~ Posted by Robert Butler, March 12th 2013
You often don't know what's missing in the world until you try and google it. Take paintings. There's a slice of life, it appears, that has simply not been represented by the great artists.
We only discovered this putting the Big Question online. In the current issue we ask "what is the best smell?" There are three illustrations in the magazine: one is a painting of wild roses, one of newly mown hay and one of freshly baked loaves. But since we put each of the six articles from the series online separately, we also needed illustrations for the other three smells: the platform of an Indian railway station, rain and bacon.
The first two weren't hard to find, but the third has proved surprisingly tricky. We searched the picture agencies and the art libraries. We searched "BBC Your Paintings" and Google Images. There are countless still lifes of oranges, apples, and lemons, garlic and onions, lobsters and oysters, pheasants, partridges and pigeons. Chardin painted a rib of beef. Manet painted a ham. Pieter Claesz-—I now know—did a breakfast with ham (getting close).
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~ Posted by Simon Willis, March 6th 2013
Giovanni makes ice-cream, but he doesn't have a sweet tooth. "If I did, I'd eat my business," he says. We're in a little room above his ice-cream shop in Brixton. There's a stove, a sink, lots of bowls and spoons on a draining board, a fridge and, in the corner, an ice-cream machine. To us it's whirring, but to Giovanni it speaks. "The ice-cream says five minutes," he tells us. He can hear it getting thicker inside the machine's drum. When it's done he opens a valve, and golden salted-caramel gelato flops into a deep tray.I was on a food walk last weekend around Brixton market in south London. Our guide was an ex-chef who lives nearby, buys all his groceries there and knows most of the stall-holders. It was the first sunny day for weeks—bright but freezing—so it was a good day for food with a kick of spice. We started with coffee from Ethiopia, roasted over coals with cinnamon and ginger and served with popcorn. Then we headed to Las Americas, a Colombian butcher where they do delicious things with pork, pig skin and hot salsa. Next up were Ghanaian shops, which sold dried fish and palm-nut oil as well as airline tickets and Nollywood DVDs. At a long table outside a Caribbean café we tucked in to curry-goat roti with scotch-bonnet hot sauce, before cooling our palates again in Giovanni's shop.He's in his mid-30s, whippet-thin, and his dreadlocks are coming along nicely. Before he opened Laboratoria Artigianale del Buon Gelato—Lab G for short—he'd never made ice-cream. He'd worked in Italian restaurants, and when he needed to find a new job he looked for a gap in the market. Brixton, it turned out, had no gelato. He showed us up a narrow flight of stairs, into a room which now serves as the shop's kitchen. First he melted sugar into caramel on the hob—"It has to burn a little for flavour. Otherwise it just tastes of sugar." Then he added salt (how much he wouldn't say), dropped in a whole pat of butter, which bubbled and spat in the 160-degree caramel, and added his ice-cream base: milk, sugar and a secret mix of stabilisers instead of cream. Less cream means less fat, and less fat means less worry. Finally he pours in egg yolk.
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~ Posted by Isabel Lloyd, February 15th 2012
In the January/February issue of Intelligent Life, the chef and food writer Simon Hopkinson talked us through his method for cooking beef stroganoff. Though strog’s combination of steak strips, sour cream, paprika and mushrooms had, he said, been a staple of British restaurant dining in the 1970s, over the decades it had fallen out of fashion and off the menu. read more »COMMENTS: Comments | ADD NEW COMMENTFood
