Pass the Salt

Yesterday, at Old St Paul’s, Wellington’s restaurant community farewelled a much loved colleague, Pierre Meyer.  I’m hoping the Dominion Post is researching his obituary as I write this because he deserves to be celebrated as a much loved chef and restaurateur who made New Zealand his home and changed the face of dining in Wellington.

Pierre’s Restaurant, drawing by Michael Fowler

When his eponymous restaurant opened in the late 70s on Tinakori Rd there were only 4 licensed restaurants in Wellington and all were fine dining establishments. Pierre’s was different. A French bistro housed in a refurbished wooden villa, it was at the forefront of a change to chic but casual dining. He served duck parfait, whole roasted poussin, delicate fish dishes, apple tarts and homemade glacés. It may not seem special these days, when ice cream is flavoured with everything from liquorice to miso, but back in the day Pierre caused a sensation with his kiwifruit ice cream. It must have stayed on the menu for as long as his restaurant stayed open, which is to say for many years.

Not many restaurants retain their popularity for as long as Pierre’s. Its success was as much to do with the man himself and the team he built around him as it was to his food.

The turnout at his memorial service was testament to that. The church was filled with his friends:  people who dined at his restaurant and attended his cooking classes;  people who worked for him, socialised with him and rubbed shoulders with him at food and wine events. His fellow restaurateurs were there too, representing a slice of the capital’s culinary history: Marbles, The Roxborough, City Limits Cafe, Boulcott Street Bistro, Brasserie Flipp, Cafe L’Affare. They were all there, along with one or two of us who used to supply them.

Dan and I owned a fresh pasta business back then. That’s how we first met him. We supplied him with  pasta, and it was typical of Pierre that he demanded the best and he demanded bespoke. I remember having to put our regular production on hold to make very small quantities of saffron fettuccine for him. It was inefficient, uneconomic and a pain in the neck to be honest, but he was so charming and so encouraging it was impossible to say no. And of course we were proud to have our pasta on the menu of an establishment that made almost everything from scratch.

We all had our Pierre stories yesterday. I never knew he was such an appalling driver. And I never knew he influenced a change to our licensing laws when a table of parliamentarians witnessed a raid on his restaurant. Close down Pierre’s? It was unthinkable. Rumour has it the law was changed the very next day. Thank you for that, Pierre. Thanks for everything.

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It’s been years since I’ve eaten a muffin. I used to like the regular sized ones made with apple or blueberry. On the rare occasions I baked, I would make lemon and buttermilk muffins with a crunchy sugar topping and I even remember making the now defunct bran and sultana muffins. (This was in the days when bran muffins competed with carrot cake in cafes that also sold wholemeal quiche.) But somewhere along the line muffins were given the Big Mac treatment, mutating into super-sized muffin/cakes overloaded with chocolate chips, or with savoury fillings that properly belong in a quiche. 

Ngaire with Muffins

I’m happy the monster muffin fad has abated, ‘though why it has been replaced by the trend for tasteless over-dressed cup cakes is anyone’s guess. Anyway, the reason I’m writing about muffins is that I whipped up a batch today, using a recipe given to me by a friend who we visited over summer. Ngaire has a bach in the bay next to ours in the Marlborough Sounds. She invited us over for lunch and with coffee she served some light-as-a-feather retro-sized, retro-styled muffins. They were golden brown, warm and homely and they made me wonder why they had ever fallen from favour.  I got out my notepad and pestered  her for the recipe which turned out to be an amalgam of essential kiwi baking: banana cake + carrot cake + sultana muffin. She gave me her recipe from memory, having more or less made it up, and she generously told me how she achieves a light texture to all her baking. Regardless of what the recipe says, she always separates the eggs, whips the whites and folds them in at the end.

Ngaire’s Muffins

3/4 cup sultanas

1 cup plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon allspice

pinch salt

2 eggs separated

2 tablespoons runny honey

1/2 cup neutral oil (eg rice bran or sunflower)

1 banana, mashed

1 cup grated carrot

Preheat oven to 180°C fan bake. Grease a medium-sized 12 muffin tray.

Soak sultanas in boiling water for 10 minutes then drain and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl sift flour, baking powder, bicarb of soda, cinnamon, allspice and salt.

In a smaller bowl, lightly beat egg yolks, honey and oil. Add to dry ingredients and fold together without over-mixing. Fold in mashed banana and grated carrot. Whip egg whites to stiff peaks and gently fold through mixture. Spoon dollops of mixture into muffin tins and bake for 20 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre of a muffin comes out cleanly. Leave in tin until cool enough to handle. Cool muffins on rack. Split and serve with butter.

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I didn’t really want to get into a tit-for-tat debate about foie gras but someone called Sam has left a lengthy comment on my last blog post which I am responding to in the hope it clarifies my point of view.

This is what Sam has to say:

This is my response:

Dear Sam,

Firstly I don’t say that all foie gras farming is humane and I certainly don’t “gloss over” the appalling treatment of birds in some factory farms. I have in fact, directed people towards YouTube and clips that document what I call the shameful side of foie gras. However, I also know from my own experience (and that is evidence enough for me) that this is not the norm. All the foie-gras farms I’ve seen are tidy humane places where the birds free-range on pasture until the gavage period at which stage they’re penned in groups with lots of room to move. The force-feeding is quick and the birds are not at all upset by it. Ducks and geese are not humans, they are designed to take big lumps of food straight down their necks – have you ever watched a water bird swallow a whole fish? 

My point is that there are good and bad farmers. The anti-foie gras brigade choose to back up their view by focusing on the worst-case factory farms that treat their birds badly.  This is like condemning all beef farming because some operators confine cattle on feedlots, or saying people shouldn’t eat pork because some pig farmers keep pigs in horrible conditions. Why do you think foie gras is any different? Don’t you think that a better response is for restaurants and consumers to support good producers by buying animal products from farms with good welfare and environmental standards – whether it be pork, eggs, beef or foie-gras? This is the policy at Le Canard.  

However, the main point of my blog post was to object to the bullying behaviour of the people who have been protesting outside Le Canard restaurant every weekend for the last six months. You object to my use of the term ‘bullying’. What else do you call the behaviour of people who will not respect the opinions of others and who use intimidating tactics to make the object of their protest behave in the way they see fit? Six months of leafleting customers and waving placards outside the restaurant – not to mention the xenophobic phone calls, and demands that the chef alter his menu – certainly fits my definition of bullying. 

Anna

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Moore Wilson Ice Installation

The ice installation at Moore Wilson in Wellington is now nothing but a puddle of water, but it was great while it lasted.

Ian Hornblow and Paul Hoather, business partners at the White House restaurant, have been chipping away at it since Tuesday. It was their contribution to the Wellington on a Plate festival, supported by Moore Wilson who donated the produce that was part of the sculpture.

Ian Hornblow sculpts Wellington on a Plate

The blocks were made at an ice factory that does this sort of thing, although usually without the fish, flowers and vegetables that had to be suspended in the water as it was frozen. Apparently the oversized ice cubes are quite tricky  to make because the water has to be de-ionised (or is it de-oxygenated?) so the ice will set crystal clear.

Ice sculpting isn’t something I know much about so, on Ian’s suggestion, I googled it and turned up some amazing images. Wikipedia says the largest ever snow sculpture was made for the annual Harbin Ice Festival in China in 2007. It measured 250m long and 8.5m high and included a sculpture of the Niagara Falls.

Ian and Paul’s installation included a Wellington on a Plate logo complete with knife and fork, a rugby ball, a tropical fish (which was in melt-down by the time I made my second visit) and a muscly torso, which Ian assured me was Sonny Bill Williams. In the absence of the trademark tattoo I find this hard to believe, but maybe that was asking too much of Ian and his set of heavy duty Japanese ice chisels.

Sonny Bill Williams?

According to Wiki, ice sculptors these days often use lasers, which you’d imagine would be a lot easier for intricate work. Ian and Paul do it the traditional way with chisels that Paul brought back from Japan 20-years-ago when he was part of a team that won a gold in the novice section of an international competition.

Ian usually sculpts with wood. He says ice is easier, “softer and more forgiving”. You do have to work faster – it’s a race against time – but he says he likes the transient nature of the medium. “It’s here today gone tomorrow – like the ice cube in your gin and tonic.”

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Cheesemaker and thorn-in-the-side of the food safety bureaucrats, Biddy Fraser-Davies, is hopeful her experience with officialdom will improve the lot of her fellow artisan cheesemakers. Having been threatened with closure for insufficient record keeping she is now filling in a ridiculous amount of forms for each cheese and complying with a testing regime that’s costing a small fortune (see last post). However, her undoubted frustration is tempered by the knowledge that she is proving her point: the food safety authority’s one-size fits all policy is unecessarily onerous and needs to be re-jigged to fit the needs of the country’s small cheesemakers.

The information she is collecting, in the form of a steadily increasing pile of folders and lab reports, will be used by the Ministry of Agriculture (MAF now incorporates the NZFSA) to help design a pared down Risk Management Programme (RMP) for micro cheesemakers who milk their own animals, produce less than 1000 litres of milk per week and only make hard cheese.

Don’t hold your breath – the wheels of officialdom are moving ever so slowly – but the following letter, elicited from the Minister for Food Safety, Kate Wilkinson, gives Biddy some hope.

“…….I understand that this situation exists in accord with an agreement that you have made with MAF for the purpose of undertaking a trial to determine the feasibility of a micro cheesemakers RMP template which has the potential to substantially reduce your operating costs, and those in a similar situation to yourself…………. I trust that you will be able to successfully complete the trial and that the micro cheesemakers template will indeed prove to be advantageous to you and your business”. (2/5/2011)

And if her dogged persistence pays off in that regard, Biddy intends taking her campaign to the next stage. She’d like to see the Risk Management Programme extended to include artisanal cheeses made from raw milk. I’ll keep you posted.

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I just had to post a photograph of the new vegetarian dish at Le Canard, the Wellington restaurant of which I am a silent but hungry partner.

Chef Pascal Bedel has taken inspiration from René Redzepi’s stunning book, Noma. Named after his highly acclaimed restaurant in Copenhagen, the book showcases Redzepi’s interpretation of Nordic cuisine with dishes that redefine those overused words, seasonal and local.

At Le Canard his ‘vegetable field’ becomes ‘le jardin potager’ – a garden of vegetables served in a flowerpot, complete with edible ‘dirt’. The flavours are intriguing, the presentation, fabulous.

A vegetarian friend of mine from New York was the first customer to order the dish. She dug into her flower pot with great gusto, devouring the whole garden from the tops of the carrots to the pomme purée at the base. She recognised a hint of horseradish in the mash but couldn’t figure out what gave the soil its tasty crunch.

Ask the chef.

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Muchas gracias to Logan Brown and St Vincent’s Cave for a fabulous lunch on Monday. It was a collaborative effort in which chef Shaun Clouston prepared a five-course, degustation lunch using Spanish wine and ingredients from the Auckland-based importer.

It wasn’t about showcasing Spanish dishes; rather, the idea was to enhance local New Zealand produce with a light Spanish touch.

We began with slivers of paprika-cured kingfish sprinkled with crystallised orange. Subtly flavoured and gorgeously textured, the fish was partnered with a chilled Catalonian vermouth. It was the perfect apéritif; I can imagine serving it alongside a dish of the fruity little Arbequina olives from the same region. These were really, really good and I intend buying some from Ontrays, the company’s Wellington stockist. (more…)

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