“Back to Basics”

Fine Food with

Charles Campion

Food writer and critic

• It’s time to go left field rather than safety-first
• “Fashion or for keeps?”
• “New year and new possibilities”
• “What is in a name?”
• “The art of shopping”

February is a particularly sullen month. Wallets are still smarting from Christmas, credit cards sulk and anyone running a restaurant is hanging on for St Val’s day in the hope that a dose of spurious romance will kick start the dining year

Towards the end of last year you could spot some encouraging trends taking their first baby steps. The majority of trends storm out of the kitchen fully fledged and are linked to new kit. Get yourself a Large Green Egg, or a smoke gun, or a water bath, and then you can create the dishes of tomorrow. But surprisingly, our legacy from 2015 is not gadget-driven. It seems that chefs and shopkeepers alike are looking through older material and blowing the dust off those classic cookbooks. The old-fashioned ways have made a quiet comeback. At the 2015 Great Taste Awards the Supreme Champion came from a butcher in Tipperary called James Whelan, and his winning product was beef dripping! About 20 years ago, Jamie Oliver started the fashion for foodies cooking their roast potatoes in goose fat and so claimed a significant advantage in the search for the world’s crispiest roast potato. But goose fat is pricey stuff (especially if it must deliver a halfway decent margin), and following extensive trials during the recent Christmas season I can confirm that roasties cooked in beef dripping are superior – beefy, crisp, golden – and for once the old way of doing things is a runaway winner. Could it be that old-fashioned, traditional foods and old-fashioned, traditional kitchen skills may start pointing the way?

Further along the foodie cutting edge you’ll come across another anachronism: bone broth. In the days of Escoffier, huge kitchens were dominated by a giant stock pot and the demi-glace it produced was a vital component of classic sticky-rich veal sauces. Now, Japanese restaurants vie to produce the most intense broth for Tonkotsu ramen. An enormous stack of pork bones is cooked for an implausibly long time and delivers an implausibly intense flavour. Making proper stocks takes up a great deal of time, but the benefit is strong, pronounced flavour, as the Japanese know only too well.

Another ‘re-discovery’ of 2015 was the vogue for fermented foods. In the 2010s the Koreans sent us plenty of black and pungent smoked garlic while household utility rooms everywhere rang to exploding bottles of home-made Kombucha (a fresh-tasting, fermented drink from Japan that contains a huge amount of beneficial bacteria. The idea has taken root that massive doses of “friendly” bacteria will solve a large range of intestinal glitches. Once again this is not a new concept, and most of Europe has been pickling away for centuries: there are those wonderful Jewish new green cucumbers and that fabulous pairing of Lancashire hotpot with picked red cabbage. In China pickling is even more crucial, as pretty much the only vitamin C to be had during the winter months comes from fermented cabbages and Chinese leaves.

It may be curmudgeonly but it’s hard not to take a satisfaction from pushing the old-fashioned concepts into the limelight. Treat your roasties to beef dripping. Make an intense stock from scratch. Embrace the health benefits of pickled red cabbage. These are not new ideas but they do work well. What’s more, you won’t need any ultra special, ultra pricey kit – for once, “being on message” may be easier than you think.