By RURAL’s culinary correspondent, Suzanne Wynn
With the arrival of June, we have left “the hungry gap” – or at least, taken one step outside with the arrival of British grown produce. Of course, many won’t have even noticed the gap, blurred as it is by imports and ‘enhanced’ growing methods.
Challenging though it is to adhere to my locally grown principles during Spring, I have a sense of pride that it is a challenge I have risen to, albeit one requiring all my cooking skills. As the new produce begins to arrive, that style of cooking becomes much simpler, as do the flavours I use to enhance it. For example, freshly dug new potatoes require nothing more than good quality salted butter and a sprinkling of herbs, usually mint, to let their flavour shine through.
I remembered a friend’s comments on returning from a holiday in Sicily, where he felt he had eaten the best food ever and, he said, the beauty was that it was all very simple, with each thing tasting perfectly of itself. He was now resolved to aim to eat more simply. What he will undoubtedly discover is that recreating his Sicilian experience will depend on his ability to source food at its peak, which is not always the easy and pleasurable experience that it should be!
Nowadays, we tend to use the term “seasoning” with regard to the addition of salt and pepper during the cooking of a dish, although its initial meaning was much wider, referring to adjusting the flavour to taste both during and after cooking. We now tend to refer to flavours that we add at the table as “condiments”, although again this distinction isn’t necessarily correct. The current fashion for chilli-based sauces has led to some people carrying their personal favourite with them but I think I would be pretty offended if a guest produced their own to add to my simply dressed new potatoes!
Waitrose recently surveyed 1000 customers to find out what home cooks reached for whenever they felt a dish lacked flavour and the favourite, at 34%, was a splash of chilli sauce. Worcestershire Sauce came in second place at 16%. Surely it depends on what flavours you are trying to enhance, but the results give us some idea of just how popular chilli (or hot) sauces have become. Have we perhaps lost our ability to appreciate plain food?
The British palate is inclined towards heat in food to an extent that often surprises foreigners, and this can be witnessed when offering English mustard – it has far more of a kick than French, German or Americans are used to. Think also about how embedded a curry has become in our own cuisine.
So, I shouldn’t really be surprised at the popularity of “hot sauces”, although I do feel they are used without thought and are often guilty of cultural misappropriation. A chilli is characterized not merely by its heat (as measured on the Scoville scale), but by its origins and flavour. For example, Hungarian paprika comes from a different pepper to the one used in Spanish paprika, which is also smoked. You wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be using Chorizo in Hungarian Goulash, and by the same token I wouldn’t expect the fermented chilli Gochujang in anything other than Korean food.
I admit to being something of a purist in regard to cultural food identity. It’s not just a theoretical prejudice; I actually find myself disorientated by fusion (or as I call it confusion) cooking. I can see that unexpected combinations may actually enhance one another, but I seem to taste not only on my tongue but also in my mind. Some scents and flavours are so evocative of a place that I find it hard to appreciate them in another cultural context, or worse, fail to spot a cultural context at all.
I accept that taste is personal, but this only goes to highlight the difficulties of one person seasoning for another. With chillis this is compounded because they have a very addictive quality caused by the bodies response to the “pain” inflicted by the capsaicin. The endorphins released to deal with this response are pleasurable and so we seek to repeat this experience, but require a little more pain each time.
Other strong flavours, such as garlic, whilst not engendering the same biological reactions as chilli, are also perceived in relation to past experience. I can quite clearly remember when garlic was a new flavour in Britain and the various reactions it received. Now I would suggest that most cooks use it in moderation almost whenever they cook with onions, although this is not necessarily reflective of the practice elsewhere. China is the world’s largest consumer of garlic at 14.3 kg per capita, where it’s not unusual for an individual to eat up to 12 cloves at a time. Whilst some places, including parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, actively avoid it because of its strong smell. In the UK 7% of people use garlic daily but there are big variations, for example 17% of Londoners eat it daily (perhaps reflecting the diverse ethnic population). In Italy garlic is used more in the south than the north, but even in the south it is used in moderation compared with Spain. We frequently fail to reflect the authenticity of recipes by adding to our taste, not as it would be used on home soil and if you are cooking just to please yourself, I guess this doesn’t matter. However, I think the revered food writer Alan Davidson probably hit the nail on the head when he wrote in The Oxford Companion to Food:
“People whose diet is rather bland and unvarying crave something to pep it up and chillies provide flavour and excitement at low cost.”
Summer provides the opportunity to recalibrate our taste. We are no longer dependent on what supermarkets can provide but have a better chance of finding home-grown produce in its prime. Let’s resist the temptation to slather it in hot sauce and ask ourselves whether instead a simple squeeze of lemon juice might be all that is needed.
Suzanne’s other culinary writings can be found at www.colintudge.com
