It doesn’t look like much, especially compared to the summer males, which are positively glamorous, but it’s a pretty good sighting for south London and a patch tick for me.

Interestingly a couple of other London birders who are on Twitter also had stonechats today — there was one at Wormwood Scrubs this morning and another at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes. So they are obviously passing through at the moment. It’s an unexpected benefit of Twitter, for me, the way it acts as a kind of antenna for bird movements and the changing seasons; I haven’t seen my own first butterfly of the season, but I have seen one on someone else’s twitter feed…

EDIT: and a very handsome male in Regent’s Park, as well.

• Wildlife round-up
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the NHM
• Whales watched.
• whale-watching

I think I learned this from a TV show where it was simply stated as Truth without explanation, but you can see why it makes sense: you don’t want the outside of the potato to be cooked while the middle is still raw. That’s not a problem with something like green beans, so those can be put straight into a pan of boiling water.

So for example, to make delicious boiled new potatoes: put the potatoes into a pan, add enough cold water to just cover them, and heat it until the water starts to boil. Add some salt, put a lid on the pan, and leave it on a low heat until the potatoes are cooked (test by sticking a knife into them). Drain the water off, chuck a bit of butter and some salt and pepper into the pan. Add some chopped chives or something, if you like. Swirl the potatoes around a bit to coat them with butter, take them off the heat and leave with the lid on for a few minutes so they absorb some of the butter and seasoning.

The potatoes will retain their heat for a surprisingly long time in a covered pan, so I often put the potatoes on the heat even before I’ve decided what else I’m cooking. They’ll still be fine after sitting around for twenty minutes or so.

The other cunning tip about boiling potatoes is: don’t just throw away the water you cooked them in. It serves as a sort of basic stock, just a bit more savoury than plain water. I always use it in the gravy when I’m cooking a roast, for example. I’m not suggesting you keep little tubs of it in the freezer; just don’t tip it straight down the sink, in case it comes in handy.

» New potatoes is © Jack Hynes and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew*
• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew (part two)
• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew (addendum)
• καλύβαπίτα
• World Cup food blogging – Trinidad and Tobago

These heads are of such high quality that one of the first Europeans to see them felt they couldn’t possibly have been made by Africans: instead he hypothesised that they were evidence for the lost civilisation of Atlantis. Which is, umm, a bit cringeworthy. You know you’ve got a bit of a blind spot when you think that Atlantis is a more likely explanation than a previously unknown African kingdom with a strong metalworking tradition. Its especially embarrassing because while it sounds like something some Elizabethan explorer might have come up with, it was in fact… in 1900. Yikes.

He was at least right that these are genuinely remarkable objects, superbly crafted and of great beauty. In fact if you judge art by how much it looks like the thing it portrays — the Daily Mail school of art criticism — there is something extraordinary about this little flowering of naturalistic sculpture in a continent dominated by various kinds of highly stylised art. Certainly that was the Western press reaction when the bulk of the work was found; references to an African Donatello, to African sculpture standing comparison with the great works of Greece and Italy, and to these sculptures being a great mystery of African art. Because, of course, there is no higher ambition than to produce work which fits tidily into the European tradition, and it is inherently mysterious that Africans should be able to do it.

I’m being a bit glib, but actually the exhibition had me examining my own preconceptions about art (I haven’t reached any conclusions yet). Although these days we are all much quicker to see beauty in ‘primitive’ art, not least because its profound influence on Modernism helped change our expectations of what ‘fine art’ looks like, I think most of us have at least an implicit sense of a hierarchy which sees exquisite representational art as, if not better, then more developed or more sophisticated than the highly stylised carvings which we normally associate with Africa. And so these Ife heads seem to carry a significance beyond their beauty.

But the emergence of naturalism really require any special explanation? I guess it might need a society wealthy enough for some people to work as nearly full-time artists, but beyond that maybe all it needs is a shift in fashion. In fact, perhaps representational art is the kind that needs least explanation, since the logic of ‘making things that look like other things’ is so straightforward.

All such questions aside: it’s a marvellous exhibition and if you’re passing through London in the next three months you you should go and see it.

• Terracotta warriors at the BM
• Exhibition round-up
• ‘The Sacred Made Real’ at the National Gallery
• ‘Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan’ at the BM
• ‘The Real Van Gogh’ at the Royal Academy

The publisher in question is Aflame Books, incidentally, a small press specialising in translated fiction from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East who I learned via the complete review are having financial difficulties. And since I need books for the Read The World challenge it made sense to order a few books from countries I haven’t ticked off yet.

Meanwhile, a minor internet shopping FAIL from Amazon via their package tracking service. Last Thursday they put some books into a van for me, drove them around south London, decided they had an incorrect address and sent them back to the depot. Harumph. They are now once again in transit; let’s see if they can find the house this time.

• Yay for Salman
• wikipoetry and the wikinovel
• Why I tend to believe that #amazonfail was a cock-up rather than anything more sinister
• what am I looking for?
• Tristram Shandy – the movie

The set-up in the video isn’t exactly the same as the one in the gallery, but it gives you the idea: a flock of zebra finches in a room with electric guitars and up-turned cymbals, who ‘play’ the instruments by hopping around and perching on them. They are free-flying in the gallery, and you can walk on paths between the instruments.

It’s an immediately appealing idea and quite memorable, so it will probably be something of a hit, at least by the standards of contemporary art installations. To be honest, though, I thought it was less striking in reality than it was in neatly-edited little close-ups on YouTube. It was more like being in a slightly odd aviary than in some kind of extraordinary art-place. People did seem to be enjoying it, though. I slightly wonder how much of that was just the pleasure of being in among all these very tame little birds, but perhaps I’m just projecting my own reactions. I did inevitably go into birdy-man mode, noticing that they were piking up nesting material and looking in vain for somewhere to put it, wondering why they were pecking a concrete wall, looking for mating behaviour.

And while zebra finches aren’t exactly imbued with an enormous amount of dignity at the best of times, there was something slightly off-putting about seeing these little birds with their own aims and desires in life being cajoled into being art. I’m not suggesting it was inhumane: they had grass and food and water, and lots of room, so by cagebird standards it seemed like pretty good accommodation.

I mainly went for the finches, but while I was there I went into Ron Arad: Restless. Ron Arad operates in the murky waters between design and art; in a sense he’s obviously a designer, making bookshelves and chandeliers and, above all, lots of chairs. But they tend to be one-off, highly expensive, and rather impractical: the kind of chairs you buy more as a style statement than because you need something to sit in to watch Buffy. Great big curiously shaped metal rocking chairs. Which I enjoyed. It’s nice to see so much thought and energy put into something.

And finally I noticed that the Wesley Chapel and Museum of Methodism was nearby, so I went in to see that; it was mildly interesting in parts, but overall, about as exciting as the phrase ‘Museum of Methodism’ might suggest.

• ‘The Real Van Gogh’ at the Royal Academy
• Visiting the crack
• Velazquez at the National Gallery
• Van Dyck at Tate Britain
• Terracotta warriors at the BM

The Railway (translated by Robert Chandler) is my book from Uzbekistan. I was slightly peeved when I received the book to read in the author bio that Hamid Ismailov was actually born in Kirghizstan, but his Uzbek credentials appear to be otherwise impeccable. His parents were just working in Kirghizstan when he was born, at a time of course when both countries were part of the USSR anyway. In some ways it’s quite fitting for this novel, because it is a book full of a patchwork of different nationalities and ethnicities, and full of people moving from place to place, for traditional reasons like pilgrimage and trade; or as part of the army or civil service; or sent to labour camps; or forcibly relocated en masse by the government, like the ethnic Koreans from the far east of the USSR who were moved to Central Asia for some paranoid reason that presumably made sense to Stalin.

One of the reviews quoted on the cover says ‘imagine Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude on the empty plains of Central Asia’, and although it’s perhaps not quite so overtly magical as 100YoS, it is certainly of that ilk, full of strange happenings and grotesquerie. It also has many many characters, all with long Uzbek names — there’s an eight-page list at the back to help you keep track of them, although I can’t say it helped me much — and it shifts around in time and place in a way which, to be honest, just meant I was usually a bit confused. It almost would have been better if I’d read it as a book of short stories, I think, because it would have saved me that sense of being permanently unsure what was going on. I have a relatively high tolerance for non-linear narratives and that sort of thing, but I found it hard going. I didn’t help myself by the way I read it; rather too many long gaps between picking it up.

On the positive side, the world it conjures up is an interesting one: a traditional Central Asian culture rubbing up against Russia and the Soviet bureaucracy, an Islamic culture in a sometimes aggressively secular state, petty local politics in the middle of it. It was one of those books where I kind of thought that maybe, if I had read it in a different place or a different mood I might have really enjoyed it, because it certainly had interesting stuff going on and I can’t put my finger on why I didn’t enjoy it… but there you go.

» Le pain rond ouzbek is © Mon Œil and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov
• Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma
• The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna
• The President by Miguel Angel Asturias

Food isn’t fashion.

I’m always annoyed by the way they present food products in the style section of the Sunday paper: a stylish-looking package of olive oil/chocolate/wine floating in white space to tempt shoppers as though it was a new pair of shoes or some face cream. Or those terribly precious delicatessens with largely empty shelves which just have a few products artfully arranged as though they were Fabergé eggs rather than, for example, eggs.

It’s not the cost — I’m not averse to spending money on food — it’s the suggestion that good food is just a style issue. Which is kind of ridiculous. For example, Spanish food has been a bit trendy over the past couple of years in London, and so people who care about such things are perhaps more likely to buy Spanish Iberico ham where before they would have bought Italian prosciutto. And why not, it’s a great product. But there’s nothing new about it. It is made in the same way as ham has been made over half of Europe for hundreds of years. It may be new to us, but it is the most traditionally produced product imaginable, the antithesis of fashion.

So what’s the significance of the [delicious if not very photogenic] gloop? Well, it’s a sausage casserole. And sausage casserole is, for me, a dish very much associated with bad student cooking: cheap sausages, too much tinned tomato, big lumps of random vegetables. My sausage casserole was made with Toulouse sausages and chorizo, a mixture of brown lentils and black beans, a jar of Spanish tomato and red pepper sauce, all backed up with lots of onion, celery, garlic, bacon, fresh herbs, and stock made with the carcass of a roast organic chicken and a pig’s trotter for extra oomph. It’s somewhere between a cassoulet and a feijoada. But it is still, really, a sausage casserole. The difference is that I am a better cook than I was back then, using better ingredients and making better use of them.

My personal tiny epiphany about this came when I was looking through an Italian cookbook and found a recipe for polpettone. You take minced beef, mix in some onion, herbs, garlic, chopped salami, milk-soaked breadcrumbs and grated parmesan, press it into a bread tin and cook it in the oven. In other words, it’s meatloaf. But up until that point I had entirely associated meatloaf with blue-collar American cooking of a, umm, not very aspirational kind. In the sitcom Roseanne, she was always cooking meatloaf, and I’m sure I’ve seen it used elsewhere in US popular culture as a signifier of social class. But seeing it in an Italian cookbook with an Italian name made me look at the recipe and think, you know, that actually sounds rather delicious. And it was. My preconceptions about meatloaf were simple snobbery.

Maybe there are some dishes which are genuinely just a bad idea, but which were inexplicably popular at some time or other. But generally, no matter how old-fashioned or déclassé or boring you think a dish is, if you make it carefully and thoughtfully with good ingredients it will be delicious.

[The first two parts of Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew are here and here.]

• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew*
• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew (part two)
• Cooking tips: boil potatoes in cold water
• καλύβαπίτα
• World Cup food blogging – Trinidad and Tobago

If you want to keep reading the links but have no patience for all the other bits and pieces I post to Salmagundi, you can also find them at delicious.

• Links of the year 2008
• Links of the year 2007
• Announcing Salmagundi
• Wordpress upgrade
• Wordpress 2.2 upgrade hitches

• No more links
• Links of the year 2009
• Links of the year 2008
• Links of the year 2007
• Links

• Links
• Links
• Links
• The Thames path, Westminster to Putney
• The Thames path, Putney to Kew

• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links
• No more links

In retrospect, this quibble about the particular characteristics of elephant dung was rather missing the point. Especially since when you look at the early paintings he clearly was being intentionally provocative; for example, one of the titles is 7 Bitches Tossing their Pussies Before the Divine Dung. And several works with ’shit’ in the title, like the distinctly creepy little sculpted head, made with elephant dung, dreadlocks and human teeth, called Shithead. And the painting of the Virgin Mary surrounded by snippets cut from pornographic magazines. Indeed, if you’re an artist who wants to shock people the Daily Mail* provides a valuable service; it must be difficult to find anyone easily offended in the world of contemporary art.

Not that the dung is just there to wind people up; it’s also a symbol of Ofili’s African background. Apparently he started using elephant dung after a trip to Zimbabwe, along with a dot-painting style inspired by cave paintings in the Matobo hills. The style developed into elaborate paintings that combine paint with collage, sequins, resin in layer after layer, and the effect is both decorative and very visually engaging: there’s a lot to look at in these paintings. The major theme is, broadly, images of black identity: hip-hop and blaxploitation movies provide a lot of the visual cues. These paintings really are gorgeous as objects, which always helps.

Over time his paintings got less aggressively confrontational and more, um, spiritual, I guess. But he still kept developing that style, with the dots and the elephant dung and so on, in various different ways, until recently he clearly felt he had taken it as far as it could go, because his latest paintings are quite different, much more straightforward, painted with big sweeps of colour. I’m sorry to say I wasn’t really keen on these new works: they didn’t have the same visual impact and they just felt a bit insubstantial to me. But it will be interesting to see where he goes with them, because he’s a talented man.

* And, incidentally, Rudy Giuliani.

» The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars 1998 © Chris Ofili. Courtesy Victoria Miro Gallery, London

• Van Dyck at Tate Britain
• Peter Doig & the Camden Town Group at the Tate
• Millais at the Tate
• Francis Bacon at Tate Britain
• Constable at the Tate

…a man carrying a horse, a medieval penis tree, and the incredible nymph navy that swiped a Nazi destroyer.

• No more links
• Announcing Salmagundi

• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links

Learning to cook is a lifelong project.

Learning to cook is a cumulative process. Some bits of it are widely applicable, but there are also many small pieces of specific knowledge. They aren’t generally complicated or difficult, but there are a lot of them, because there are so many different ingredients and cooking techniques. You build up a stock of knowledge as you learn new recipes. You can’t really rush that process, short of going to catering college or working in a restaurant so that you’re cooking all day every day. But learning is part of the fun.

It helps to have proper equipment.

I sometimes find myself cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, on holiday or at a friend’s house, and apparently most of the world seems to cook with blunt knives.

Why make it harder for yourself than it needs to be? Cooking is about 50% chopping and slicing, so if you keep your knives sharp it just makes it easier. A really heavy frying pan that retains heat makes it easier to brown meat. Even the simple things, like a larger chopping board or a potato peeler that feels comfortable in your hand, will just reduce the little aggravations that can make cooking stressful.

I’m not talking about the fetishistic end of the market, necessarily, fun though it is. I mean, I have a Japanese chef’s knife made of steel that has been folded 63 times, so it has rippled patterns in the blade like a samurai sword; but much as I love it, I’m willing to concede it’s not strictly necessary. But it is worth spending a little bit more for a good solid bit of steel, and then sharpening it regularly.

Since this post is aimed, to some extent, at people who are just learning to cook, I don’t want to imply that you need to go out and spend masses of money on cookware before you even start. As long as you have some knives and some pans and a source of heat, you can cook. But, over time, it is worth accumulating some better equipment.

Seasoning doesn’t just mean salt.

Seasoning is absolutely vital. There’s nothing more deflating than getting some nice ingredients, investing time and energy in them, and ending up with something which is just a bit… boring.

Salt is certainly part of that. There’s a reason why food manufacturers and restaurants put so much salt into their food: the way it enhances the flavour of everything else is almost magical.

But I find it helpful to think of seasoning more broadly than that. At the risk of turning these posts into Everything I Know About Cooking I Learnt From Onions: take onions. Just about every stew in the entire European tradition starts, like my generic stew recipe, by browning some onions. If you want to make a meat sauce, for lasagne or moussaka or shepherd’s pie: start by browning onions. The same for a lot of curries. Is that because every cook wants their food to taste noticeably of onions? No, of course not. It’s because the sweet, savoury background flavour of browned onions acts to enhance the main ingredients of your dish. Cooks don’t conventionally refer to onions as ’seasoning’, but to me, it’s all part of the same thing.

It’s similar with the bouquet garni (i.e. the bundle of herbs). You’re not really putting them in because you expect people to be able to pick out the flavour of bay or thyme; you’re trying to make the whole stew richer and more rounded.

Once you use this broader definition of ’seasoning’, the dividing line between ’seasoning’ and ‘main ingredient’ becomes a little blurry. Chunks of bacon make a good addition to a stew; they add savoury browned meat flavours, salt and fat. Ingredient or seasoning? It doesn’t actually matter; the point is to always remember that, however good your ingredients, they need a little help to be at their best.

One approach I find quite helpful is to think about the five basic flavours: sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami. Often we think of seasoning as adding salt to things, but equally when something seems bland you can try to add sweetness (onions, carrots, tomato, fruit, or indeed sugar or honey), sourness (citrus juice, vinegar, tamarind) or umami (stock, tomato, mushrooms, parmesan cheese, soy sauce). You can also think of hotness as another basic flavour (pepper, chilli, ginger, horseradish, mustard).

It’s noticeable that the classic condiments are all concentrated ways of adding these flavours to food: parmesan is salt and umami; tomato ketchup has sour, sweet, umami and salt; salad dressing is usually sour, salty and sweet. We squeeze lemon juice on fish: sour and sweet.

Not every dish needs to hit every one of these flavours, but it’s worth just bearing them in mind.

Sometimes you have to burn things to give them flavour.

When people joke about cooking disasters, they always talk about things getting burnt. Perhaps that’s why when I started cooking I was always paranoid about accidentally burning things. So when I was browning onions or meat, or frying a steak, I was always too cautious with the heat.

Well, I’ve since learned that the flavours that are produced by the browning process are absolutely crucial to many recipes. Apparently the effect of heat on all those proteins and amino acids produces a whole mess of different complicated chemical reactions and a whole rich, complex combination of savoury flavours. So let the heat do its job. If you want to brown some meat, let a heavy frying pan get really hot, put the meat in and don’t move it around: leave it to really get some colour. And while you don’t want to reduce it to charcoal, if some bits of it actually get burnt black around the edges, that is completely fine. The same with onions: I would generally brown onions more slowly, but again, it is just fine, even desirable sometimes, to get them quite dark and a bit burnt looking.

And if you’re frying a steak, or perhaps some scallops, something which you want to be quite browned on the outside and barely cooked in the middle, don’t be afraid to make the pan really hot. Producing a bit of smoke when you fry a steak is completely normal.

Cheap cuts of top quality meat are nicer than prestige cuts of rubbishy meat.

Stew is a way of turning the problems with cheap meat into virtues. You start with the toughest cuts of meat, full of sinew and bone and cartilage, and you brown them, which makes them even tougher; but gentle simmering over a long period eventually makes the meat so tender that you can break it up with a fork. And the sinew and bone release savoury flavours and gelatine and fat, and make the liquid thick and unctuous. So for making stew, shin of beef is a better choice than fillet steak anyway.

But if you have to choose between making a stew of  really good quality shin of beef (grass-fed, rare breed beef, properly aged) or roasting a joint of sirloin that is as cheap as the supermarket can produce (from a dairy/beef cross, raised in a shed, packaged as soon as it’s butchered) the stew will make a tastier, more impressive dish than the roast sirloin. Which is why slow-cooked pork belly and lamb shank are such fixtures on restaurant menus.  And if you want to do a roast, a less expensive cut of top quality meat will be more impressive than a glamour cut of rubbishy meat. So shoulder of pork rather than rolled rib of beef.

Even cheap cuts of really good quality meat can be expensive, of course; but then, the nature of meat is that it should be expensive. Animals have to be fed; raising them is labour-intensive. The only way that it’s even possible to sell meat so cheaply at the supermarket is to use breeds bred for growth rather than flavour and raise them in intensive conditions. And whatever you think of the ethics of it, the result is inferior flavour and texture. It’s like eating tomatoes in winter, in Britain at least: it doesn’t matter how much you have a craving for tomato salad, it’s always going to be disappointingly bland and watery. Because although it is possible to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse in Spain or Holland in December, you have to fight against the basic nature of the tomato plant to do it.

» El Cocido en Gelida is © Joan Grífols; the essence of being hungarian is © hungaro phantasto and used under a CC by-nc-nd licence.

• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew*
• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew (addendum)
• Cooking tips: boil potatoes in cold water
• καλύβαπίτα
• World Cup food blogging – Trinidad and Tobago

• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links
• Whales watched.

• Links
• Links
• Links
• No more links
• Links of the year 2009

Cooking is easy.

This is how to make a stew:

Peel, chop and brown some onions. Brown some chunks of meat. Put the onions and meat into a casserole. Put a glug of wine (or water, or whatever seems appropriate)  into the hot pan the meat was fried in and while it boils away a bit, scrape up the sticky brown goodness from the pan; pour that into the casserole as well. And some stock, a few vegetables, some herbs (perhaps a few bay leaves, sprigs of thyme and parsley stalks) and some salt and pepper. Leave it in a low oven or over a low heat for a few hours.

None of that is difficult.

I don’t want to be glib about this; I know that when you first start cooking, even quite simple things like peeling, chopping and browning an onion can be intimidating. Everything is new to you so you’re never quite sure you’re doing anything right; you’re not particularly comfortable handling knives; the onions make you cry†; you’re not quite sure what level of brown you’re aiming for.†

You’re never going to remove that learning curve completely. But we’re talking about a pretty manageable level of difficulty here.

Admittedly, not all dishes are easy; some things are technical, or require very precise timing, or have a chance of going dramatically wrong. But not as many as you might think. It’s entirely possible to avoid all that difficult stuff and still have a whole repertoire of delicious recipes that you can use to impress your friends/colleagues/in-laws/potential bedmates.

… but ‘easy’ isn’t the same as ‘quick’.

There’s a whole industry around the idea of simple cooking: books and TV series, all designed to reassure the beginner that cooking is accessible. Nothing wrong with that. But there is a tendency to conflate ‘easy’ with ‘quick’; it’s all about meals that can be cooked in minutes. I understand that people are busy, and there are plenty of great recipes that are quick to prepare. But some of the most rewarding foods you can make need long slow cooking. Starting from scratch, a chicken stew is probably going to take you two hours, and a beef stew more like four.

And sometimes that’s a virtue; if you’ve got people coming to dinner, you can put the stew in the oven well in advance, do the washing up, then go off, run a bath, have a gin and tonic, relax, and leave the cooking to take care of itself.

Double the quantities means double the work.

Well, not quite. But it feels like it.

It’s very obvious that making twelve individual pies is a lot more work than making six. With something like stew there’s a tendency to look at a recipe and think oh, I’ll just scale it up, it’ll be easy. Don’t get me wrong, stew for twelve is probably a better plan than individual pies for twelve; but it’ll be a lot more effort than stew for six.

Cooking for a lot of people is a lot of work. There’s no getting away from it. Which is fine, just as long as you go into it with a clear idea of what to expect.

It’s not rocket science.

Rockets are not conceptually difficult; you set fire to some fuel, it squirts out the back and pushes the rocket forwards. The difficulty is that the margin of error is so small. Let’s say you’re in northern France, trying to fire rockets full of high explosive at the east end of London. A slight manufacturing fault, and the rocket blows up on the launchpad, a slight calibration error and it splashes harmlessly into the North Sea. And nobody wants that.

Food is much more forgiving.

Recipe books have a completely misleading air of precision, and when I started cooking I tried to follow recipes exactly; if it said ‘two medium onions’ I would worry about whether my onions were on the small side, and maybe I should use three instead. But honestly, it doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t particularly matter whether you coarsely chop the onions, or chuck them in a food processor for a few seconds, or cut them into beautifully even perfect half-rings. It doesn’t even matter that much whether you just lightly turn them golden or you brown them quite hard. You can use strong or mild onions, red onions, shallots. Any of these changes will make some difference to the final stew, but not a catastrophic one. It will still be a stew, and it will still taste good.

Similarly, stew is all about long, slow cooking. So ideally I put in stews at a very low temperature, maybe 120ºC, and leave them as long as possible. But the same stew cooked at 180ºC would still turn out OK; maybe not quite as good, but still tasty, and ready a bit sooner.

And recipes are not set in stone. If you only have one recipe for something, it seems like a very rigid thing: exact quantities of exact ingredients, exact timings and temperatures. But if you have several recipes from different books, you realise that they are all slightly different. And beyond that, you start to notice that even though two dishes have different names, they can still be understood as variations on a theme. Every meat stew in Europe — carbonnade, daube, cassoulet, coq au vin, stifado, Lancashire hot pot, Irish stew, goulash, cholent — can be seen as a variation on the basic stew recipe I gave above. So when you understand the basic principle, you can easily improvise a stew based on the ingredients you have available.

Which doesn’t mean I’m one of those irritating people who boasts that they never use recipes. I love cookbooks. I have no interest in reinventing the wheel; a good cookbook represents the accumulated wisdom and experience of generations of cooks, and it would be stupid to ignore that. But it’s not holy writ.

It’s not worth cutting corners.

When you’re in the middle of spending two hours making homemade stock which is just going to be one ingredient in a beef stew which is itself going to take another four hours to cook; or when you’re browning the meat for a big stew, and you’re on the fourth panful of meat, and the kitchen is smoky and the extractor fan is really loud and you’re hot and sweaty: you may find yourself wondering whether it’s worth it.

Well, I can’t answer that. You have to choose your priorities for yourself. But I will say this: it really does make a difference. Stock cubes are not as good as fresh stock.‡ Dried herbs are not the same as fresh ones. Your casserole will not taste as good if you don’t brown the onions or the meat properly.

Of course sometimes you find you don’t have the right ingredients, or you’re in a hurry, and you have to compromise. And what I said about food being forgiving still applies: it might not be as good, but you’ll still end up with something tasty and nourishing. But if you really want to be a good cook, you need to make a conscious decision to do it properly, to make the effort to dot the is and cross the ts.

And for me it’s worth it, in the end; because it is the pleasure of having produced something really good that makes cooking rewarding.

NOTE: this turned into a sprawling monster of a post, so I split it into two; part two is here.

» The photo is ‘Daube stewing‘, © Jules Morgan and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

* This is not actually true. I make a pretty good pizza, for example, and the overlap between that and stew is quite limited. Perhaps one day I’ll do another post, ‘Everything I Know About Cooking I Learnt From Making Pizza’.

† The best advice if chopping onions makes your eyes water: wear contact lenses, and make sure you have a really sharp knife. Other than that, you just have to get used to it.

‡ You can buy pots of fresh stock from a shop, you don’t have to make it yourself. Though if you have some meat bones — the carcass of a roast chicken or something — it seems a pity not to.

• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew (part two)
• Everything I Know About Cooking, I Learnt From Making Stew (addendum)
• Cooking tips: boil potatoes in cold water
• καλύβαπίτα
• World Cup food blogging – Trinidad and Tobago

It’s a gangster/prison drama about a young French Arab, played by Tahar Rahim, who arrives in prison at the start of the film and is immediately approached by a Corsican gang who threaten him and offer him protection in return for killing someone.

The film starts with Malik arriving in prison — we learn almost nothing of his life beforehand — and ends when he leaves, so it’s set in a very grey, constrained, claustrophobic world, and visually it’s mainly a kind of gritty realism. It’s rather Wire-esque, both in that visual style and in the attention to the procedural and mechanical details of prison life.

I thought it was a very good film. It works as a gangster movie — perhaps slightly slower-paced than you might expect from most American movies in the same genre, but none the worse for that. But it’s a gangster movie with an underlying serious-mindedness and darkness, and with other themes running through it, most obviously the French muslim immigrant experience, that give it a bit of heft. And it has a very good, understated central performance by Tahar Rahim.

• War of the Worlds
• Tristram Shandy – the movie
• Today’s big question
• Tippety-tap
• The Seventh Seal

• Links
• I know what the Apple Tablet is for
• A passing thought on the iPad: handheld ≠ mobile
• Yet again with the iTunes icons
• What I want to see at WWDC

Which probably means I’ll stop the automatic link posts here, and keep this blog for longer text-based pieces, although I won’t actually make that change until it’s been working for a bit.

I think it looks quite spiffy on a Mac; it’ll look slightly less spiffy on a PC, not least because it relies heavily on Helvetica Neue Light. And on any version of Internet Explorer older than IE8, you’ll just see a message telling you that your browser sucks. In your face, Microsoft.

There is a link to it (Tumblr) in the sidebar on the right. Or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

• No more links
• Wordpress upgrade
• Wordpress 2.2 upgrade hitches
• Wordpress 2.0 Theme Competition – winners announced
• Why ‘Heraclitean Fire’?

• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links

• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links

The exhibition’s full title is ‘The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters’. The inclusion of some of Van Gogh’s letters supposedly provides a bit of biographical-intellectual-psychological context for the paintings. Which is an interesting idea, but calling it ‘The Real Van Gogh’ is still ridiculous.

The show hardly needs a special hook to attract the public’s attention; it is, somewhat surprisingly, the first major Van Gogh exhibition in London for 40 years, and I’m quite sure that it will be packed for the whole run. And rightly so: it has a lot of marvellous paintings in it. Van Gogh is so universally popular that the bloody-minded part of me almost wants to argue that he’s overrated, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Quite apart from anything else there is to say about his work, there is just such a lot of straightforward pleasure to be had from it.

Looking at the late landscapes I found myself thinking of El Greco: the strength of colour, the tension in the distorted forms, the stretching of the possibilities of figurative painting without losing that connection with real objects. By which I mean: he doesn’t seem to have been heading towards abstraction in that way that, in Cezanne’s landscapes, the mountain sometimes seems to be fragmenting into patterns of light and colour. Van Gogh’s landscapes are full of the thingness of things.

So it is a marvellous exhibition which I highly recommend. On the other hand I thought the letters were a bit of a sideshow. Most of them were written to his brother Theo; in the relatively short sections which the curators have translated from Flemish or French, Vincent talks about what he has been doing, how his work is going, and provides little ink sketches of the paintings he has been doing. It’s quite interesting; you do get some sense of his personality, of how articulate and thoughtful he was. And some of what he has to say about the work is somewhat interesting. But even without buying into the Death Of The Author idea that the artist’s life is irrelevant to understanding the work, I do think there is a limit to its value. Artists’ comments about their own work always seem so vague and generic compared to the specificity and particularity of the work itself; which I guess is why they end up as artists rather than writers. And the awkwardness of putting too much text in an exhibition mean that you’re not getting that much of Vincent’s thought anyway.

Perhaps there is a particular value in providing this kind of biographical material for Van Gogh, since he is probably still widely thought of as the mad genius artist. The letters at least give a more rounded sense of a real human being, since he comes across in them as, well, fairly normal. Intelligent, good with languages and incomprehensibly good with paint, but certainly not frothing at the mouth. I guess that point is worth making.

• Rodin at the RA
• Modigliani at the RA
• Georg Baselitz at the Royal Academy
• Exhibition round-up
• Cranach at the Royal Academy

• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links
• Wolf flu

The Guildhall Art Gallery is another gallery which I decided to check out because it’s on the Art Fund list and I’d never been there. Unlike the Guildhall, the gallery building is fairly new. The original gallery was extensively remodelled by the Luftwaffe in 1941 and didn’t reopen until 1999. And the building is rather grand — though if the City of London couldn’t grub together a few quid to build an art gallery, it’s hard to imagine who could.

The actual art was a bit underwhelming (or at least not my taste). Especially so at the moment as they are between exhibitions, so one of the large rooms was closed. What was left was a load of portraits of royalty and City grandees (Lord Mayors, heads of livery companies, yawn), some scenes of London, and a selection of Victorian/Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Some of their Pre-Raphs are rather famous, but still: really not my favourite thing.

The amphitheatre was quite interesting, although rather less spectacular than the word might suggest. Ephesus it ain’t. They didn’t even know it was there until 1988, when archeologists found it, and they decided to incorporate it into the building of the new gallery. So you go down to the basement and you can see a section that was the entranceway. Basically it’s a few traces of wall and some wooden drain, but it was interesting to see it.

» The painting is My First Sermon by John Everett Millais. The photo is of a bit of the 2000-year-old wooden drain from the Roman Amphitheatre. OPH 2008__0079_Guidhall.JPG is © king_david_uk and used under a CC by-nd licence.

• ‘The Real Van Gogh’ at the Royal Academy
• What a Walrus
• Visiting the crack
• Velazquez at the National Gallery
• Van Dyck at Tate Britain

• blue tit × 3
• great tit × 2
• coal tit
• long-tailed tit
• chaffinch × 3
• goldfinch
• woodpigeon × 2
• pigeon × 4
• magpie × 3
• blackbird × 3
• song thrush
• robin
• dunnock × 2
• ring-necked parakeet × 3
• sparrowhawk

There’s a few fairly regular visitors missing; greenfinch, jay, great-spotted woodpecker, goldcrest, nuthatch. But on balance think it’s a pretty decent list.

• RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2009
• RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2008
• RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2007
• RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2006
• RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2005

I don’t think that needs to be true for it to be successful. I think it’s significant that Apple had a sofa on stage for the product launch.

Despite the fact that there is more than one real computer in the house, I often use the iPhone at home to look things up on the internet or check my email. Because if you just want to do something quickly, the device which is in the same room beats the one which is somewhere else; but also because sometimes it’s nice to do all that stuff from the comfort of a sofa.

Nintendo recently brought out a larger version of the DS, which might not make sense if you believe that a handheld device is all about portability. But it makes sense to me, because I don’t actually use my DS on the train or waiting for a bus; I sometimes take it on holiday but otherwise it doesn’t leave the house. It’s still nice to be able to just pick it up and play it anywhere. And somehow it feels like less of an effort — you can pick it up, play for a few minutes, put it down — it’s a more casual, comfortable experience than using a ‘real’ games console.

I think the iPad could be a successful product just to have around the house, something to pick up and use for a minute or two as an internet device or for casual gaming; something you can curl up on a sofa with. Something that never leaves the house, except perhaps to take on holiday.

Some people will carry them around, of course, and no doubt people will find lots of ingenious uses for the thing — it is a blank slate — but that may not be the norm.

• Links
• I know what the Apple Tablet is for
• Yet again with the iTunes icons
• What I want to see at WWDC
• Weird computer problems

The patch ticks were all in Dulwich Park. One was a fieldfare which turned up when it was snowy in February, which was pleasing but if anything slightly overdue.

There was also a peregrine falcon I spotted flying high overhead in March, which wasn’t actually the first time I saw a peregrine in Dulwich Park; it’s just that the first time, many years ago, what I’d actually seen was a pigeon from a funny angle. It was only a fraction of a second before my conscious brain kicked in, but for that moment I ‘knew’ it was a peregrine (Ivory-billed Woodpecker, anyone?). Back then it would have been a truly staggering sighting; but in the last 15 years London peregrines have gone from 0 to 18 breeding pairs. Which is great news, but downgrades my peregrine sighting from ‘staggering’ to ‘exciting’.

And finally, I saw a firecrest, which was a very gratifying reward for all the times (hundreds? thousands?) I have seen goldcrests and dutifully checked for an eyestripe, just in case.

Two of the three British ticks were from the same jaunt to the Lee Valley Park in June where I had a good day, seeing I think eight species of warbler and hearing several nightingales. But I went there on an actual twitch to see the Savi’s warbler that had been hanging around for a bit. I definitely heard it (they have an extraordinary song) and I saw something which looked roughly like a Savi’s warbler and was in the right place… but was so distant it could have been a reed warbler that just happened to be in the same bit of reedbed. But it’s not a lifer or anything and I definitely heard it, so as far as I’m concerned that’s a tick.

And on the same day I saw a brown flash moving from one bush to another which, equally recklessly, I’m going to say was a Cetti’s warbler. Again, it was definitely there — it was singing beautifully — and it’s not  a lifer, so I’m happy to count it on my British list.

And the third British tick is, slightly embarrassingly, really, little-ringed plover. Which is an attractive wee beastie — the eye-ring makes all the difference — but which lacks the real star quality I’m looking for in my Bird of the Year.

I didn’t see anything new in Provence, but I did get a nice selection of the classic Mediterranean species: nightingales singing all over the place, black kite, the inescapable Sardinian warblers; a short-toed treecreeper nesting under the tiles of the villa where we stayed; Dartford warbler, subalpine warbler, woodchat shrike, woodlark, turtle dove. And one of the cutest birds EVAR, one which I haven’t seen for a few years, crested tit.

But my bird of the year was a species I’ve only seen once before, I think, in Norfolk many years ago, and that one was a female or a juvenile, so it looked, not wishing to be rude, a bit drab and nothingy. Whereas the male I saw in France looked like this:

That is one good-looking bird. I just love that little highwayman’s mask it has, and it’s such an elegant colour combination: pink, russet, slate blue and black. Just as birdsong is often beautiful but doesn’t really sound like music, birds are often beautiful, but despite what the creationists will tell you, they don’t necessarily look designed. Or at least not by a designer with real flair. They look like what they are, things which have developed organically.

But there are some species where that organic process has produced something which happens to coincide with human ideas of stylishness, and the red-backed shrike is one of those. It looks fabulous. And that is as good a reason as any to make it my Bird of the Year for 2009.

» Firecrest is © Sergey Yeliseev and used under the by-nc-nd licence. Lanius collurio – Pie-grièche écorcheur – red-backed shrike is © arpian and used under a by-nc-sa licence.

• RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2009
• Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 19: Magpie Shrike
• Bird of the Year 2009: best performances in a supporting role
• Bird of the Year 2008: best performances in a supporting role
• Bird of the Year 2008

• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links
• Links