Good reviewer gives restaurant a drubbing

There aren’t many restaurant reviewers who I trust to say clearly what they think without adding in a touch of egomania. Jay Rayner of the Observer is one of the ones I trust. He was the first serious reviewer I’d ever read who didn’t shy away from clear negative reviews, as well as good positive ones.

Why am I writing this? Because one of his most recent reviews is marvellous. Here are a few quotes from his review of London restaurant Suka from 29 April 2007.

Any attempt at conversation – ‘God I hate this place. How can they live with themselves,’ etc – kept being interrupted by waiters trudging off into the distance and back again
[…]
The one advantage of this set-up was that the waitress was so far away from me, and the music so loud, I couldn’t really hear her recitation of the menu’s ‘concept’.
[…]
Anyway, having eaten there, I can sum it up myself: ‘We are now going to extort as much money from you in as short a period as possible for as lacklustre a meal as we can get away with.’

Now go and read the whole thing. It’s great!

– DM

UPDATE: I’m not alone in cyberspace when it comes to expressing respect for Jay Rayner. If you’re interested, take a look at what Silverbrow has to say.

Failed food: Cadbury Picnic Hedgehog

Cadbury Picnic Hedgehog

What were they thinking? Take a hedgehog, remove its spines, dessicate it, add chocolate flavour, and roll it into a Cadbury Picnic. It doesn’t sound promising: Cadbury Picnic Hedgehog.

Come to think of it, we don’t even have hedgehogs in Australia! Your average teenage chocolate-bar-buyer probably doesn’t even, like, know what a hedgehog is. The bar should perhaps have been called a Picnic Echidna for the local market. I’ll check the ingredients list to see if it’s only made from local ingredients. Hmm, can’t tell. Perhaps there’s an illicit trade in dessicated hedgehog. AQIS should be told!

My local Coles supermarket was clearing the shelves of ‘New’ Cadbury Picnic Hedgehogs. Special! Clearance! Within the best before date. How could I resist?

A unique combination of peanuts, chocolate fudge, biscuit pieces, caramel and wafer in delicious Cadbury milk chocolate.

Deep down I knew there were no mammals involved. Hedgehogs just don’t work in confectionery. The manufacturer, Cadbury, was apparently thinking of that Australian slice-staple Hedgehog, mostly made of crushed biscuits, chocolate, butter, sugar and nuts.

The Cadbury Picnic Hedgehog (formerly known as ‘New’, now ‘Clearance’) bore no resemblance to Hedgehog. Really. To say someone was even thinking of Hedgehog when they developed this product would be stretching things. Take one Picnic bar, remove the rice crispy bits, add biscuit nuggets and pieces of so-called fudge. Bite into it.

Stop!

Those fudge pieces are quite firm. Firm enough to make you think the chocolate bar contains foreign bodies (think: contamination scare). Was I about to break a tooth on a stone?

The very firm little ‘fudge’ pieces were thin and rectangular and tasted just a bit of chocolate. A textural disaster. The nuggets of biscuit were flavourless and powdery. This Picnic was on a downer.

I love the idea of product development. All that balancing of flavours and textures, shapes and nuances, sounds like heaps of fun. Companies tend to be quite secretive about these things and employ experienced professionals to devise new products. So what happened here? Experts’ day off at Cadbury? An executive whim imposed on the consuming public? I’m writing to Cadbury as you read.

– DM

About showing one’s undies

Man. Woman. Curdled custard. Authors have made millions from explorations (in print {ehem}) of the seemingly incomprehensible differences between the hairier and the curvier sexes. Talk of Venus and Mars, emotion vs logic, blahdiblah. All those tiresome clichés over the barbecue — the blokes in the garden moaning about their missuses (the plural of wife) and the ladies loitering in the kitchen whinging about their useless insensitive hubbies.

Deepening the male-female mutual comprehension divide — for those who experience it — there seems to be yet another point of difference. My Google homepage, which serves up a range of feeds from news services, sciency things and other trivia, suddenly delivered me into the world of flashing one’s underwear. One of the feeds is from wikiHow. It tells people all sorts of useful things like how to survive falling through ice on a lake, how to fold a napkin, how to become a sophisticated adult (I passed). On the day in question, the featured article was How to Get out of a Car Gracefully Without Showing Your Underwear

Now, I don’t know about you, dearest fully-clad reader, but I ain’t never shown me knickers whilst disembarking from an automobile. It was a danger I had never imagined. Life as a male can be so innocent. Are women everywhere living in fear of that first step out of their car? Afraid of lecherous men hiding behind carpark pillars? Secret cameras embedded in the pavement next to the parking meter?

I clicked the link through to the full article and understood the problem immediately. Just look at the educational image.

I mean, she’d show her undies if she so much as breathed deeply. Scandalous. No wonder the advice includes:

Even if you’re careful, you might end up showing a glimpse of your underwear. Make sure they’re clean and flattering just in case.

Indeed!

The solution is quite technical and I shan’t bore you with the multi-step instructions for exiting the vehicle. It’s a mixture of dance-step and yoga. The advice to:

Practice in private before you go out, and have a friend watch you so you can make sure you look good and you’re not showing off your underwear.

seems particularly important. If you have no sense of rhythm, ladies, I’d say your best bet is to wear culottes.

I’ve been digesting the article’s words of wisdom over the past days. Watching people getting out of cars. Observing people on trains and trams. Staring at women in cafés. I just don’t see the problem. Or, more to the point, I think the problem has been obviated. Have you noticed, dear suited-up reader, that people are showing their undies all over the place? Why worry about knicker-no-nos while getting out of a car if half the population is already showing the back of their G-strings at Sunday brunch?

Although I at first felt this was a girlie problem, I now believe one should be much more concerned about male undies. We’ve become inured to the once-outrageous fashion of displaying the branded elastic waist of men’s briefs. Now that every Brad and his mate is showing his Calvins or Aussiebums, it’s a disappointment when someone’s t-shirt rides up to reveal an absence of branded elastic. While men-with-undies thought they were groundbreakingly risqué, ‘ghetto’ boys had been letting half their bum hang out of their jeans for quite a while already.

If anybody has been looking (the mothers in the audience might nod in horrified agreement), a good proportion of the under-20 population has been showing rather more than their waist band recently. Yesterday, on an innocent suburban train journey, I copped an eyeful of a teenager’s right buttock. His jeans slid below the leg of his briefs as he got up to leave the carriage. It’s a wonder he could still walk when the beltline of the jeans was so dangerously low. And what was keeping the jeans up at all?

With G-strings at brunch and buttocks on the daily commute, getting out of a car without showing one’s undergarments is quite obviously a redundant concern.

– DM

Burn your hot cross! It’s time for something Swedish

ready to eat

Think of Easter and food, and you probably get images of chocolate eggs and hot cross buns. How about a change from the mundane? A diversion from arguments about peel-or-no-peel in the hot cross buns or whether people expressing affection for chocolate hot cross buns should be crucified?

I’ve never seen these in Australia (though I’m sure there’ll be some expats cooking them for family and friends), so get ready for another sweet surprise before Easter. Scrumptious little buns from Sweden — edible ones, not those of some tennis player. Known as semlor or fastlagsbullar, these babies are fairly simple to make and much too easy to eat. After spending five winters in southern Sweden, I can assure you I had had ample opportunities for detailed examination of the product (also known as gorging oneself).

Officially, they’re a pre-Lenten delight, which of course means that you shouldn’t eat them in the 40 days before Easter. More precisely, they should only be eaten during Shrovetide: Monday in southernmost Sweden (home of the term fastlagsbullar), and Shrove Tuesday elsewhere.

The astute reader will have noticed that I’m writing about these buns much too late. It’s almost Good Friday. However, few Swedes have qualms about consuming semlor anytime between the beginning of January (just like Easter eggs, they appear earlier every year) and Easter, so why quibble about religious tradition?

The basic concept: Cardamom, cream, marzipan; all in a sweet bread. They’re an institution across Sweden, with annual competitions to find the best baker, and frequent discussions about who has good ones for how much. There’s little talk of varieties or flavours, because the only common variations on this traditional item are what to do with the marzipan, whether to add extra almonds, and how to eat them. I have, however, seen recent mention (in Swedish) of chocolate semlor and ones filled with raspberry jam. Sacrilege! Crucifixion?

freshly baked

The buns (semla and bulle just refer to types of bun in Swedish) are made from an enriched yeast dough.

Semlor filled and ready to eat

Purists will actually take a little bread from the centre of the bun, crumble it, and mix it with the marzipan before filling the bun. Some bakers add flaked or crushed almonds to the cream, others garnish the top of the bun. The basic model requires that the buns be dusted with icing sugar. Cardamom is usually added to the bread, but can (unconventionally) be added to the marzipan. Don’t even think of omitting the cardamom from the recipe!

cream filled

The decision about how many buns a recipe will make is rather individual. I’ve seen a recipe where 375gm of flour makes 20 buns, but another where 500g of flour only makes 12! Yum. The recipe printed here strikes a balance between indigestion and petit-fours.

The dough for the buns sometimes includes the following, but these ingredients aren’t essential and some can be hard to find here: ground almond and bitter almond, ammonium carbonate (E503a: a raising agent rarely used in Australia), and Swedish quark (‘Kesella’, 10% fat). It’s also useful to know that the marzipan we can get here has a rather low almond content (about 30%), whereas Scandinavian ‘almond paste’ is usually 50% almonds (and appropriate for this recipe).

Finally, a little comment on how to eat a semla/fastlagsbulle. If you enjoy snorting cream, then feel free to stick your nose into the cream as it squidges out. The more conventional reader might be interested to know that semlor of the type described are only about 100-150 years old, and the main precursor to these is an enriched bun served in a pool of warm milk. This is how some people continue to eat the newer variant. Whatever you do, remember that one is never enough and three is generally a tad piggy.

burp - all gone

– DM

This is a revised version of an article which was first published in The Age (Epicure), Melbourne, on 08 Apr 2003.

 

Semlor
(Swedish Lenten Buns)

 
  Source: Duncan Markham
Yield: 8
 
  Buns  
200 g plain flour
35 g sugar
0.5 tsp ground cardamom
0.5 tsp salt
ca 14 g dried yeast (instant)
35 g butter
ca 100 ml milk
1 egg – lightly beaten
  Filling  
4 tsp milk
150 g marzipan – grated
200 ml whipping cream
1.5 tsp icing sugar (pure)
  1. Mix the flour, sugar, cardamom and salt in a bowl. Make a well in the centre and add the yeast.
  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the milk. Cool the liquid to lukewarm. Add 2/3 of the beaten egg.
  3. Pour the liquid into the bowl. Slowly mix the dry and wet ingredients, then knead this dough until soft, smooth and elastic. Add a little extra milk if necessary. Cover with a cloth and leave in a warm place until doubled in size (60-90 mins).
  4. Knead the dough lightly, then divide it into eight equal pieces. Form each piece into a round bun. Place the buns on a greased/non-stick baking tray, ca 5 cm apart. Cover and leave in a warm place to prove until doubled in size (60-90 mins).
  5. Preheat the oven to 230°C (lower for convection oven). Lightly brush the tops of the buns with the leftover egg.
  6. Bake for 7-10 mins, until deep golden brown. Take care not to burn them (it can happen quickly). Remove and allow to cool completely on a wire rack.
  7. With a very sharp knife, horizontally slice off the top quarter of each bun and put to one side. Using a fork, scrape out about two teaspoons of bread from the middle of each bun and place this in a small bowl.
  8. Mash this bread with the milk for the filling. Add the marzipan and mix to a fairly smooth paste. Place a liberal tablespoon of filling in the middle of each bun.
  9. Now whip the cream until it holds its shape well but isn’t completely stiff. Pipe or dollop the cream over the filling.
  10. Lightly place the top of each bun on top of the cream and push down gently, just enough to squidge the cream to the edge of the bun. Dust the lid with icing sugar.
  11. Best eaten with a cup of coffee or in a bowl of warm milk. Store in the refrigerator for up to 48 hours.

Review: Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation

Book review

Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, published in 2001, is a well researched, persuasive and at times shocking work describing the excesses of big business and the broad spectrum of compromises that make modern, cheap fast-food lifestyles possible. It is interesting to review this work six years after publication, when a movie has appeared of the same name (late 2006) and when some of the issues raised in the book have gained greater momentum and seen some strategic improvements in the fast food world (such as McDonald’s ‘healthy’ menu options).

The profile of organic foods is markedly higher now than at the time the book was written, ‘good-conscience’ supermarkets have appeared in many countries (Macro Wholefoods Market in Australia, Whole Foods Market in the USA, Naturalia in France) and farmer’s markets appear to be growing in popularity.

I am sympathetic to much of what the book attempts to achieve, but only so far as it is supported by relevant facts. Schlosser’s research is excellent, his facts well supported and his narration outstanding. I felt no reason to doubt the plausibility of most of what was written (especially after reading the notes at the end of the book).

It should be noted that the movie Fast Food Nation is a fictional story about characters working in the various industries described in the book. The book itself is not fiction. It is a piece of investigative journalism with a strong ideological position.

This work is entirely aimed at a US-domestic readership. It is fairly accessible to outsiders, but the information, the ideology and the rhetoric are crafted for the readers Schlosser knows best. His few excursions into foreign territory are limited, clichéed and sometimes flawed.

Schlosser’s skill as a storyteller is marred by a strong tendency to draw the bow just a bit too long. His desire to paint detailed pictures of so many of the (real) characters in the book panders to the USAmerican penchant for the extended ‘local’ and ‘personal’ narrative which can alienate other English-speaking readers. But I’m sure it works for his intended audience.

If just half of the barely relevant scene-setting detail had been omitted, his work would have been sharper and more compelling; less inclined to trigger cynicism in the reader. Instead, I found myself sighing as yet another person’s story was told with too much detail before Schlosser finally reached his point.

Kenny Dobbins was a Monfort employee for almost sixteen years. He was born in Keokuk, Iowa, had a tough childhood and an abusive stepfather, left home at the age of thirteen, went in and out of various schools, never learned to read, did various off jobs, and wound up at the Monfort slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska. He started working there in 1979, right after the company bought it from Swift. He was twenty-three. He working in the shipping department at first, hauling boxes that weighed as much as 120 pounds. Kenny could handle it, though. He was a big man, muscular and six-foot-five, and nothing in his life had ever been easy. P187

Most of this verbose description is irrelevant to what follows: the relevant part of Kenny’s story is a long and harrowing one. A different type of narrative excess is seen below:

On July 11, 1997, Lee Harding ordered soft chicken tacos at a Mexican restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado. Harding was twenty-two years old, a manager at Safeway. His wife Stacey was a manager at Wendy’s. They were out to dinner on a Friday night. When the chicken tacos arrived, Harding thought there was something wrong with them. The meat seemed to have gone bad. The tacos tastes slimy and gross. An hour or so after leaving the restaurant, Harding began to experience severe abdominal cramps. It felt like something was eating away at his stomach. He was fit and healthy, stood six-foot-one, weighed two hundred pounds. He’d never felt pain this intense. The cramps got worse, and Harding lay in bed through the night, tightly curled into a ball. He developed bad diarrhea, then bloody diarrhea. He felt like he was dying, but was afraid to go to the hospital. If I’m going to die, he thought, I want to die at home. P193

It wasn’t the tacos’ fault. The food poisoning was caused by E.coli in some frozen burgers in Harding’s freezer, and that’s what the rest of the chapter deals with. But you don’t forget the tacos, even though they were irrelevant to Schlosser’s factual point. Tacos are fast food and apparently they weren’t nice on that memorable Friday night in July, 1997, so let’s include them for good measure? Guilt by association is a dirty trick.

Too many authors with a strong ideological position sacrifice the good, meaty facts (if you’ll excuse the pun) when they resort to cheap emotional point scoring with little content. Saying ‘you shouldn’t vote for MrX because his policies are cruel and his party is corrupt’ might have a basis in fact, but is immediately undermined if you then say ‘and he’s ugly too’. Throwaway lines give doubters and opponents simple, unnecessary ammunition. Taking cheap shots isn’t a virtue — a lesson that Michael Moore of Fahrenheit 9/11 has never learnt, and which Schlosser also fails at times. Schlosser’s opponents are numerous, coming from big business, the political right (who label him a lefty liberal or even a socialist), and quite a few who just feel he’s un-American. Dropping the cheap shots and focusing on the salient facts would have made the whole work tighter and less tiresome.

It’s not just the overextension of detail and the occasional cheap shots that distract from the point. Schlosser sometimes draws tenuous connections between events or facts and this tarnishes the respectability of his arguments. In line with the often careless USAmerican invocation of Nazism and the horrors of WWII, Schlosser attempts to draw a bad-guys line between McDonald’s, Walt Disney and Nazism: Walt Disney employed two German scientists after WWII who had both been associated with activities which resulted in the abuse or death of concentration camp prisoners. These men had nothing to do with McDonald’s or the relationships between Walt Disney and McDonald’s, but their irrelevant presence in the book serves as a cynical attempt to spray black paint on a canvas that will be thoroughly coated in blood and manure by the end of the book anyway.

One other example of rhetorical over-reach: fast food restaurants cause violent crime. Schlosser details a number of murders conducted at or by workers at these establishments. Without doubt, rotten conditions of employment can lead to extreme actions by some mentally unstable people, but there must be a reason why the popular term for crazed killings is ‘to go postal’ and not ‘to go McDo’.

Schlosser’s presentation of facts, events and purported causality is weakest and most frustrating as the end of the book approaches. He becomes repetitive and it’s clear that parallels in many other industries are somehow to be ignored, as are questions about society and human behaviour that beg attention.

For all the merit of his description of the absolute immorality of parts of agribusiness, the dehumanising tendencies of large enterprises and the bottom-line, and the unhealthiness of fast food from source to table, Schlosser fails comprehensively to take into account social factors in creating this situation. So much of what he criticises as the sins of big business exists in a chicken-egg relationship with the consumer. McDonald’s serves food at artificially low prices, from which producers earn the slimmest of margins and from which consumers can become unhealthy and obese. Who drives this? Consumers have been taught to hunt down the cheapest prices or exploit the maximum in convenience. They can still be depicted as victims, though not necessarily of the fast food business. Greed is not new, but nor is the desire for a bargain. An obsession with the bottom-line isn’t restricted to the corporations. I couldn’t help wondering which is the more effective argument: (1) your actions as a consumer promote the abysmal conditions in the meatpacking industry, or (2) big business exploits employees without regard to morality or humanity? Schlosser barely touches the first.

Schlosser concludes Fast Food Nation with a direct appeal to the reader. Gone is the narrative of facts. He finally says ‘this is me’ and writes about what he feels people should do and why. The somewhat propagandistic style at last turns into a clear personal stance — a refreshing change, as the reader could be forgiven the cynical exhaustion by the end of the preceding chapters. It is, however, also the point at which Schlosser does what so many anti-business-complex, pro-sustainability, pro-organic, pro-Slow writers do: not only does he fail to address individual responsibility, but the perspective of an empowered middle class takes over and he ignores the fact that the desirable, un-fast food is barely affordable for most of the main victims of fast food. Schlosser isn’t on the organic and Slow bandwagon, but the catch-cry is the same: choose to buy something else. When it comes to local food produced in a responsible, ethical manner, the price-point is usually out of reach of the most vulnerable sections of society — sadly also the employees enslaved in the various industries contributing to the black picture that Schlosser describes.

Fast Food Nation is good — if you already believe, or if you are willing to filter out the narrative fluff. It is skilfully crafted as the battle-cry for a sympathetic readership. It is without doubt a ‘must-read’, but better read in the cold light of day rather than in the warm glow of an ideological hearth. Its style guarantees that many unbelievers will remain resolute in their disbelief, but you could hope that the book sews some seeds of doubt in those who are at first determined to disregard even the more horrific facts retold in it.

-DM

Links:

contact Books for Cooks

amazon.com: Fast Food Nation

amazon.co.uk: Fast Food Nation

Syrup & Tang goes live

Welcome, gentle reader, to syrupandtang. The beauuuuutiful design is the result of many long, hot summer days and long, grumpy late nights over the last four months. You do find it beauuuuuutiful don’t you? (This is a rhetorical question.) The site will probably need a few tweaks as I discover things I missed or decide that I don’t find some features beauuuuuutiful enough. Do tell me if you find something which isn’t working as you think it should. Some technical notes are found here.

One paragraph down and still no mention of content. {chagrin} Food. Eating. Drinking. Travelling. Thinking. That’s what it’s all about. This isn’t a diary and I’m unlikely to tell you what I had for dinner. I hope you enjoy what you read on syrupandtang. And if you have a comment you’re welcome to leave one here, under a specific article, or send one directly to me via the contact form.

Now click away as you choose:)

– Duncan

A sense of humour at Eurostar

The train that thinks it’s a plane seems to have a sense of humour. Putting to one side Eurostar’s once unenviable reputation for tardiness and forgetting momentarily Eurostar’s legacy-airline pricing model (no affordable one-way tickets, a maximum return price of €760 for a journey of less than three hours), one can’t help being impressed by this touch of humour on the company’s website (my emphasis):

[UK-flag]
Tickets
To check in, all you have to do is insert your ticket into the machine (which will hold onto it exactly long enough for you to start to panic, just a little bit) and then walk through the gate with your baggage. Easy. If you need help, our staff are always around, and we’ll be glad to check you in ourselves.

When To Check In
This depends mainly on what ticket you have. Unless you’ve been advised otherwise, please check-in at least a 30 minutes before your scheduled departure. Below are the full details, just bear in mind that if in doubt, arrive with time to spare. And have a croissant.
Link to original

Not only is this refreshingly lighthearted, but it’s present in the other languages available on the Eurostar site as well:

[FR-flag]
Il vous suffit d’insérer votre billet dans la machine (qui ne vous le rendra qu’aprés avoir observé chez vous un début de panique et un premier geste d’appel au secours en direction de notre personnel d’accueil”)
[…]
En cas de doute, prévoyez large et arrivez en avance. Et savourez un bon croissant.

[NL-flag]
Om in te checken hoeft u alleen biljet in de machine te steken (die het net lang genoeg zal behouden om u een beetje zenuwachtig te maken)
[…]
Hieronder vindt u alle details, maar denk eraan dat in geval van twijfel het beter is te vroeg te komen. En een croissant te verorberen.

Consistency in translation (where culturally appropriate) is second only to godliness and a good millefeuille.

-DM