“Match making”

Fine Food with

Charles Campion

Food writer and critic

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Thirty years ago nobody had heard of food and wine matching. People who considered themselves refined would insist on white wine with fish and look down their noses at anyone quaffing red with their Dover sole, but the idea that you should expend time and energy on working out what went with what raised an eyebrow

Now, ‘matching’ sessions are big business: wine and cheese; chocolate and whiskey; beer and mushrooms; red wine and roast beef. It seems that we all need reassurance that we are doing the right thing in the kitchen.

First of all, it is worth trying to assess just what it is that makes a good pairing. Nearly a decade ago I had the pleasure of a session trying to match drinks to curry and we made an attempt to assess how the pairings worked. There were two kinds of successful match, either the flavours of the drinks echoed the aromatics of the curries or the drinks’ role was reduced to cleansing the palate between dishes. So a strong ale (appropriately enough, an I.P.A.) worked well with rich dishes. Meanwhile, on the palate cleansing side of the equation, fizzy water, fizzy lager, or champagne all worked equally well. So we can all save money in curry houses by ordering lager rather than our customary champagne.

Recently some Indian boffins have been researching the differences between dishes from a number of different cuisines. The fieldwork was extensive and there was plenty of number crunching, all of which delivered roughly the same conclusion: if you are a French or Italian chef you set great store by balancing flavours and textures. Dishes play one flavour against another, everything is refined and elegant. Indian cooks, however, are never as happy as when big flavours bang up against one another.

Take a peep into the kitchen of a Balti restaurant in the suburbs of Birmingham. Balti Tropical is a favourite, a sauce heavy with spices, plus pineapple, plus prawns, plus chicken, plus lamb, plus chick peas, finally topped with a handful of chopped coriander leaves on its way out of the kitchen. Page one of the saucier’s manual would rule these combinations out as impossible, it’s enough to make a chef’s toque quiver. But like some other strangely delicious combinations – bacon and marmalade, or Marmite and ginger biscuits – Balti Tropical is very good to eat.

If customers will opt for a heavily spiced and discordant curry, might not they also lean towards other strong flavours? Perhaps that very old, very acidic, blue cheese has some life left in it? Perhaps that West Indian pepper sauce will change their ideas about cottage pie forever? Perhaps we should all get heavy handed in the kitchen and seek flavours that scrap with each other rather than meekly blending together. It would certainly give the organisers of cheese and wine matching evenings something to think about.