Saturday 13 February: Ireland 🇮🇪 : Irish Stew
When I casually mention to my friend R that I am cooking my way round the world and am wondering what to do for Ireland, without a second’s hesitation, she says “Irish stew” and looks at me like I am an idiot. Obvious really.
(On the same walk, I ignore friends who try to suggest that in fact Iceland lies between Canada and Ireland and that a faithful interpretation of the rules will lead me to fermented shark meat, which is somewhere next to authentic Canadian cheddar cheese curds in the meat and dairy aisle of the non-existent global foods grocery. I point out that they should really look at a map and that not once on one of my many transatlantic flights did I come anywhere near Iceland…)
Helpfully R phones her mum and gets her to take a photo of the recipe for Irish stew that her family use. I have got no idea what the book is called or who the author is, but the recipe is super simple and involves easily obtainable ingredients though I draw a blank when I try to get hold of some Guinness.
I start by browning some cubed beef before removing and browning some sliced leeks and diced carrot before coating in 4 spoonfuls of flour. I work in some port and a large amount of beef stock, redcurrant jelly, Worcestershire sauce, bay leaves, salt, pepper and quartered chestnut mushrooms before reintroducing the beef. Then cook in the oven for 2 hours or so until the beef is tender and topping with a bit of curly parsley.
Again, I have to wait an eternity for the stew, smelling its deliciousness hours before I can touch it.
Finally. Gentle port and redcurrant beef gravy. Soft mushrooms. Soft stewed beef. Fruity carrots but no sign of the leeks. A little perk from the parsley. Not a potato in sight. The whole effect is soft and sweet and really quite delicious. Buttered sourdough bread is a great accompaniment.
Fabulous. And when I reheat for lunch three days later, it is even better.
It takes me back to good days staying in a friend’s cottage on the coast near Sligo, a place of sanity and sanctuary in the awful week after the bloody Brexit vote. It makes me think of the warmth of Irish friends and the kindness of two great Irish bosses: John Bruton, my ambassador in Washington days, and Charlie McCreevy, my then Commissioner. It is perfect for a winter night in these hard days.
Sunday 14 February: United Kingdom 🇬🇧 : Fish & Chips
On the home straight. The last time that I was in the UK was over a year ago, over to see my youngest sister who was visiting from Australia as part of her 50th birthday celebrations, the whole family sat together in a posh restaurant, completely unsuspecting what would come next. Absence makes the heart grow fonder: enforced absence even more so… Who knows when we will next meet again?
So to cook British food is emotional: it reminds me of the ties that bind, of the special feeling that I had in the days before the Channel Tunnel, crossing over to the UK by ferry, and often seeing the White Cliffs of Dover.
If I were to cook a dish that reminds me of home, it would not be a British classic but one of my mother’s classic dishes: a ham, chicken, egg and cheese pie, salmon with mashed potatoes, broad beans and homemade mayonnaise, or the lemon cheesecake that she made for me without fail during my childhood, every time I returned from boarding school for the holidays.
But for the purposes of this trip, it obviously has to be Fish & Chips. No other recipe immediately summons up the country. No other British recipe has such a claim on foreign imaginations, with the possible grim exception of the Deep-fried Mars Bar that some unkind friends suggest. (The same who suggested the fermented shark meat.)
I ate it rarely in my childhood despite living in a fishing village: a rare outing to the chip shop on the quay front, sitting outside, looking at the boats in the estuary, the fish flaking into small bits in the newspaper wrapping, the big fat chips slowly absorbing the malt vinegar that I had doused them with.
In the years since, it has been a rare joy, eaten once every few years. I remember an Easter driving trip to Dorset, sitting on a pebbly beach with a bag of fish & chips, a thermos of tea, and a Mars bar, watching the sun go down on the red cliffs and a small bonfire nearby with friends clustered round.
I find a good recipe from an American Anglophile: Daring Gourmet at https://www.daringgourmet.com/fish-and-chips/
As with the American burger and fries, it requires careful preparation and then everything going as fast as possible, all the more so as I have to use the same deep fryer for the chips and fish.
I prepare the chips in the usual manner, though allowing for more chunky chips than I would for a Belgian fry. In the UK, my guess is that they only fry once, but I ignore the authenticity in favour of decent chips and do a second fry after letting them dry and cool.
Then I make the batter, my first time, mixing together flour, yeast, and salt before whisking in some cold fizzy IPA. Belgian Coast IPA is as close as I can get to a British beer. I make this in a small rectangular container.
Then I take my fish. I am unable to find cod, but plaice is just as common, so I go with that, tamping it with paper towels, dusting it in cold flour, and then, with the batter as close as I can get it to the fryer, dip the fish into the batter and then straight into the frying basket and straight into the fryer at around 180C before it makes a colossal mess. The bubbling fryer is a wonderful sound.
I fry it for around 5-6 minutes until golden, before serving the lot with boiled peas – not mushy as I am a southerner – and the chips, which I sprinkle with salt and douse in malt vinegar. I also spray a bit on the fish. And a second bottle of the IPA on the side.
The effect? A thin coating of crispy batter. A soft melty interior of moist plaice, made even better with the malt vinegar. Vinegary chips: nice and soft and salty. Soft fresh peas, mixed in a small dollop of mayonnaise.
It is simple. It is indulgent. It takes me right back to Appledore quay in the late 1970s.
I lick the plate clean.
Monday 15 February: Home: Belgium 🇧🇪 : Carbonades flamandes / Vlaamse stovery / Flemish beef stew with frites followed by Dame Blanche over speculos ice cream
I started in Belgium on New Year’s Eve with moules-frites. A ‘departure’ meal deserves a ‘homecoming’ meal ‘on return’. I opt for carbonades flamandes: the ultimate warming Belgian beef stew, all the more traditional because of the use of a good abbey beer.
To get ahead, I make it the same evening as the fish & chips, browning beef cubes just as I had done for the Irish stew then browning some onions (which always takes an eternity) before deglazing the frying pan with some beer and then pouring the whole lot and rest of 2 bottles of beer over the beef and onions into a Dutch oven, together with thyme and bay leaves. After leaving to stew over low heat for about 2 hours, I mix in some redcurrant jelly.
The following day, I reheat and then double fry some chips. I serve the whole lot with the requisite big dollop of mayonnaise and of course with a bottle of beer. Comme il faut…
The effect? The beef is nice and tender. The sauce is wet but rich. The chips are just pleasure even if not on a par with the wonders produced by the Maison Antoine or Frit’ Flagey. The beer completes the sense of homecoming.
But I am not done, because my friend M has complained that I never make dessert, so in her honour and to balance the Flemish main course, I make a simple but typically Walloon dessert: a Dame Blanche. Traditionally this is hot chocolate poured over vanilla ice cream but to amp up the Belgian side, I use ice cream flecked with speculos (brown sugar biscuits) and with a few speculos on the side. We overlook the fact that it comes from Haagen-Dazs…
It is creamy and indulgent and I feel very full.
But it is good to be home.
Home. It took lockdown and the other awful events of the last year to make me realise that Belgium truly is my home and likely to be for many years to come. It crystallised my quiet affection for the place and my many good Belgian friends. And the bike has helped: cycling through countless small villages, along countless country lanes, past countless churches, the countryside rarely boring.
Epilogue: three reflections
I finished this strange challenge over a month ago and only now do I get down to finishing writing about it. That is in large part due to the fact that I have been crazy busy at work, and using my weekends to escape outdoors.But the other reason is that I wanted to chew on it and what I learnt about it. And I have three reflections.
My first is what a wonderful diverse world we live in.
I had cooked a number of the dishes before: the spaghetti alla puttanesca, the Burmese chicken curry, the gong bao chicken and fish-fragrant aubergines, and of course the burger and chips.
But following both the spirit and the letter of my self-set challenge meant cooking – and first finding – viable recipes for countries that I have never even set foot in and recipes that I have never tasted: Bosnian beef stew, Lahori chicken, Chingri Malai. I had to trust to the world of Google and the amazing army of chefs around the world eager to share their cuisines or understand others.
It generated many wonderful surprises. And a few horrors due to my poor cooking. I was exposed to new tastes and new textures.
What a quietly wonderful thing it is – and a testament to the beauty of our modern world – that even in semi-lockdown I was able to locate most of the ingredients within a few kilometres of home in the outskirts Brussels. I now have some strange and wonderful stocks for which I have to find a use: Vegeta seasoning, Japanese pepper, Gochujang sauce, and… black ping pong balls… Sorry: Iranian dried limes.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is quoted as saying “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”. These recipes unlocked – at least partially – cultures far away and hinted at steaming kitchens on hot evenings. For a few moments at least, they transported me away from the sadness and loneliness of a hard COVID winter.
My second reflection though is a counterpoint to the first: underneath this, there is a surprising commonality in the ingredients that we use around the world. I cooked over thirty recipes from twenty-seven countries. My only criteria were that the dish sounded doable and that it was representative.
Yet for all the joy of sliding from one region to another with new tastes creeping in – a kick of chilli as I moved to the Indian sub-continent, limes, coconut milk and fish sauce in South-East Asia, tomatoes and potatoes as I returned to the West – I kept finding the same ingredients popping up in many of the dishes irrespective of the continent, and most of them so common as to be completely unobtrusive.
My very unscientific tally is that eight ingredients appeared at least eight times.
In ascending order: rice, cinnamon, coriander, potato, chilli, tomato, and way ahead, garlic and onion which each appeared in over half the dishes.
The onion: allium cepa. Present in pretty much every cuisine around the world (including African and Latin America which I did not ‘touch’). So present that you probably don’t even notice it. Long-lasting, nutritious, flavourful. Put it this way, try spending a week of cooking new dishes each day without using one.
And the wider allium family: garlic, shallots, spring onions. I used them in all but three of my recipes.
Think about that for a bit and what it means for our existence and migration on this planet. Wikipedia says that it has been cultivated for at least 7,000 years.
And then think about the tomato and the potato, those former strangers to European shores, imported from the Americas and yet now again prevalent throughout our food worldwide. The ultimate successful immigrants.
And my third and most important reflection comes from thinking about which of these dishes I enjoyed the most and find myself craving.
My top six in order of ‘visiting’ are:
- Bosnian beef stew;
- Bangladeshi Chingri Malai;
- Burmese chicken;
- Japanese tori katsudon;
- Russian borscht; and…
- British Fish & Chips
“What do you mean, British Fish & Chips?”, I hear you think. “Have you ceased thinking like a loyal Eurocrat and succumbed to Johnsonian nationalism? It’s not even quality food: it’s fried, salted and vinegared food with peas as an apologia”.
Hold with me a minute. My choice is a genuine one.
If anything, the fish and chips are the most salient. Because the act of eating is not always about the taste or the nutrition. It can often be an act of memory, taking us back to happy or resonant experiences in the past.
I cannot see a bowl of broad beans without remembering my childhood and the experience of sitting outside on a summer day peeling the gloriously green bean pods from our garden, dropping the beans into a plastic bucket and feeling the soft cottony interior of the pod.
Food does that to us.
Food takes us to a cold and windy quay front of our childhood with our family around us.
Food takes us to a dining room full of the laughter of long-absent friends over a shared meal too many moons ago.
Food takes us to a Greek seafront on a wonderful holiday, the sun setting over the island, the wine white and sturdy, the fish as fresh as can be.
Food takes us to a rackety overnight train out of Bangkok and a metallic bowl of tom yum infused with coriander and lemongrass.
Food takes us to a housing bloc on the Latvia/Lithuania border, where a vivacious immigrant from the Ukraine took me for a swim in the nearby river and then cooked a meal of sheer simplicity and deliciousness before I crashed out on her sofa. And charged me a princely 5 Euros for the privilege.
This is not about quality: it is about a particularity to a point in time.
Though it must be said: that fish and those chips were quite delicious.
This has never been conveyed better than that wonderful scene in the Pixar film Ratatouille where a delicate bowl of ratatouille silences a critic eager to savage by taking him back to his childhood.
But food is of course an act of the present: it is the most transitory and subjective of experiences. It is a moment of pleasure that is purely now. All these dishes were delightful to eat (and many of the others too). They were moments when I could close my eyes and just enjoy. There are meals and tastes that you just want to linger forever in your mouth. And how many of them there are in so many different ways: freshness, sweetness, spiciness, saltiness, meatiness, fruitiness, nuttiness, and of course umami to name but a few.
Perhaps you wondered what posts about cooking recipes are doing on a website ostensibly dedicated to comfortable bike touring. This is after all “Bike, Bed and Wine”, not “Bike, bed and steak sauteed in a little butter with a side of fries and lamb’s lettuce in a light vinaigrette”.
And yet it has everything to do with bike touring. Because to experience a location by bike is to be completely in the moment. To tour by bike is to immerse yourself in the landscape, to feel its every contour, to pick up its every smell.
Bike touring takes you to the big cities but also to the small towns and the off the beaten track hotels and restaurants. You have no choice.
Fried pigs’ ears in Shipka.
A simple dinner of trout and marinated pear salad followed by chicken schnitzel in the outskirts of Arta.
A small tavern in the lakes of Lithuania, not far from one of the major missile bases of the former Soviet Union, serving chicken with lemon.
It’s also a really good excuse to eat a lot of fabulous food in the evening to go with your glass of wine. Or two. For purely medicinal purposes.
(And besides, the title “Bike, bed and steak sauteed in a little butter with a side of fries and lamb’s lettuce in a light vinaigrette” was already taken…)
But I digress…
Because food is ultimately an act of the future as well. Indeed, it is one of the most future-facing acts we can undertake. To eat food is to live for the future, to survive.
Consider the reverse: the hunger striker, the elderly patient who refuses their food. To drink or sleep is an impulse. To eat is a decision.
How funny that in culture, we associate food with the end: the Last Supper, the condemned prisoner’s last meal, when really food is the start or the continuation.
And right now, we must live for that future. We must live for a day when we can sit and eat with friends and family again, when we can sit in a small tavern in a frontier town, chewing on chicken, when we can sit in a bordello-like Manhattan restaurant savouring an outlandishly big New York strip, when we can arrive in a Russian town on the Volga and taste authentic borscht for the first time, or the back streets of Dhaka for a plate of jingling prawns, or the hillsides of Sarajevo for a peppery beef stew…
This is not complacency: this is hope. Hope for the times as yet not had, to the experiences that await us when it is all over. Hope for what we will do when we are able to live again. Hope for how we will now live our lives when we are aware of how and how fast it can be taken away. Hope that we will live our lives with a new intensity.
Because as that wonderful illustrator, the late Maurice Sendak said in his final interview: “Live your life. Live your life. LIVE your life.”
So eat…
https://speakola.com/motivate/maurice-sendak-live-your-life-2011