The Bluffer's Guide to Food by Neil Davey

Author:Neil Davey
Format: epub
Publisher: Bluffer's Guides (Perseus)

‘If you start with good ingredients, then you don’t need bows, whistles and Smarties on the top.’

Darina Allen, Ballymaloe Cookery School, Ireland

SHOPPING AROUND

Shopping, they say, is 80% of the battle when it comes to preparing good food. Actually, they don’t say that at all. Sounds convincing, though. See how easy this is? As the rules of eating and, particularly, the rules governing our attitude to food have changed, then so have the rules of shopping. A few years ago, food shopping went something like this: look in cupboards, look in fridge, compile list, visit supermarket, buy things on list, buy many things not on list, come home.

These days, food shopping goes something like this: look in cupboards, look in fridge, check organic vegetable box, check calendar for details of next organic vegetable box delivery, check calendar for details of next organic meat box delivery, check the recipe you tore out of that Sunday supplement to see just how much quinoa and how many pounds of Jerusalem artichokes you need, call organic vegetable box company, go to supermarket for basics, go to butcher, request birth certificate and family tree of the piece of beef that you’re considering buying, pop to local market to discuss the week’s cheese requirements with a producer of artisan washed rinds…

For the sake of punctuation it can be left there, but you get the point. The rules haven’t just changed; they’ve packed an entirely new wardrobe, had plastic surgery and emigrated.

To be fair, shopping well is a useful skill. Yes, some of the food worshippers’ shopping techniques have become a middle-class cliché (and the reason why children throw almighty strops in Islington delis, screaming ‘But I wanted SUN-DRIED tomatoes!’), but if you start with good ingredients, you don’t need to do anything to them to make them taste good. Darina Allen, who runs the acclaimed Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, explained it thus: ‘If you start with good ingredients, then you don’t need bows, whistles and Smarties on the top.’ That’s a very useful ‘simplicity-is-key’ quote to drop into many food conversations.

You don’t, of course, have to do all of the aforementioned. You can just go to the supermarket and pretend that you know what you’re doing. But a knowledge of how to pick good ingredients is useful for the sake of your own taste buds and to enforce your claim as a highly knowledgeable food-worshipping type. It’s also not just a case of spending the sort of sums on the weekly shopping that used to buy a week’s holiday. Bargains score you brownie points in this world, ditto an address book of great local shops. Simply put, insider knowledge is cool.

SHOPPING CLEVER

Striking up a relationship with a local greengrocer can be a worthwhile experience, particularly if they’ll sell you (or even give you) bags of bruised fruit that they can’t shift. While there’s a certain amount of kudos attached to having the perfect apple on display in your fruit bowl, there’s potentially more if you can

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