Tropical Fruit vs. Deciduous Fruit

Image via Wikipedia

An Australian cricket team in happier days: Perth 2006.

With the Ashes series all but decided in England’s favour. And deservedly so too, perhaps it’s time us Aussies learnt to lose gracefully (hint, hint, Ricky Ponting!). And who better to learn from than the very English who have bested us?

Last Ashes series in Australia, to distract from their teams miserable performance, I read that the Barmy Army took to chanting the following chant:

“We’re fat, we’re round, three dollars to the pound!”

What’s that? The exchange rate? English fans are singing about the performance of their currency in relation to Australia’s? Yes, that was the case - you gotta love those barmy poms!


So, as a distraction of my own: “English food vs. Australian food” or more specifically “Tropical Fruit vs. Deciduous Fruit”. I must warn my readers, however, that I’m no botanist and I am going to using the terms “Tropical” and “Deciduous” shall we say “loosely”. And, if I happen to claim some mediterranean fruits as “tropical” forgive me, in penance I shan’t include the really unbeatable foods like coffee and chocolate because they don’t grow in Australia.

Image via Fir0002, Wikipedia

Australian Mangoes

To begin with: Mangoes. As I was surprised to find earlier this year, you can get mangoes in “Old Blightey”, and I was even more astounded to hear a work colleague confess that she didn’t actually like mangoes! But, the reason is, I suspect, that the mangoes you’ll find in Morrisons or Sainsbury’s aren’t really mangoes. I mean, sure technically they are, but no, not really. A mango isn’t sour. Sure, in the early part of the mango season, you’ll find one with some green sour-ish patches, but the ones one sale in Morrisons could be substituted for lemons! To enjoy the real mango experience, you have to come down under, or better yet, visit India - because in all honesty, the mangoes I tried when I was in India beat anything I have had before or since! When you bite into a ripe red and gold mango you’re biting into a summer’s worth of tropical sunshine, a mango is unbelievably sweet like no other fruit. Sweet but mellow and deliciously juicy, you know it’s ripe and ready to be devoured when you can put it to your nose and literally breath-in the decadent excess of sugar it has stored. Mangoes go straight onto the top of the list.

Next, Strawberries. We get strawberries down here in Australia. Great big juicy Queensland strawberries, some as big as apples, and they taste like... they taste like... well, to be honest, they don’t really taste of anything, I don’t know what the big fuss is with strawberries? Or at least I didn’t until my first ever visit to the Northern Hemisphere, Québec, England, Finland, France, all delivered strawberries that were unbelievably sweet and full of flavour. In Australia, strawberries are generally eaten dipped in sugar and a punnet occasionally rots in the fridge uneaten. In England, a punnet might be finished on the same day it was bought, especially if it was bought from the local farmer’s market.

Image via Wikipedia

French Gariguette strawberries

Blueberries. I could say the same for blueberries as I said for strawberries, and for that matter, blackcurrents, raspberries and cherries. I don’t think blueberries and cherries suffer as much as strawberries from the tendency to tastelessness - they simply don’t grow to enormous, watery proportions like strawberries do - but there’s no doubt they taste better when grown in a cold latitude.

Grapefruit. It’s a bit sour, being a member of the citrus family, but if you follow these directions you can’t go wrong. 1) Cut the grapefruit in half. 2) Cut out the white “pith” from the centre. 3) Cut out the flesh of the fruit into “pizza” segments, but be careful not to cut through the skin. 4) Sprinkle 1 teaspoon of sugar over both halves. 5) Repeat step 4 - it is a member of the citrus family remember. 6) Dump another teaspoon of sugar right in the centre from where you removed the pith. 7) With a teaspoon, eat each of the segments you cut. 8) Now here comes the best part, close your eyes and picture yourself stranded on a tropical island where you haven’t had anything to drink for days, lift the grapefruit half to your lips as if it were a cup, now pour the delicious sugary fruit juice into your mouth, being sure to let some of it miss and run down your cheeks and neck in true Robinson Crusoe style!

Now, you can’t do that in England can you?

Ok ok, next fruit. Deciduous this time. Um, how about apples? Nice, but a bit boring. Then plums? Yeah, they’re delicious, but frankly the more sun the better and Australia has more than England. How about peaches? Ditto what I said about plums. Well, we’ll have to choose a tropical then: chillies! Fiery and exciting, forceful and with a take-no-prisoners attitude, definitely not a fruit for the faint-hearted. Sure you can grown them in England as well as in Australia, but whose temperament do they really suit better?

Well, if you’ve been following the Ashes series this summer, you’d have to say: “England”.

The Parasites of European Tourism: Awful Restaurants in Top Spots

Image via Samuli Lintula, Wikipedia

For any of the cafés at the Piazza della Signoria, Florence,
expect to pay exorbitant prices.

The greatest problem with going on a tour of the main sites of a new and foreign city is lunch. Where do you go, when you’re hungry from exploring a city that you don’t know very well, you’re miles away from your hotel and you haven’t packed anything to take with you? Occasionally, you find yourself going to familiar fast-food chains just because you’ll know what to expect. But when in Paris, or Florence, or somewhere with a good reputation for food, do you really want to be eating at McDonalds? So you try having a look for a nice restaurant, or café to eat and here comes the real problem: those parasitic restaurateurs that live off of the good culinary reputation of a particular country or city or region to serve you rubbish on a plate and charge the world for it.

Such restaurants and cafés are always to be found in tourist hubs, a pub in Covent Garden, the bistro across from Notre Dame, or the Al Fresco café in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. They survive because they get their traffic not from their own good reputation, but from the reputation of whatever tourist attraction that they are close to. As David Whitley of Grumpy Traveller has commented:

“They know they won’t get repeat trade, they know people on holiday fritter away money at a rate they’d not dream of at home, and they know that the odd upset customer is worth the gain.


“And they’re always the places where service is worst.”

But the corollary that no-one seems to notice about this parasitic practice is that the loser in the end (apart from the unhappy customer) is the reputation of the country or the place that is being so parasitically exploited in this way. So much so that, having visited Tuscany I can honestly tell you that although Florence is such a significant city in European history and although it has such great architecture and the Uffizi and Accademia are unmissable, the entire city is a giant tourist trap, and for the real Tuscan experience I would recommend nearby Lucca, which has its own splendid Piazzas, cathedrals and fountains and a significant and interesting history of its own.

And the real big-time loser in this parasitic practice is France. To the extent that you might find a columnist in Britain’s “The Independent” fatuously claim that British food is better than French. For an Australian who’d never been Paris, such a claim would be dismissed as ridiculous, just on reputation alone, even more so for an Australian whose experience of British cuisine was the pub-grub of north Hertfordshire. But for my part, as I had been to Paris, I could see that there was some credibility in the columnist’s claim. Unfortunately, France which, since at least the 50s has enjoyed a pre-eminent position in the culinary world, nowadays suffers from such a rash of mediocre restaurants that I can well imagine that around the world, everyday there are hordes of holidaymakers returning from France with a massive sense of disappointment at the much-vaunted “French cuisine” that they’d heard so much about.

Image via Wikipedia

A beautiful view from atop the Cathédrale Notre-Dame 
de Paris, but I'm sure that there aren't any great
restaurants to be seen! Tourist hubs like the Île de la
Cité are no-go zones for good food and good service.

For Paris in particular, the world’s most visited city, with 45 million tourists a year, it is a particular problem, and having visited the city four times, I still can’t recommend a restaurant for my readers for a mind-blowing French-food experience. For that, I would urge readers to visit l’Alchemiste in Saumur in the Loire Valley, a place I never would have found were it not for the recommendation of my hosts when staying at Château de Verrières.

American Fatso Voyeurism

Image via Wikipedia

A tomato: in puris naturalibus

Watching tonight’s episode of “Jamie Oliver’s American Food Revolution” it occurred to me that there exists a kind of voyeurism that people get in seeing the extremes of people that exist in the United States, particularly in that sea of ignorance which in the media is referred to as “Middle America”. Of course it’s not just the fatties that people enjoy watching and Americans get a the same sort of kick out of watching the bizarre specimens of humanity that their country is capable of producing as well – just think of the success of Jerry Springer – but when it comes to food, I can’t help getting the impression that the rest of world watches in a sort of stupefied awe and wonder at how people can actually live off of the food that so many Americans eat.

It seems incredible to me that people can actually eat junk food as if it were everyday food. But on Jamie’s show, it seemed common at the school he was visiting. For example Jamie showed a bunch of tomatoes to a class of 5 and 6 year olds and incredibly not a single one of them knew what they were, the closest guess from the class was “potato”. For reference, Jamie explained that tomatoes are what ketchup is made from and a student immediately chimed “oh tomato ketchup I know what that is.”

Another voyeuristic highlight from the show was the incredulity Jamie received from the “lunch lady Doris” types who ran the school canteen when he tried supply knives and forks with his meal. These ladies wouldn’t believe that in England primary school kids were allowed to eat with knives and forks. Even more incredibly, when given knives and forks these kids didn’t know how to use them!

A few months back, I wrote a post entitled “English Food Deserves its Reputation”. I was quite critical of the stodgy and boring “meat and two veg” type food typical of an English kitchen. But to think that there exist in America, entire communities of fatties, who live off of McDonalds food and the like and never have to eat with knives and forks or have fresh vegetables at home is almost unbelievable – in fact, how can you not watch, transfixed to the screen?

Italian wine: "Probably tastes like vinegar" (So what hope for Australian?)

A snippet of French attitudes towards wine: Australian wines are popular in Britain - but in what esteem are they held in France? The opportunity to consult a French waiter presented itself when dining at a restaurant in Nice when we popped over for the February half-term break.

It wasn't one of those jolly little brasseries that have that typical bistro atmosphere so unique to France because Esther wanted to visit an upmarket place to enjoy pretentious French cuisine at it's best. Being Nice, it had a strong Italian influence, and the waiter serving me the Italian wine I ordered (the only wine that I could afford) disdainfully remarked (in English) that it probably tastes like vinegar - 'Italian wine's not that good'.

So later in the meal I braced myself and asked his opinion of Australian wine. His reply was that he didn't know - he'd never tasted it - but he thought he knew someone who might have tried it before. (Yes thought he knew someone who might have tried it - very re-assuring). Thus although popular with the un-discerning English, it would seem Australian wine has barely made a dent in France. And furthermore, as Australian wine-growing has such a strong Italian heritage, the waiter's disdain for Italian wines wouldn't bode well for the popularity of Australian wine either. But before the end of the meal, the waiter returned, he'd consulted his 'friend' who'd tried Australian wine - apparently "he says it's quite good".

Tentatively I would conclude, the base Australian attitude to winning at everything works. Sure it's crass and vulgar - like Ricky Ponting's team of sore losers and even worse winners. But perhaps through a trophy culture and lots of wine-tastings, Australian wine might surpass it's "humble" Italian origins. Although of course, like cosmopolitan Britain's "food culture" it's not built on a solid foundation of long-standing traditions. Australia doesn't do long-standing traditions; unless you want to count its history of racism or the decrepit old Labor party.

In comparison, I don't think Italian wine-makers would be particularly bothered that a waiter in France doesn't rate their wine; winning trophies isn't the reason why Italians make wine. Likewise although the French are universally acknowledged as the masters of wine-making, they are so not because that's a stated goal of French wine-makers; rather they are so because they have a long infatuation with wine that dates as far back as Julius Caesar's observation that it was known for a Gaul to trade a slave for a single amphora of wine. The French will continue to produce and drink their own wine regardless of how it is perceived by the outside world.

In that case will the "winning" attitude last? Or will Australian wine-making success, built on the shaky foundation of a 1980s fad for 'haute cuisine', fall as meteorically as it has risen?

Only time will tell...

English food deserves its reputation

English food deserves its morbid reputation. Not because England doesn't have any good restaurants or the English landscape doesn't make good quality 'produce' - England has both excellent restaurants and if you go to an English butcher or deli you can find delightful locally produced ingredients. No English food deserves its moribound reputation because of the English spirit towards food.

Nowadays the English believe that their food is quite good; it has 'changed' from the bad old days and their is a real 'food culture' in England. As if an arty-farty interest in food in cultured papers and a few Michelin stars make for good national cuisine. Whilst England has its Heston Blumenthals and its Gordan Ramsays, a small English town like Letchworth is whole-heartedly provided for by Morrisons.

Sainsburys, Tesco, Marks and Spencer and Morrisons ready-meals are the order of the day in most English larders. Green beans are air-lifted from Egypt and Kenya, topped, tailed and wrapped in plastic in single-person portions where they sit on supermarket shelves. Shopping trolleys are filled with fish-fingers, ravioli and 'ready-to-go' vegetables to be steamed. It's hard to find couscous that doesn't have Ainsley Harriot's face on it - and although it's nice the first time, soon the heady smell of artificial stock becomes too much to bear.

Teaching at a local high school, a "healthy" school no less, I am daily offered a new variation on a tried and tested English theme: "goo". Two slices of some roast meat drowned in gravy with mash and two vegetables, even lasagna with mash and two vegetables, shepherd's pie with more mash and two vegetables; an occasional English treat is 'Yorkshire pudding' to be drowned in gravy and had with yet more mash - gravies, mash, stock and stew, the essential elements of English cuisine. Another regular at the school canteen is 'jacket potato with beans' - doesn't sound too bad you think? Well it's not green beans or French beans you know - it's an enormous jacket potato, with a cross cut into the centre, covered in baked beans from a tin and chedder cheese pre-shredded from a packet - mm-mmm!

Add to this cuisine the English climate which maintains a respectable distance between every individual's body-image and actual body through layers of warm woollen clothing, and you find a nation of sallow-skinned, porky, lard-lads. Friendly, good-natured lard-lads, to be sure - solid, hearty food is a joy to eat and an antidote to the cold and gives red-nosed English "old codgers" their happy disposition. But lard-lads nonetheless. My girlfriend uses 'becoming English' now as shorthand for growing man-boobs and a pot-belly; which she threatens me with if I don't remember to exercise every day, push-ups, rows and carrying her up and down the staircase once or twice ;)

Which is why English food deserves its reputation. Hearty food; hearty, goo-ey, thick, stodgy English food.