Creme Brûlée the Easy Way

'Burnt Cream' doesn't sound particularly appetising, which explains why this classic dessert prefers to be known in French translation, despite considerable evidence that we can claim it for our own. In this way, it mirrors the fate of ordinary custard, which must go by the francophone 'crime anglaise' in order to distinguish itself from the mainstream corn flour derivative. Although it is possible to caremelise the sugar with a powerful grill, a blowtorch is really the only extra tool the average cook needs to knock up this dessert in minutes.

You will need, a bowl, a whisk, six egg yolks, 4oz/200g sugar, half a pint/500ml thick cream, and the extracted innards of half a vanilla pod. You will also need a fridge and a microwave. Lets deal with that elephant in the room. There is a lot of anti-microwave snobbery out there, the reason for which is simple to explain. Like a television, which it superficially resembles, ninety nine per cent of its output is absolute garbage. The microwave itself however, is no more to blame for the Rustlers Burger than TV is to blame for Top Gear, it simply makes cold things hot, which is what we're after here.

Start by beating the yolks, sugar and vanilla gubbins until thoroughly incorporated, now add the cream and give a good thwacking so that all is combined. Now insert the bowl into your microwave, and ping it at full power in one minute, then at thirty second intervals until the magic happens. Resist the urge to keep stirring, and watch as the custard thickens and then, when the egg yolk can take no more, splits and creates what looks like very runny scrambled eggs. At this point, take your whisk, and beat wildly until homogenisation is once more acheived. If you have a hand blender, this can be acheived with a few seconds of zuzzing. And that's it. Pop the finished custard into ramekins/ teacups/ eggcups or whatever you have to hand, and fridge for a couple of hours. The result is a perfectly smooth, evenly set creme that is superior to the potentially overcooked and uneven results of the traditional water bath method. Top with white sugar and a couple of drops of water to aid the caramelisation, and shoot fire at the top until it melts, browns and sets. Now whack the sugar with the back of your spoon, and savour the sensation of hard bitter sugar and soft custard, and the self satisfaction that you did it so easily.

Cookery Books

Before I got hot and cold running Internet plumbed in at home, my days off would often consist of wandering round Waterstones, flicking through whatever caught my eye and generally using it as a library. It has comfy chairs dotted around, and even an in store coffee shop, so this behaviour is encouraged. Obviously, a fair chunk of my time consisted of perusing the cookery section, which had clearly been arranged to fit into what book store's curatorial mindset envisaged to be the 'lifstyle and hobby' section of the first floor. There is always plenty of new product to be shifted in the food section, and this is in Sheffield where the availability is miserly compared with say, Nottingham's branch. New cook books tend to fall into one of two categories.

The first is the telly spin off. Every time a presenter or named chef has a new series on one of the major terrestrial channels, their publishing arm throws together an accompanying volume, containing usually next to no information you couldn't have gleaned watching the program in the first place. These books are photo-heavy, a trait which we will see has infected nearly all cookery writing. They also contain recipes. Telly cooking nowardays is almost completely bereft of recipes. An unspoken agreement between producer and viewer exists whereby neither is really fooled that they are being given any sort of culinary instruction. Instead it is all location shots and shaky cameras, intent concentration faces and, here we go again, 'passion'. With a few rare exceptions, no one cooks the stuff they see on telly. When it is finally reproduced in recipe form, with plenty of close up photographs of food stylists' trickery and screenshots from the series, next to no one cooks it then either. More often than not, they are bought as birthday and Christmas presents, for that person you know who is a bit into food. They thank you profusely, pore over the pictures, and then the tome is consigned to the shelf or coffee table to moulder in useless perpetuity. 

'Coffee Table Book' is a phrase rarely heard these days, but the idea persists. It is not the sole preserve of cooking, in fact it is a form better suited to visual media. Art, fashion and architecture are all ripe for coffe table bookishness because they are suited to lavish illustrative glossy reproduction. Unfortunately, the very same thing has happened to food. The second form that many new publications take, is the chef/restaurant book. Just as the telly spin off is designed to sell a programme's own advertising, so is the chef's/restaurant's book an excellent money spinner, whilst at the same time promoting that individual and the business they represent. Again, the same formula holds true, big glossy photos on heavy gauge pages designed to within an inch of their lives, accompanied here and there with recipes that no one is going to cook. 

If you accept that both types are of little practical use, then at least the second type is far more interesting, dense, and maybe, has a few practical tips and ideas if nothing else. I can think of three stand out examples of this form that deserve a place on the bookshelf of anyone who takes food seriously. The first is Thomas Keller's 'French Laundry Cookbook', now over a decade old, but still an absolute classic from a chef and restaurant that I don't feel silly to call legendary. Heston Blumenthal's 'The Fat Duck Cookbook' is an engrossing mix of narrative, science, unfathomaby complex recipes, mouthwatering food porn close ups, and the waywardly eccentric illustrations of Dave McKean. 'A Day at El Bulli' takes obsession with detail to a strange and dizzying place, an insight into the remarkable brain and working methods of the great Ferran Adria. It is the apogee of 'you're never going to cook this at home, but look at the pictures absorb the mythology and enjoy'. It is in this arena that cookery books that aren't going to teach you to cook really come into their own. This was also the point of Elizabeth David. Any inexperienced cook who picks up something like 'French Country Cooking' and expects an instruction manual is going to come unstuck. Her stuff, fantastic as it is, is closer to travelogue, and to journalism than it is to recipe- mongering. 

The sad thing is that there exist a good many books from which it is possible to derive an auto-didactic education, but they are seldom the most hyped, and rarely top the best seller list. The most important cookery book published in the English language is Lousette Bertholle, Simone Beck and Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. I don't like the title either. It's not an art, and this book won't make you a master of it, but it is a fantastic, rigorous, concise, basic and yet thorough explanation of so many essential principles that I would go so far as to say the following: it is not the only book you need, but until you have read it from cover to cover, don't waste your time even thinking about buying anything else.

Dog's Dinner - Ploughman's Lunch, Pub Aesthetics and Punk Attitude

It is common knowledge that the Ploughmans Lunch is as much an invention of the twentieth century as Chicken Tikka Masala, and as quintissentially British. It owes its existence to relaxation of milk rationing and industrialisation of food production, when mechanised processes met copious raw product. This age of dubious 'progress' also brought us the Chorleywood Bread Method. Chorleywood was the home of the British Baking Industries Research Association. In 1961, its boffins hit upon what they deemed to be the holy grail of a no time bread production method. Whilst it may not hold a candle to geological time, bread time is a slow clock. Three and a half hours is considered a no time dough, because it does not allow for adequate fermentation. Instead, ascorbic acid, fat, extra yeast and vigourous mechanical pummeling acheive in a few hours what had previously required a day or so. Well, in truth, they don't. They result in a cuboid of aqeous baked flour that tastes of nothing more than the sum of its parts. 

What I am about here is not a history lesson in the debasement of our most basic staple foods. There is a subtler force to be reckoned with, and that is how these products are dressed up and marketed. Mentioning no brands, only a mother with an appalling disregard for the health of her family could be proud of serving them the sliced white colon clogging chemical rich abomination that readily flies off supermarket shelves. 'Farmhouse' is a monicker applied to British bread as though it means something. Eating this garbage is as elementally English as pushing your bicycle up a cobbled hill to the sound of Dvorak's New World Symphony. Which brings us back to the 'Ploughman's'. Why, in an age of mechanisation (the end result of which is the product you're trying to sell), would it seem prudent to dream up an image of Olde English bucolicism? Why appeal to that misty and misunderstood collective imagined past, of Piers Ploughman and Walter Scott?

The fact is that histoy sells. Or rather, the idea of history sells, the misunderstanding of ideas such as 'tradition' and 'heritage'. It's something to retreat into, especially when it feels as though the modern world might be getting too much for us. When British cities first bulged with their populations of former rustics as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the PR coup for countryside, farmers, and Morris dancing had yet to be acheived. British pubs that belong to the golden age of pub design, roughly a couple of decades either side of the turn of the twentieth cenury, delight because they are unashamedly urban, rather, they are celebratory of their city location. Probably the jewel in this crown is Walter Thomas's Philharmonic in Liverpool; gaudy, trashy, over elaborate, polished, and joyful. 

What came later down the line in terms of pub design, still haunts us today. I am talking about the  ignorant stick on hisortricism that crept into bed with the various idioms employed in the building of roadhouses between the wars. Post-war, it became triumphant, and found its apogee in the B-road half timbered monstrocities that  became willing hosts to the parasitism of the Carvery Years. We have evolved to expect a sort of shorthand when it comes to public house interiors. Firstly, there must be wood. Plenty of it, and it must be stained dark and polished. Next comes brass. Nothing screams 'pub' like shiny brass abutting shiny wood. After that, a subsidiary list of elements all collude to tell us we are drinking in a proper pub; stained or etched glass, old black and white photographs of local sites, upholstery that mimicks carpeting. The primacy of beer, and its links to the less than sober British nostalgia gland, point to reasoning behind dressing up a new industrial product as the 'Ploughman's Lunch'.

Modern pub design, and refurbishment, is mindful of this state of affairs. Sheffield's 'Devonshire Cat' makes a fair stab at ticking off he checklist, wood, brass, upholstery and so on. Unfortunately, because the space is horribly unforgiving, the end result is something akin to a decent steakhouse in a continental service station. The expansive low ceiling single room-space only allows for box pew type seating. A more succesful essay in pub design is the refurbishment of the Broadfield. Ironically, though interior walls have been removed, the end result is nothing like the sort of open plan desecration pubs suffered in the later twentieth century. The result is subtle and also somewhat bizarre. There is wood (of course), and brass, and also stained glass. Skilful use of architectural salvage has resulted in a space that is at once open, and yet closed in with partions and cubicles.  More bizarrely, the interior decorator has hedged their bets and gone fifty percent pub, fifty percent mid century railway carriage/waiting room. Although it is utterly nonsensical, it works, and why shouldn't it? It is the job of every pub designer to invent their own fiction.

In all likelihood, Sheffield is about to get a pub from Brewdog, a company with its own particular aesthetic, one of rebelliousness and non conformity at all costs. It is therefore unsurprising that in an effort to stand out, they should turn against all things 'pub' in terms of interior design. The Devonshire Street outlet will doubtless be all stripped wood, hard edges and right angles and gleaming chromium. Not content with pitting themselves against the received notions of brewing and drinking (gosh, how punk!), the abandonment of of beer's architectural trappings is as much a statement as anything that rolls out of their mighty public relations department.

Chain Reaction

In my capacity as a wooly middle class liberal, I avoid Starbucks. That is, I avoid it when I know there's a better alternative. It happens that Sheffield's top three are Bragazzi's, #9 Cafe in Nether Edge , and Tamper in town. Now it also happens to be the case that these are independent concerns. Small scale, independent, and that greatest of modern shibboleths, local; whatever that means. A lot of the time however, there is no alternative, no better alternative, and that's what matters. If Jimmy Mc Sheffield's ultra sustainable, ethically sourced, uber local vibrant diversity coffee tasted like rat's piss, then I'd go to the Starbucks next door. Perhaps the only gastro-cultural American import of any worth to come our way in the last half century, has been the rise of coffee shops, which has for the most part meant chains. 

Our short memories need spurring a little to remember what it was like before what Derren Brown has called the 'Starbucks revolution'. In the Maxwell House years, coffee meant a sort of watery bitter concoction that developed its intriguing taste complexity from having been kept warm on the filter machine for the best part of the day. We may not like the power that large scale chain food and beverage operations wield, but in areas where our lives have been enhanced by them, we should have the honesty to say so. 

The truth of course, is never pure and rarely simple. Take for instance, the unspeakable Greggs. In the last half-decade this purveyor of factory farmed, industrial, bargain bullshit has dropped outlets like a scattershot of peptic ulcers that offend the eyes nose and stomach. Their runaway success is down to the collusion of exploiting the British appetite for bargains and their commensurate antipathy to quality. Who cares if it tastes like crap? It's cheap as chips and means I can still afford ten pints of Stella. In a recent article, Will Self made a comparison with what he called the French answer to Greggs.

You may have sampled their wares. If you've been down that London, he chances are high you've come across a Paul. According to their website, their success is due to 'one family’s love of good food and passionate commitment to the best traditional baking methods over more than 100 years'. If I have to hear about yet another chef\baker\cafe\artisan sandwich designer who has 'passion' my tendency is to beat my head repeatedly against the wall. In the case of Paul however, it is all true. Your local Paul may not be the best boulangerie in the town, but only if there is some seriously stiff competition. If we got one in Sheffield, it would face stiff competition from the likes of Forge Bakehouse or Seven Hills Bakery.

The tide of progress will not roll this far north though, not, I suspect, in my lifetime. If some sort of French invasion meant that there would be a hostile takeover whereby every Greggs became a Paul, I would be he first one out there saluting as the enemy tanks roll in. Why is it that France has succumbed to chain bakeries and sandwich shops but still eats so well? (I know this is a generalisation and here is much bad food and cooking out there). We have been told for years now that supermarkets have killed off small retailers because they are massive and convenient, but I suspect that the public must shoulder some of the responsibility for our unquestioning acceptance of mediocrity. French supermarkets, such as the Carrefour chain, are super-massive; they are hyper-markets. And they are wonderful. Far from killing off local artisanal food production and quality produce, they are rammed full of quality gear that makes even our most illustrious 'farmers market' seem like a squalid joke. So if the hostile invasion can also drop a massive Carrefour on the knackered remnants of what used to be Sheffield's so called 'city centre', then yes please, and thankyou very much. I'm all for things that are local, small scale, independent, but only if they are also very good at what they do. The mistake of 'foodie' culture is often that it doesn't ask the most important question first, and that is 'is it any good?'.

A so called 'chef'