Gina Mallet at Gremolata: Last Chance to Eat

Gremolata Regulars

Gremolata's Exclusive Interview with Gina Mallet

Gremolata: McDonald's and some of the other big food corporations don't get as hard a time in your book, as I would of thought. In fact sometimes (like when they promise to get rid of trans-fats) they come out on the side of angels. Are we too mean to big food business?

Gina Mallet: Yes, McDonald's is a white knight!

G: But they have such a horrible reputation. Explain.

GM: Food biz is just that. If the public buys what the food biz sells, then food biz's like McDonald's will happily continue to sell. If however, the consumer starts to protest and stops buying, the food biz reacts positively by trying to adjust its practices. The supermarkets would never have themselves included organic produce in their stores unless the public had asked for it. McDonald's would never have stopped buying battery hens' eggs unless it was convinced that the hen-huggers, animal activists, were affecting their business. In the matter of ADR, the technology that strips cow carcasses so thoroughly that chips of bone were showing up in pizza toppings, McDonald's reacted quite swiftly to consumer protests and banned it. McDonald's is always trying to stay one step ahead of the consumer: when criticized for the fat content of burgers, it brought in chicken burgers, etc. It now offers wraps with veggies.

People hate McDonald's because it represents American imperialism. And they hate McDonald's because they hate themselves - or their lack of control. Fast food is insidious and overeating is easy. McDonald's is still a bargain and lots of poor people get their meals there, even Chinese people! So critics, notably those on the left, sometimes like to make out that McDonald's is exploiting the poor. But isn't this patronizing the poor and saying they can't tell the difference between good and bad food? The reason everyone, or almost everyone eats fast food is that it tastes good.

G: Last Chance to Eat chronicles the decline of so many delicious foods: fresh eggs, dry-aged beef, farmhouse cheeses. Are there any foods that are getting better, or are at least reverting back to a higher quality?

GM: Yes there are. Tomatoes to start with. The commercial tomato is probably the most despised vegetable. We in Toronto only get good tomatoes out of market gardens in the summer and even then the quality is uneven because field tomatoes, the bulk of the crop, are grown from cheap and thus inferior seeds and picked unripe. The field tomatoes imported from California through the winter are worse. But hydroponic growing is improving tomatoes and lengthening their availability - even in Canada. The small citrussy-smelling tomato from the Netherlands, they're called Holland tomatoes, are the nearest thing I've tasted to the truly great tomato: the one grown in someone's garden. Hydroponics has been criticized as producing perfect but tasteless produce - but the Dutch have developed great seeds, expensive ones I should add, and a technique for growing tomatoes slowly in water and under glass. These Holland tomatoes are available in Toronto from March through November. Canada is also beginning to produce good hydroponic tomatoes - as Northern countries get more light, hydroponic growing is very promising for the future of fresh vegetables in Canada. And consumers love the way Holland tomatoes come on a string. In fact, lots of tomatoes are now coming on the vine. The whole thing was an accident. Back in the early nineties there was a glut of round red tomatoes in the world and the Dutch tomato growers were hurting. One was so fed up he just chopped up his vines and took the tomatoes to market prepared to dump them. Instead, consumers rushed to buy them

I also see a future in genetically engineered fruit and vegetables. Researchers have worked for a long time to improve the taste of tomatoes generally - they're trying to transfer the intense flavour of the small tomato to larger tomatoes. (Incidentally, I don't agree with those who claim that the old giant heritage tomatoes taste best. I think their size is against it. Smaller is always better.) So far the only GE tomato has been a disaster - the Flavr Savr was withdrawn quickly. It was tasteless. But GE has the potential of making tomatoes taste better by transferring genes easily among varieties. Ditto strawberries. Again, researchers have tried for hundreds of years to breed strawberries to taste as various as wild strawberries. A handful of wild strawberries will taste of oranges, plums, pineapple, you name it. But the cultivated European strawberry, the common eating strawberry now, is chromosomally incompatible with wild strawberries. Gene splicing however could transfer wild strawberry taste to cultivated strawberries.

I Have to add, as well, that farmed salmon can be not only as good as wild salmon - but it is more reliably good. I'm talking here of the very good farmed salmon, say the organic Atlantic salmon from Ireland. New Brunswick salmon is good too. Restauranteurs welcomed the first farmed Atlantic salmon from Norway because it was reliably good. It's sometimes forgotten that wild food is naturally variable. Before the days of uniform standards, eaters had little choice but to accept what was available. But now a lot of food tastes the same in a reliable way. It may not, as critics charge, taste as good as it did, but remember, our memory of food is always selective because we don't eat in isolation but in a context - what the meal represented, when it was presented, with whom and so on....and food often tastes best when the circumstances are just right.

Used responsibly, i think genetic engineering may produce more tasty food.

G: What are you eating or buying these days, in the midst of a grey Toronto winter?

GM: Oroblanco grapefruits - pale volleyball fruits, very sweet and the peel is tart when candied. Seville oranges - here for just a month and sour, wonderful for candying and saving, wonderful for any orange dessert when mixed with a sweet orange like tangelo/mandarin in Claudia Roden's wonderful middle eastern orange cake. Purple beets for borscht. Brussels sprouts for sweet and sour Brussels sprout salad created by chef Andy Little at Evermay Inn on the Delaware. C'est Bon, 15% fat fresh goat cheese from St. Mary's, Ontario. Beenleigh Blue, an absolutely wonderful blue cheese from England with a sweetish paste. Mashed celeriac to go with Tuscan roast chicken where the stuffing of bread, mushrooms, pancetta, chicken livers goes under the skin (I always buy kosher chickens). Canned Marzano tomatoes from Italy for sauce...

And I'm on a diet!

G: Speaking of Claudia Roden, do you have a list of favourite cookbooks or food writers?

GM: Yes, I use Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques, Bonnie Stern's Essentials of Home Cooking, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 1, The New American Chefs, Edouard de Pomiane's French Cooking in Ten Minutes, The River Cottage Book of Meat by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Nigel Slater's Real Food.

G: Some wine writers are bemoaning the loss wine diversity as indigenous vines are ripped up to plant varietals more appealing to modern palates. On the other hand, there is also a widespread feeling that new techniques are producing better wines, consistently for a wider audience. What's your take on the wine market and what are you drinking these days?

GM: I'm not a wine expert so this is just a light take on subject. Yes I suspect that techniques are lots better now, and there is lots of good wine out there and I like the different and "new" varieties: Malbec from
Argentina and Carmeniere from Chile. I look forward to screwtop bottles, too.

But I live in Ontario and get a very poor selection of good reasonably priced wines. The general list of the LCBO is pop, mostly. The biggest conglomerates are over-represented and lots of bottles in cute shapes. Vintages is horrendously expensive. If I go to Century Liquors in Rochester, I can buy much better wine at better prices - notably reasonably priced and drinkable whites, and ditto Bordeaux. I literally can't find a red Graves in Toronto that isn't far too expensive or not very good. I read the Washington Post wine writer [Ben Giliberti] each week because I find his selections interesting - but too often it's academic as I can't get the wines here. When I go on the Sherry-Lehmann website, I see all kinds of deals for goodish wine. It's frustrating.

G: If you could plan the perfect meal, what would it be?

GM: Champagne. Taittinger, I think. Home cured anchovies. Terrine de foie gras and curly toast. Grilled Dover sole, steamed potatoes, tiny green beans (served with Montrachet or Chablis). Cheese: tommes au raisin, fresh goat cheese, comte (Red Graves, Clos Fourtet). Oeufs a la neige, beaten egg whites floating on glass of Rayne Vigneau Sauternes. Turkish coffee. Chartreuse.

G: Yum! One very last question: how do you home cure anchovies?

GM: Judy Rodgers' Zuni Cafe Cookbook has a good recipe. Use fresh anchovies no more than 4 inches long. Expect about 20 fish per pound and allow about two pounds of rock salt per pound of fish. Gut fish by hand, pinching and twisting off the heads which should tug the viscera from the belly at the same time. Then use your index finger to pry open the belly, sliding it under the vertebrae to wipe the cavity clean. Rinse each fish under cold running water. Loosely layer fish in a colander, scattering with about one quarter of the rock salt as you go. Let the anchovies drain in colander overnight in the fridge. Next day, carefully repack fish, layering with remaining rock salt in wide jars or earthenware crocks. Cover tightly and refrigerate. Thus preserved, anchovies will keep for nine months.

To serve, rinse fish, then soak in cool water until pliable (about five minutes). Next, use your fingers to ease the fillets free of the central bone. Rinse each fillet, rubbing gently to remove scales, collarbone, remaining fins. Taste and keep rinsing until fish is only mildly salty. Dry them between absorbent towels, then place them in extra virgin olive oil to just cover and serve with flakes of parmigianno reggiano and sliced celery, Niçoise olives and a squeeze of lemon.

Gina Mallet on Why she Wrote Last Chance to Eat

It's a memory book. I got started thinking about food and how important it was to people, how food is a memory bank constantly refreshed and referred to, how certain recipes were lodestones, for example how your mother made a certain dish, my mother made the most delicious oeufs en cocottes, eggs baked with cream and a dash of Lea and Perrins in a little dish, and how good they tasted, how good they still taste in memory and why? because she made them after a dire eggless period of our lives when my family lived in the country in England after world war II - a time of great food shortages. And how, of course, she made them - to delight her family. To share with us her pleasure in good food. My family loved to eat out, it was a social occasion, in fact when I grew up, meals were much more social occasions than they are now. Eating went right along with communicating. My parents loved having people over for a meal, it was a relaxing way to make new friends -- breaking bread together really had meaning then.

After I moved to North America, I, like a lot of people I met, took food for granted. Living in North America, food is almost too available, there are too many choices, paradoxically it takes effort to eat well. I found this out when I spent a couple of summers in the late nineties writing restaurant reviews for the Globe and Mail. Although there was a lot of good cooking, much of the food was the same -- the same rack of lamb, steak, salmon, and pasta, pasta, pasta which is really to my mind as banal as Big Macs. There was the craze for fusion, everything came with some obscure herb or spice -- what on earth is galangal? .I actually called up restaurants to find out if they had something new that night....one time I lucked into a Dover sole just flown in from the North Sea....when I asked why can't I eat this more often, I was told that Dover Sole was really old hat and belonged on fusty old Toronto menus! Omigod. A Dover Sole is sublime. Now I'm more tolerant because I realize that a restaurant culture is not created overnight which is what was happening then. You need an infrastructure not just of knowledgeable restaurateurs and chefs and an enthusiastic band of regular eaters out to raise the standards all around...Restaurant food is I think at its best when it has a loyal following and good waiters.....I remember asking for cornichons, those tiny pickles, to go with an appetizer of marrow bones and the waiter said "I'll get the wine waiter." A French chef told me he had been dismayed when a restaurant critic described his fried salsify as soggy potato chips.

It wasn't until I interviewed one of the few French chefs in Toronto, followed him around the kitchen, tried to learn how to chop properly, that I had this epiphany. Of course I'd been to France, eaten wonderfully there, said over and over again they're the best, but suddenly on this chilly Toronto night, I realized what was missing in my dinners out --- the sense that food was of immense importance, worthy of a great deal of trouble, not just a stir-fry, of philosophical interest not just sensual pleasure and so on...And of course the conversation which took me back to my childhood and my parents' house... I realized then that the subject of food was personal and inexhaustible, and the whole library of books about the French and food, Alice Toklas' cookbook, Julia Child, MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David were portraits of people as much as descriptions of food. I should have said characters because food mags etc today are packed with people but they're not characters, they're mostly cut outs or celebs without much to say about anything...So the idea of a book was forming: what's happening to food?. I went to the cook who is still a major influence over the food I eat - Escoffier, the French chef who created the gold standard of culinary art in the Edwardian age, which was really an absolute pig out but presented superbly....I remember looking up the a la carte menu for London's Carlton Hotel in 1912. Escoffier offered more than 100 dishes! I could have eaten almost anything from oysters and caviar, foie gras to fennel soufflés, grilled steak, Dover sole of course...what had happened to this idea that a restaurant should be so prodigal? Then I realized a lot of that food is no longer available! Foie gras is now under the gun from animal rights people, oysters cost a fortune, caviar is endangered, beef, of course, I tremble to eat....the fish is becoming mostly farmed....why doesn't anyone cook braised lettuce?

The theme emerged : changing, vanishing food

And no food is facing more radical change than the egg -- and the egg was the food at the heart of the classic French cuisine, Escoffier's cuisine. It was the beaten egg white that gave the cuisine its élan-- the soufflé, the meringue, the mousse, a desert like ouefs a la neige, beaten egg whites floating on a sea of crème anglaise is so simple as to be genius. But the egg is threatened -- now a toxic bacteria plagues it and already, commercial eggs are being irradiated, a process that prevents the egg white from frothing....No more soufflés!

The egg moreover is still suffering the hangover from the years when food scientists falsely claimed eggs raised people's cholesterol. Even today, I see TV ads trumpeting the benefit of eating a "low cholesterol" egg. There is no benefit whatsoever in eating a "low cholesterol" egg. As far as my body is concerned, it pays not attention to the cholesterol in an egg. And that is the last scientific word on the subject.

Escoffier had hundreds of recipes for the humble egg. He exalted scrambled eggs. I realized it was a long time since I had made myself scrambled eggs and when I did so again, serving them with smoked salmon, gosh they were good. Ironically they were faster to make than a hamburger...so why don't people eat scrambled eggs rather than hamburgers? Because you need to concentrate all the time as you make scrambled eggs so the texture is just right. Overcooked scrambled eggs are inedible. Today's eater is a lazy eater. Put the ground beef on the grill, time it, and you're fine. You really can't go wrong. This is industrial food at its most basic.

Scrambled eggs are work in other words. And who wants to work on food any more. Pears are vanishing from North America because few people know any more how to test a pear for ripeness. You have to squeeze the neck not the body.

Some reader marvelled at 100 pages devoted to eggs...I don't think they were entirely admiring. But I think eggs are a mother food - like milk, which I also devote one of the parts of my book to, or rather cheese and the ongoing controversy over raw milk vs. pasteurized milk cheeses, a debate dividing North America from Europe, a debate important to Canadian cheese eaters as well, because raw milk itself is banned in Canada.

I picked beef as a vanishing food, of course. It's a really interesting because when I wrote the book, I pointed out that to try to separate Canadian beef from US beef was impossible, the industries are so intertwined. It's rather disappointing to now discover that in fact the Canadians didn't stop feeding their cattle animal parts when the Americans did. Overall my forecast however is proving to be right. Beef is going to vanish because Mad Cow Disease is still out there.

There is not much new scientific discovery or indeed news in my book - instead what I have tried to do is weave together all the aspects of food in the last fifty years into a narrative that I hope will help people understand what's happened and what is happening to food and what it means to people, not in a nutritional way, but in a cultural way. The years of eating could have been a subtitle. When there wasn't much food, people were happy to eat whatever there was and became ingenious in making any food taste good. Now we in North America are squeamish about the more intimate parts of animals -- shunning kidneys, tripe, glands and so on, shunning fish that look unpleasant, the lamprey which is the terror of the seas is found delicious by the Spaniards but we won't touch it.

Barry King, who is the executive director of the American Cheese Society, which is an organization that promotes artisanal and specialty cheeses, describes our diet as "sterile and bland." The first savant of food, Brillat Savarin said famously you are what you eat. Does that mean we are bland and sterile?