely high-end hot dogs. These can be bought from a stand, and behind a sizzling grill hangs the Northfield Farm sign, which promises that the meat is all "rare breed," and features an illustration-a portrait, really-of a cow's face, with intelligent, knowing eyes. The cow in the picture gazes at you, establishing a rapport that will be consummated only when the sausage goes into your mouth. It would seem almost Hindu, if it weren't for the eating part. Borough Food Market is the place Londoners mention when they want to make the argument that the English have started to care about cooking. It's Dean & Deluca meets Hunts Point, and it is thronged, on a typical Saturday afternoon, with the Gucci-sunglasses-and-flip-flops brigade, Londoners with great hair and ever-increasing property values. There's a foie-gras stall, with tasting spoons at the ready. There's a stand entirely devoted to the ostrich: ostrich filets, ostrich pepper steaks, ostrich burgers. There are stalls where you can sample half a dozen different olive oils, and a stall that sells nothing but garlic from the Isle of Wight. A chocolatier offers tastes of candies with adventurous flavor combinations, like caramel and salt. You can find a zillion different kinds of organic mushroom, laid out in baskets, like a fungal Citarella window. There are so many baby vegetables for sale that you wonder whether any vegetables have been left in the ground to see adulthood. At lunchtime, a long line forms at a stand that sells coal-grilled-chorizo-and-arugula sandwiches, even though the English don't know how to pronounce "chorizo."

To suggest that the English have become obsessed with food seems, at first, like
perversity, on a level with proposing that the French have developed a national
predilection for celibacy, or that the Japanese can't stop talking about their feelings. Of course, shoppers at Borough Food Market buying their Joselito ham-it comes from Iberian wild pigs raised on acorns in dappled sunlight, according to the pigs' handsomely produced brochure-are the more militant variety. Affluent Londoners may patronize Borough, or they might go to a long-established butcher's like Lidgate's, in Holland Park, another center of urban cow-worship, where a sign in the window advertises the farmers' commitment to "respectful husbandry befitting these noble animals, giving them the freedom to browse as well as to graze," as if the farm were a high-end spa.

Still, even ordinary British citizens are being more careful these days about what they put
in their mouths. Farmers' markets, selling local or regional produce, are starting to spring up all over the country. In the past several years, consumers have been able to go to food fairs at stately country homes, where they can sample specialty products from local farmers and indulge in the strangely British masochism of seeing how the grand folks up on the hill live. (Unlike Americans, who visit the homes of the wealthy in a spirit of aspirational pleasure, the English do so with a lingering sense of serfdom.) The major supermarkets, where the British do sixty per cent of their food shopping, offer vast sections devoted to specialty imported goods-spiced pestos from Morocco, toasted-pumpkin-seed oil from Austria, and, that metric of modernity, an infinity of different olive oils. For the past few years, global gourmands have been arguing that the restaurants in London are now better than the restaurants in Paris. There are even celebrity chefs. Food has become interesting. Recently, the gossip column of London's Evening Standard, which is usually devoted to the tawdry comings and goings of minor nobles and pop stars, featured an item headlined "CHEESE SHORTAGE PREDICTED FOR CHRISTMAS," in which a person described as "Britain's only Master of Cheese" warned that the country is facing "a cheese catastrophe." It was the lead story.

All this would hardly be worthy of note-"FINE MEAL AVAILABLE IN INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL CITY" doesn't sound like news-were it not for the historic awfulness of the English diet. Anyone over the age of thirty-five can remember when olive oil was something you bought in a pharmacy (it's good for getting wax out of your ears, apparently), and English children are still raised to enjoy a range of foodstuffs that are more or less inedible. These include such offerings as the chip butty (French fries between slices of white bread) and perplexing toppings for toast, like canned spaghetti and baked beans and Marmite, a black, salty, yeasty spread that causes gagging in foreign nationals.

If you ask London food professionals why the English are gourmandizing, you'll get various interpretations of the national character. Henrietta Green, a cookbook writer and an advocate for farmers' markets, told me that the English were beginning to be educated about food, although they still had a long way to go. "If you go shopping with a French consumer and an English consumer, the French one wants to be tempted, engaged, persuaded that this is the most wonderful piece of brie," Green said. "The English shopper is much more skeptical, thinking, Why the hell should Ipay two or three pounds for this cheddar? They never make the equation that if you pay something extra you are getting something better."

Green is an energetic woman of middle years, with dark-brown bobbed hair and ample proportions. We met for lunch at Clarke's, on Kensington Church Street, one of the best of the London restaurants that serve local ingredients. (It's owned and run by Sally Clarke, who trained in California and was inspired by Chez Panisse.) I ordered Scottish smoked salmon and crème fraîche, and Green had grilled squab with pancetta and apricots and bitter greens. She had meringue with cherries for dessert, and I had cheese and oatmeal crackers. "In these environmentally correct and politically correct times, people are more concerned about food," she said, gnawing on a squab leg. "Food miles-the number of miles it takes for a food to get to marketplace-are very important. One kilo of asparagus from California uses four kilos of aviation fuel to get here." She cracked her squab bones with her teeth, and wiped her plate clean. "Food is like fashion," she said. "If you look at fashions, they are cyclical, and the thing that really moves something on is a new technical development. There isn't all that much you can do-and then, all of a sudden, Lycra is invented. But then there is a reversal, and everyone wants a hundred-per-cent linen. For a long time, there wasn't all that much you could do with food-and then, suddenly, there were planes that could bring us every kind of food every day of the week. We can fly strawberries in from Peru. We can farm the desert. And then there is the reversal. And right now, in terms of food, we're having a linen moment."

This might also be described as a cashmere moment in English cooking, cashmere
being the favorite fabric of Nigella Lawson, who is currently Britain's most celebrated television cook, and whose voluptuous form, clad in tight Tse separates, has attracted as much attention as her way with a rack of lamb. British television is jammed with gastro-tainment: almost every evening, in prime time, viewers can tune in and watch one host or another bustling about a handsome kitchen while brandishing an olive pitter or lathering elbow-deep in an organic turkey. Gary Rhodes, the host of a televised amateur bake-off contest called "Master Chef," has a head of spiky hair identical to that which the violinist Nigel Kennedy used to wear, for similar branding purposes; Ainsley Harriott, who now hosts a cheesy game-show/cooking hybrid called "Ready Steady Cook" (and its spinoff, "Celebrity Ready Steady Cook"), is tall, black, and particularly gifted at chatting up post-menopausal women. At a level of celebrity equivalent to that enjoyed by David Beckham or Geri Halliwell is Jamie Oliver, "The Naked Chef." (He's already on the Food Network in the United States.) Oliver is a twenty-six-year-old alumnus of the River Café, one of the best restaurants in London, who has been transformed by television into a puckish kitchen pinup: he's scruffy yet cute, with straggly hair that is decades away from receding. He's unthreatening and friendly, even if he does lay on the Cockney patois as thick as marmalade, helping to extend the reach of such terms as "lovely-jubbly" and "pukka" well beyond their natural boundaries. "The Naked Chef," so-called because the recipes are stripped down, was one of the first cooking shows to offer a life style rather than a set of handy instructions: Oliver is seen charging around London's markets and fishmongers on his motorbike, sliding down the bannister of the spiral staircase of his house in the City, and having a bunch of his pukka mates over for dinner. (He has recently fallen afoul of some serious London food types, who object to his doing commercials for Sainsbury's, the supermarket chain; this is viewed as a betrayal of culinary principles, like Dylan going electric.) Oliver is credited in England with making cooking cool for the New Lad, that soccer-loving, Ecstasy-eating, Maxim-reading hormonal mess of a creature, although it is equally possible that his show's success lies in giving middle-aged women license to spend half an hour watching an attractive young man poking cuts of raw meat with his fingers or pummelling his pestle into his mortar.

Nigella Lawson's program, "Nigella Bites," is the show of the moment in England, however. (It will be shown in America on the E! network this fall.) Lawson is not a trained cook; she's a newspaper columnist with a lot of influential relatives. Her father, Nigel, was Margaret Thatcher's chancellor; her brother, Dominic, is the editor of the Sunday Telegraph; her late husband, John Diamond, was one of the most celebrated journalists in England-for nearly four years, he wrote a column for the Times about having throat cancer. (The column became a book, a television documentary, a stage play, and a TV drama.) Lawson, who is forty-one and has two children, has long, dark hair and pale skin and a brilliant makeup person; she looks like a cross between Anna Nicole Smith and a young Susan Sontag. As she is stirring a bowl of chocolate cake batter-her manicured hands are usually photographed at the level of her chest-she will say things like "You are not talking strenuous exercise, but you are talking deep, deep pleasure," and the show is punctuated with images of her licking pork fat off her fingers or digging into a dish of mashed potatoes the minute they're finished. The joke going around is that the series should be called "Nigella Swallows."

I met Lawson for lunch at the River Café, where she pointed out, over pork loin and chard, that she has a highly developed sense of camp and irony. This would be a fine explanation of her show's naughtiness were it not that everything in England is camp and ironic. (Irony is where the English begin, just as the French begin with insouciance or the Americans with earnestness.) Her transformation from journalist to celebrity-she's been on the cover of everything from the middlebrow Mail on Sunday's magazine to the New Statesman, Britain's leftist equivalent of The New Republic-is, she theorized, due in part to the public awareness of her private life. "The world loves a girl who has suffered," she said. "I don't mind pity-I love pity-but I find other people's need for me to be tragic very wearing."

Cooking programs like hers, Lawson suggested, appeal to something elemental, although she did not propose the same elemental thing that many of her commentators seem to focus on. "I think human beings have a fantasy about transformation of the self," she said. "Food is like that: you are transforming something by cooking it. And you are watching television thinking you might transform yourself into someone who might do that." Men like her because she is, as she puts it, "posh totty" while also being warmly maternal. Lawson is a Jewish mother, no less, although she's the kind of Jew who grew up eating ham for Christmas dinner. Women like her, too, and this is because Lawson, as well as being gorgeous and having the panache to wear gold mules with feather trim around the house, is also vulnerable, and prone to putting on weight, which is something women always appreciate in other women. All that licking of fingers has something desperate about it; the show usually closes with a scene of Nigella creeping into her kitchen in her silk dressing gown and scarfing down mouthfuls of whatever she cooked on the show that day. It looks a bit pathological. Lawson gained fourteen pounds during the filming of the present series, and the director instituted a weekly weigh-in for the whole team. ("The sound man and I were neck and neck for a while, but I tore ahead at the end," Lawson says.) That must be a heartening statistic to many female viewers, although not to those who might actually try to cook anything she proposes.

Learning to cook is not really the point of Lawson's show, just as MTV does not exist to teach viewers how to play electric guitar. Cooking instruction is still provided on British television, however, by Delia Smith. If Lawson is the Princess Diana of the kitchen-glamorous, tragic, and endlessly hungry-then Delia Smith is the Queen: traitlaced, reliable, and chilly. She's sold millions of books; it would take a peasants' revolt or an act of Parliament to get rid of her. (In fact, Smith turned down a peerage a few years ago, saying she was too busy.) Smith has been on TV for nearly thirty years, but her view of the culinary capacities of her country people are those of a reproving schoolteacher.

In a celebrated episode of the show, "Delia's How to Cook Part One," Smith demonstrated the correct way to boil an egg. "Cooking was taken out of the schools curriculum in England," she told me. "My latest book is dedicated to the young people of Britain-it's for them." Smith gets quite exercised about the way other television hosts eat. "I have a no-tasting rule," she says. I hate that. I can't bear anybody putting anything in their mouth. I think it is naff and awful. They can't speak while they are eating; and then, if they do speak, it is always the same thing-'Oh, delicious,' 'Oh, yummy.' Yuck."

A cooking-show host who is disgusted by eating is, in a way, perfect for Britain, since the gastronomic fantasies promoted by television and the supermarket aisles have been accompanied by a succession of food scares: mad-cow disease, swine fever, genetically modified foods, and this year's foot-and-mouth disaster, during which acres and acres of English countryside have been closed for business and three and a half million animals have been slaughtered. Foot-and-mouth struck during the wettest twelve months on record, which added to the national gloom; in a new book about the crisis, "The End of British Farming," Andrew O'Hagan provides an impressive range of meteorological descriptions, all of which a less ambitious writer would have rendered as "It was raining." (O'Hagan's book is not the only one about the agricultural crisis:
a current best-seller, "The Great Food Gamble"-"essential for anyone who cares about themselves or the future," the cover asserts, which leaves only psychopaths and the severely depressed outside its purview-is by a well-known BBC news presenter named John Humphrys. (It's as if Tom Brokaw had written about cows instead of the Greatest Generation.) In this context, watching sensuous television about beating eggs with cream and butter serves as an excellent displacement activity. It's a lot safer than eating.

The most perceptible reaction to the food scares is the rise in sales of organic foods, which have increased fifty-five per cent in 1999-2000-a rate that alarms organic-food producers and small distributors in Britain, like Thoby Young, who runs the Fresh Food Co, an organic-food delivery service. He told me, "Whatever else it is, that growth is not organic. It has much more in common with a beef calf that is pumped up with steroids and hormones to gain maximum weight." The real troublemakers, most independent food distributors would argue, are the big supermarket chains, which sell about three quarters of the nation's organic food. The flagship branch of Sainsbury's, on the Cromwell Road, offers aisles and aisles of organic foods: meats, vegetables, eggs, and milk, but also more creative organic offerings catering to the traditional tastes of the British, such as organic chocolate bars and organic gin. Supermarkets are the perennial villain in most British food narratives: when Sainsbury's announced, earlier this year, that it was going into partnership with farmers in Grenada to meet the demand for organic produce, the Guardian made the venture sound like an invasion far grander and more sinister than Reagan's 1983 adventure. Andrew O'Hagan's book is an antisupermarket jeremiad; the "multiples," as they are known, are the opposite of food sanctuaries like Borough market. At one point, O'Hagan visits a Devon farm that produces yogurt which had been described to him by the Sainsbury's public-relations people as the kind of small-scale, high-quality venture the store wished to encourage; the farm in question, he discovers, is cattle-free. "I was absolutely delighted when we managed to get rid of the very last cow off this farm," the farmer tells him. "That's the thing about cows, you know, they just poo all the time."

The only food person I met who had anything good to say about supermarkets was
Nina Planck. She is a thirty-year-old American living in London, where she launched the capital's first farmers' market, in 1999, and now runs ten of them. "The supermarkets have delivered great variety, and great choice, and great prices," she told me, when we met in a Soho restaurant one evening. "They have given the consumers something they wanted, and now the consumers are blaming them for it." Planck has been in the U.K. for five years, which is long enough not to be surprised by such a reaction. She was raised on a farm in Virginia, though she is the kind of farm girl who went to work for Dick Gephardt when he was House majority leader, and most recently was a speechwriter for the American Ambassador to Great Britain. (She plans to return to the United States later this year to launch a political career.) She's very media-friendly, which in England means that she provides facts, figures, and anecdotes, and also tends, at her interview appointments, to arrive early and have an open bottle of wine on the table when the reporter gets there. Planck is regarded with skepticism by some members of the London culinary community, their ostensible objection being that her farmers' markets cast too wide a net: she allows anyone who lives within a hundred miles beyond the M25, the freeway that encircles Greater London, to sell in her markets; purists say the venders shouldn't travel more than forty miles. But there's also an element of understated resentment at this very young, very slender outsider telling locals how to run the show: "the American," she is called, as if she were the sole ambassador of bad Hollywood movies, McDonald's, and 'N Sync. Planck, who is currently taping her own television cooking program, is as evangelical about free markets as she is about greenmarkets. "A year ago, we had almost no lettuce in the markets," she said. "Now most of our vegetable growers are doing mixed salad. That is how quickly they respond when they are under the pressure of market forces, and there is a magic in that."

With choice comes responsibility; now that the British have access to the best of the world's food and the finest their own country has to offer, the important thing, food experts feel, is that they learn what to do with this bounty. It is possible, of course, that, even though the English are now able to buy goat cheese and radicchio, the native taste bud will revert to type. A look at the contents of a Marks & Spencer sandwich case, which might hold such an abomination as crab-flavored seafood pieces in cocktail sauce on oatmeal bread, suggests that some degree of reversion is inevitable. Still, the vanguard continues the process of reëducation. After I had lunch with Nigella Lawson at the River Café, I called Ruth Rogers, the co-owner of the restaurant, and discussed the importance of seasonal food, as it is outlined in the restaurant's most recent cookbook, "River Café Green." The book consists of twelve chapters, one for each month, containing market specific recipes; a reader should never, ever flip to September and make figs baked with crème fraîche when it is still only March and she should be making sea kale with lemon and pecorino romano. "We are urging people not to be seduced by the choice of raspberries in February," Rogers said, sternly. In a perfect Britain, all eating would be like lunch at the River Café on a sunny summer's day: the pork would be organic, the scallops would taste of the ocean, the Thames would sparkle, and so would Nigella Lawson, and-but for the absence of Jamie Oliver in the kitchen-all would be delicious and perfect. Rogers, by the way, said that she hasn't served beef or offal for three years, because of B.S.E., but she was thinking that she might reintroduce it to the menu. The cows will be honored to be included.