There is a serious argument that takes place every so often as to whether great cooking should be considered an art. I always take the view that it is the eye of the beholder, or in this case the mouth, that should decide the argument.
In my lifetime I have eaten at some of the best restaurants in London and one or two in Paris and New York and invariably I have been pleased and satisfied. I’m not over adventurous. For instance I’m not that keen on Game. Many years ago in London’s oldest restaurant, ‘Rules’ of Maiden Lane, my wife, more daring than me, ordered ‘Jugged’ Hare. She said she enjoyed it and she did seem to eat it with some relish but the smell was so repugnant I could not bring myself to taste even the small sample she offered me. Again I now love Oysters but it was years before I felt confident enough to swallow them, I was always fearful of choking while they were halfway down my gullet, I’ve never tried snails or tripe or Cods’ eyeballs so I can’t be considered a ‘gourmet’ much as I’d like to be. I did have sweetbreads once and thought they were delicious but made the mistake after eating of asking the chef what they were. The common belief is that they are lambs or calves testicles, this is not the case but they are the glands of young animals.
For many years I couldn’t cook. My wife, who I considered a cook par excellente, would ask me to watch her and at least learn the rudiments of cooking in case anything happened to her. I would laugh and tell her “don’t worry, I’ll be gone long before you”, sadly this wasn’t to be. When Shirley, my wife, became ill I would do my best, buying all those easy to cook dishes from Marks and Spencers that are such a boon to working wives and, as she wasn’t eating much we got by. When Shirley died I carried on in a desultory way but gradually I started to cook, one day I even made a complete roast dinner and over the years I have tried my hand at most things until now I’m reasonably competent. I know my wife would have been quite proud of me.
We can only read and wonder at the great cooks of the past, chefs like August Escoffier, Brillat-Savarin and Prosper Montague, they all created acclaimed and memorable dishes, banquets and extravaganzas to entertain the Kings and Queens, Presidents and Dictators, Poets, Playwrights, Actors and Divas of Europe and America All the great chefs seemed to be French and they were famed and feted throughout the world, mighty hotels in London, Paris, Rome and New York vied for their services.
As recently as the 1960s’ Internationally known chefs were French, Swiss, Austrian or Italian, the concept and the ability seemed beyond Britain. There were of course great restaurants run by great restaurateurs but the man in the street didn’t have a clue who the cook was, as long as the food was tasty and nicely presented in good surroundings that was it. There was a school of thought that decor or ‘ambience’ was just as important as the food, more so said some critics.
Things started to change when men like Nico Ladenis entered the restaurant trade, he ran ‘Nico’s’ in Battersea very successfully for many years and because of his success he opened a place in the lush countryside where his customers were mainly farming and fox-hunting types not in the least interested in ‘haute cuisine’ and he made headlines by refusing to put salt on the table or cook a steak well done. He regarded his customers as ‘barbarians’ and didn’t last very long. Robert Carrier also helped to change the scene opening ‘Carriers’ in Camden Passage and suddenly there was all these new restaurants and cuisine's all refreshing the taste buds. Then there was ‘nouvelle cuisine’ a very light way of cooking, using only the freshest possible ingredients this was supposed based on the cooking of Paul Bocuse though the term had been used before. At the same time another great chef, Michel Geurard thought up ‘cuisine minceur’ which was even more refined, using only natural ingredients cooking everything, even vegetables in their own juices, using no or oil fat at all but tasting delicious and being arranged on an outsize plate with the colourful ingredients arranged like an impressionist painting.
Of course we had TV chefs the first one I can remember was Phillip Harben, a mild mannered, bespectacled and bearded man with a striped apron who gave lessons in cooking in a straight forward manner, that was on black and white television and was not at all exciting, it was left to another English cook to inject some drama into cookery programmes this was Fanny Craddock a larger than life character, whose personal appearance, a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Danny La Rue, and her sometimes outrageous statements, caused more comment than her dishes which, though colourful, didn’t appear particularly nice, wholesome or tasty.
Nowadays we have wall to wall cookery programmes, Cooks ‘goings ons’ are given as much prominence in the tabloids as pop stars and footballers. Gordon Ramsey and even his in-laws make headlines. New restaurants which seem to have ‘gala’ openings every week are reviewed in all major newspapers. The higher the prices the better the reviews and the reviewers have become celebrities themselves, their descriptions of the food, the decor, the friendliness or otherwise of the staff try to outdo each other week by week. It’s a competition to see who can be most spiteful or fulsome in their praise. Some of it is so over the top they must be running out of adjectives, in fact sometimes I wonder if they are paryoding themselves.
If I could afford it I would be able more truthfully to assess the quality of the food and the truthfulness of the reviews. Even if one has plenty of money I’m told that some of these places as well as being particular about who they let in have waiting lists so long it could be months and in that time they would have changed owners or cooks.
Even pubs nowadays have become gastro pubs. Maybe the first gastro pub or maybe the first half a dozen were ‘gastro pubs’ but surely not now. Not now the pub companies do the pubs up the same battle ship grey, the same pine floors, the same garbed in black waiting staff, surely they are just pubs serving food, some times good and sometimes bad just like before.
Getting back to the question is cooking an art or a craft? I believe it can be art. If an individual can cook and present something which when you look at it makes your heart skip a beat and when you taste it your heart not only skips but your eyes fill with tears and your hand shakes as you lift the next morsel to your lips then it is art. Maybe your Mother was an artist or your wife or brother. Some people are born to cooking and I believe they can aspire so high that they can be classed as Artists.
Others will never riser above craftsmanship. They can go to catering college, be apprenticed to Gordon Ramsey, open their own restaurant and be sold out every night and still lack that greatness. I believe that is what a Michelin 3 star should be about but I also believe there are many unknown artists out there working in cafes, pubs and ordinary kitchens who only a few people will know about.
There is someone I know who works in a local pub as a chef, his food is pretty good but whenever I hear he is going to make a meat pudding I try to go there, it is simply sublime, the best one I’ve had since I was a small boy. I guess we all know people like that who can achieve greatness with one dish but the true artist is one who achieves it every time.
Saturday 13 November 2010
Thursday 4 November 2010
East Enders
My birth certificate says I was born in Limehouse in 1932. Until I joined the army at the age of 18 I lived most of the time in Old Ford, Bow, E.3.
The ‘East End’ has always been the poorest part of Britain, it’s been mythologised over the years as it has fascinated sociologists, criminologists, writers, missionaries, welfare workers and latterly film and TV makers. From Victorian times to the present day the world has been absorbed by the plight and the crimes of the people and the area.
In 1910 a famous American writer, Jack London ventured to London to find out for himself if the stories of poverty and appalling slums in the area were true. His account of his stay was published under the title ‘People of The Abyss’ it is a ghastly account of the lives of those that inhabited this miserable place. It described a world of human beings shuffling through their world like downtrodden ghosts, poor, starving and oppressed by their poverty.
What was especially shocking about this account was that London at that period was the capital city of the richest and biggest Empire that had ever been.
Conditions must have improved by the mid thirties because I had a very happy childhood even during the war despite being evacuated for a few short periods. There was still poverty, lots of kids never had a toothbrush or had seen a hankerchief. Shoes, or more likely boots, were rarely new and were often stuffed with cardboard as they wore out but most of us had a roof over our heads and never starved.
In my day the East end started at Aldgate and ended at Bow Bridge. It comprised, at the very heart, Hoxton, Bethnal Green, Mile- end, Bow, Poplar and Hackney, the rest were east Londoners, not ‘East-enders’, over Bow bridge was regarded as the suburbs. Nowadays they even count people from Dagenham as East enders this wasn’t true a few years ago. Even the speech was different, ‘Cockney’ as spoken by a true native was richer and much less harsh and whiney to that spoken on the fringes and what has now evolved through television and radio as ‘estuary english’ a very ugly version of London accented speech.
Even the clothes were different , we had all the best Jewish tailors in our areas from the well known Maxie Cohen of Aldgate and Myers of Hoxton to the expensive Les Miller in Whitechapel, Francks of New road and Charles Stevenson of Brick Lane, and the girls had all the best fashion shops as well. We frequented the ‘Lane’ on a Sunday morning gathering round ‘Solly’s’ the record stall in Wentworth street it was where anyone who had ‘style’ went.
Weekends we went to the Lyceum and danced to the sound of Oscar Rabin, we belonged to Youth clubs like the Repton and now and again went to pubs like the Hospital Tavern in Whitechapel or the Coach and Horses in Mile end or the Deuragan in Hackney.
In the mid sixties most of my London was still recognisable, still lots of shops, still lots of businesses run by the same people and families that had been there for years, same Jewish tailors, Jewish restaurants like `Blooms’ and ‘Goldwaters’ and Mr Marks still serving smoked salmon, beigels and latkas from his delicatessen in Wentworth street. Roman road was still a thriving family market with Butchers selling hot saveloys or faggots with pease pudding as a sideline along with all the different meats. The greengrocers, bakers, cook shops and pie, mash and eel shops and fish stalls whose families had been coster mongers for a 100 years they were still there the backbone of the area.
But if we know our history change is inevitable and when one reads Shelley’s great poem ‘Ozymandias’ it hammers home the message that nothing is forever and so it has proved with my ancestral home.
In the late 40’s we had lots of immigrants from the Caribbean, this was to fill a need, there was full employment and many jobs in transport and the hospitals were hard to fill so Railway, Bus and Hospital authorities advertised in the West Indies, but the newcomers, despite much racism and some resentment, fitted in well enough, taking to our institutions like the pub and the church so things didn’t alter that much. There were some ‘race’ riots in Notting Hill but not in our neck of the woods. The East-end have always had many people from different lands, there was a sizeable black population around the docks, always lots of seaman from the West Indies in the Cable street area and lots of what we called Lascars in their seamans dress of blue dungarees, as well as the Chinese in the original ‘Chinatown’ of Limehouse.
However in the 70’s Uganda’s President, Idi Amin, decided to throw all the Asians out of his country. Many of these were prosperous and well educated Indians, mainly Muslim, and though they were stripped of all their assets they came to this country with a wealth of knowledge, education, professionalism that other immigrants had lacked. People who emigrate do it to better themselves, in this case they were forced out of a country of which they were the main middle class. Many of these settled in London and started small businesses, there was also an influx of people from Bangladesh when that troubled land went through periods of disaster, floods and famine and also Pakistan was a major source of cheap labour, gradually Whitechapel in particular started to change, most Jewish businesses packed up and left their places being taken by Asian entrepreneurs who easily filled the vacancies in the garment trade and started their own shops and restaurants and opened Mosques to cater for the mainly Muslim element. Of course this alienated local populations far more than the Caribbean influx because fathers and mothers and even grandparents followed children to this land and they were seen, true or not, to be a drain on our already over stretched social services and hospitals. Many East enders at that time moved to places like Basildon, Harlow and Debden, lots of streets were knocked down and replaced with new dwellings that were mainly occupied by newcomers and so to people of my generation the East end was becoming a very different place.
In 1985 a series, ‘East enders’ started on BBC television. It proved very popular and is still going to this day although I watched a few episodes and snorted my derision in common with most people of my background we all thought it was so unreal and I have never watched it since. If I was to watch it nowadays it might reflect life in that part of London I only know that back in the 80s’ it bore very little relation to the life we lived. The Mitchell brothers two garage mechanics were ludicrous as so called gangsters and hard men. Dirty Den was just not believable, Angie the landlady was a more plausible figure, there were many glamourous landladies in pubs but the rest were not true to life.
However, life imitates Art and many of the actors in soaps are now full blown ‘celebrities’ and they are seen in fashionable night clubs and restaurants along with footballers and pop stars and lots of young people seem to aspire to their way of life and probably East end young people copy what they see on the soap and ape the actors dress and speech so it’s probably a fair representation of the area it tries to dramatise.
The ‘Essex’ boys and girls whose parents or grandparents were from East London no longer go ‘down the lane’ they’ll go to the new super shopping malls like Lakeside or Blue Water or night clubs in Epping, Gants Hill or Chigwell, some of the more ‘progressive’ will make a pilgrimage on Friday or Saturday night to Shoreditch which has an abundance of bars and pubs much to the annoyance of the long term residents and I doubt any of them go to ‘Tubby Isaac's’ for a bowl of jellied eels after their Friday night pint as we used to.
As an old East ender I still have much affection for the place and I still visit the area as one of my sons lives there and, thank goodness, they still have some pie and mash shops, but I don’t think I could live there anymore, many areas are alien to me, I quite enjoy the bustle and colour of places like Brick Lane and Green street near Upton Park, and, if I was younger, the liveliness of the bars, clubs and pubs would appeal to me, I also like the diversity that the multitude of races bring, there seems to be representatives of everywhere on earth living in East London, there are Arabs, Australians, Austrians, Belgians, Brazilians, Canadians, Chileans, Danish etc. etc., one could go through the alphabet, recently I asked a waitress in a restaurant in Shoreditch where she came from as I couldn’t place her accent I was quite surprised when she said Northampton.
It does no one good to see the future but in terms of the cosmos it wasn’t long ago when London’s population was numbered in thousands rather than millions, it is now one of the great cities of the world and still attracting migrants by the hundreds of thousands and a big percentage are drawn like magnets to the hub of East London, I remember it as being at it’s best fifty years ago I wonder what will it be like fifty years hence?
The ‘East End’ has always been the poorest part of Britain, it’s been mythologised over the years as it has fascinated sociologists, criminologists, writers, missionaries, welfare workers and latterly film and TV makers. From Victorian times to the present day the world has been absorbed by the plight and the crimes of the people and the area.
In 1910 a famous American writer, Jack London ventured to London to find out for himself if the stories of poverty and appalling slums in the area were true. His account of his stay was published under the title ‘People of The Abyss’ it is a ghastly account of the lives of those that inhabited this miserable place. It described a world of human beings shuffling through their world like downtrodden ghosts, poor, starving and oppressed by their poverty.
What was especially shocking about this account was that London at that period was the capital city of the richest and biggest Empire that had ever been.
Conditions must have improved by the mid thirties because I had a very happy childhood even during the war despite being evacuated for a few short periods. There was still poverty, lots of kids never had a toothbrush or had seen a hankerchief. Shoes, or more likely boots, were rarely new and were often stuffed with cardboard as they wore out but most of us had a roof over our heads and never starved.
In my day the East end started at Aldgate and ended at Bow Bridge. It comprised, at the very heart, Hoxton, Bethnal Green, Mile- end, Bow, Poplar and Hackney, the rest were east Londoners, not ‘East-enders’, over Bow bridge was regarded as the suburbs. Nowadays they even count people from Dagenham as East enders this wasn’t true a few years ago. Even the speech was different, ‘Cockney’ as spoken by a true native was richer and much less harsh and whiney to that spoken on the fringes and what has now evolved through television and radio as ‘estuary english’ a very ugly version of London accented speech.
Even the clothes were different , we had all the best Jewish tailors in our areas from the well known Maxie Cohen of Aldgate and Myers of Hoxton to the expensive Les Miller in Whitechapel, Francks of New road and Charles Stevenson of Brick Lane, and the girls had all the best fashion shops as well. We frequented the ‘Lane’ on a Sunday morning gathering round ‘Solly’s’ the record stall in Wentworth street it was where anyone who had ‘style’ went.
Weekends we went to the Lyceum and danced to the sound of Oscar Rabin, we belonged to Youth clubs like the Repton and now and again went to pubs like the Hospital Tavern in Whitechapel or the Coach and Horses in Mile end or the Deuragan in Hackney.
In the mid sixties most of my London was still recognisable, still lots of shops, still lots of businesses run by the same people and families that had been there for years, same Jewish tailors, Jewish restaurants like `Blooms’ and ‘Goldwaters’ and Mr Marks still serving smoked salmon, beigels and latkas from his delicatessen in Wentworth street. Roman road was still a thriving family market with Butchers selling hot saveloys or faggots with pease pudding as a sideline along with all the different meats. The greengrocers, bakers, cook shops and pie, mash and eel shops and fish stalls whose families had been coster mongers for a 100 years they were still there the backbone of the area.
But if we know our history change is inevitable and when one reads Shelley’s great poem ‘Ozymandias’ it hammers home the message that nothing is forever and so it has proved with my ancestral home.
In the late 40’s we had lots of immigrants from the Caribbean, this was to fill a need, there was full employment and many jobs in transport and the hospitals were hard to fill so Railway, Bus and Hospital authorities advertised in the West Indies, but the newcomers, despite much racism and some resentment, fitted in well enough, taking to our institutions like the pub and the church so things didn’t alter that much. There were some ‘race’ riots in Notting Hill but not in our neck of the woods. The East-end have always had many people from different lands, there was a sizeable black population around the docks, always lots of seaman from the West Indies in the Cable street area and lots of what we called Lascars in their seamans dress of blue dungarees, as well as the Chinese in the original ‘Chinatown’ of Limehouse.
However in the 70’s Uganda’s President, Idi Amin, decided to throw all the Asians out of his country. Many of these were prosperous and well educated Indians, mainly Muslim, and though they were stripped of all their assets they came to this country with a wealth of knowledge, education, professionalism that other immigrants had lacked. People who emigrate do it to better themselves, in this case they were forced out of a country of which they were the main middle class. Many of these settled in London and started small businesses, there was also an influx of people from Bangladesh when that troubled land went through periods of disaster, floods and famine and also Pakistan was a major source of cheap labour, gradually Whitechapel in particular started to change, most Jewish businesses packed up and left their places being taken by Asian entrepreneurs who easily filled the vacancies in the garment trade and started their own shops and restaurants and opened Mosques to cater for the mainly Muslim element. Of course this alienated local populations far more than the Caribbean influx because fathers and mothers and even grandparents followed children to this land and they were seen, true or not, to be a drain on our already over stretched social services and hospitals. Many East enders at that time moved to places like Basildon, Harlow and Debden, lots of streets were knocked down and replaced with new dwellings that were mainly occupied by newcomers and so to people of my generation the East end was becoming a very different place.
In 1985 a series, ‘East enders’ started on BBC television. It proved very popular and is still going to this day although I watched a few episodes and snorted my derision in common with most people of my background we all thought it was so unreal and I have never watched it since. If I was to watch it nowadays it might reflect life in that part of London I only know that back in the 80s’ it bore very little relation to the life we lived. The Mitchell brothers two garage mechanics were ludicrous as so called gangsters and hard men. Dirty Den was just not believable, Angie the landlady was a more plausible figure, there were many glamourous landladies in pubs but the rest were not true to life.
However, life imitates Art and many of the actors in soaps are now full blown ‘celebrities’ and they are seen in fashionable night clubs and restaurants along with footballers and pop stars and lots of young people seem to aspire to their way of life and probably East end young people copy what they see on the soap and ape the actors dress and speech so it’s probably a fair representation of the area it tries to dramatise.
The ‘Essex’ boys and girls whose parents or grandparents were from East London no longer go ‘down the lane’ they’ll go to the new super shopping malls like Lakeside or Blue Water or night clubs in Epping, Gants Hill or Chigwell, some of the more ‘progressive’ will make a pilgrimage on Friday or Saturday night to Shoreditch which has an abundance of bars and pubs much to the annoyance of the long term residents and I doubt any of them go to ‘Tubby Isaac's’ for a bowl of jellied eels after their Friday night pint as we used to.
As an old East ender I still have much affection for the place and I still visit the area as one of my sons lives there and, thank goodness, they still have some pie and mash shops, but I don’t think I could live there anymore, many areas are alien to me, I quite enjoy the bustle and colour of places like Brick Lane and Green street near Upton Park, and, if I was younger, the liveliness of the bars, clubs and pubs would appeal to me, I also like the diversity that the multitude of races bring, there seems to be representatives of everywhere on earth living in East London, there are Arabs, Australians, Austrians, Belgians, Brazilians, Canadians, Chileans, Danish etc. etc., one could go through the alphabet, recently I asked a waitress in a restaurant in Shoreditch where she came from as I couldn’t place her accent I was quite surprised when she said Northampton.
It does no one good to see the future but in terms of the cosmos it wasn’t long ago when London’s population was numbered in thousands rather than millions, it is now one of the great cities of the world and still attracting migrants by the hundreds of thousands and a big percentage are drawn like magnets to the hub of East London, I remember it as being at it’s best fifty years ago I wonder what will it be like fifty years hence?
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