Financial times magazine 89 april 2017

A SQUARE MEAL: THE INSTAGRAM FOOD GAME

by Natalie Whittle

347

12

36

Issue number 711 • Online ft.com/magazine • Editorial inquiries 020 7873 3636 • Advertising inquiries 020 7873 3121 • FT Weekend Magazine is printed by Wyndeham Group in the UK and published by The Financial Times Ltd, Number One Southwark Bridge, London SE1 9HL • © The Financial Times Ltd 2017 • No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without the prior express permission of the publisher

ANDY SEWELL

Rowley Leigh’s artichoke gratin

@FTMag

FOOD & DRINK SPECIAL ISSUE 5 Gary Silverman Salmon

and the single man • 6 The Inventory Paul A Young, chocolatier 8 How to… Understand any sport • 10 Mehreen Khan The politics of saying sorry • 10 Letters

24

Jonathan Meades’ recipe for cassoulet

18

18

Koks’ head chef Poul Andrias Ziska

12 Feeding Instagram How the photosharing app influences restaurateurs, by Natalie Whittle A ve ery remote restaurant Robbie Lawrence heads to the Michelin-starred Koks on the Faroe Islands 24 Observations Jonathan Meades on culinary plagiarism 30 Dairy revolution Polly Russell goes in search of exceptional farmhouse cheese 36 Rowley Leigh Artichoke

gratin • 39 Jancis Robinson Indian wines O’Riordan on Manchester • 41 Tim Hayward Breddos, London 43 Lindsey Tramuta Parisian sweet somethings • 45 Games • 46 Gillian Tett The House of Donald 40 My addresses Adam

Cover photograph by Luke & Nik for the FT

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

3

GARY SILVERMAN

OPENING SHOT

Salmon and the single man

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

A

fter 20 years of marriage, I get a funny feeling when I eat salmon.

I’m not allergic to the fish, nor do I dislike its flavour. Grilled, broiled, served raw over sushi rice or smoked, sliced thin and piled atop a schmear of cream cheese on a bagel, salmon almost always works for me. Even the dried-out version they serve at diners in the US isn’t half bad if you squeeze enough lemon on it.

My issue with the dish is purely a by-product of my psychosexual development. So central was this particular food to my life as a young man that I toyed with the idea of writing a book about my dating experiences titled I’ll Have the Salmon (a companion piece to my as-yetunwritten but exhaustively researched self-help guide: Stop While You’re Behind – Learning to Live Without Reaching Your Potential).

Rightly or wrongly, I came to see salmon as the answer to one of life’s more difficult questions – what to eat when one is attempting to fall in love and might have sex. The issue is rarely addressed in traditional romantic literature, I suspect, because it is so problematic. Even Shakespeare would have been hard-pressed to render a Juliet reeking of the anchovies in her Caesar salad or a Romeo weighed down by the slab of porterhouse he downed at dinner.

Although courtship often involves meetings over meals, culinary obstacles to intimacy abound. There are oily sauces that splatter and stain, the cloves of garlic that linger in the gastrointestinal tract long after the linguine has been eaten, and those infernal chilli peppers that lurk in Thai dishes, threatening the tongues of would-be lovers with outright incineration if they dare to look up from their food to gaze into the eyes of their beloved.

My digestive problems as a dater were compounded by my taste in romantic partners. As a young man of somewhat literary sensibilities, I was drawn to women who were characters – the kind I knew from 19th-century novels, French New Wave films and the popular songs of my youth (hello, “Ruby Tuesday”!). A queasy nervousness goes with this particular territory; after Tony meets Maria in West Side Story, they dance, they sing, they embrace, but they never call Domino’s and order a pepperoni pizza.

I began to understand that for someone like me, looking for love demanded sound menu decisions. On general blandness grounds, the obvious solution would have been to stick to chicken. But there was a rub. Chicken is often the least expensive dish at a restaurant and no man wants to look like a cheapskate to the woman who was going to make his life worth living – at least not right away.

Salmon, like so many aspects of relationships, represented a compromise. It cost more than chicken but less, say, than lobster. There ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY HAYSOM

was always the odd chance of biting into a bone, but the dish could be consumed without picking anything up with your hands or making any unfortunate slurping sounds. I even came to like the fact that salmon is often served in small portions and without significant adornment; it helped me focus on the matter at hand.

Salmon became such a regular companion during my romantic pursuits that I started waxing on the subject while drowning my sorrows on dateless nights, giving rise to the I’ll Have the Salmon concept. Looking back on

‘Rightly or wrongly, I came to see salmon as the answer to one of life’s more difficult questions – what to eat when one is attempting to fall in love and might have sex’ it, I would say the book failed to materialise for two reasons. Given the author’s record of accomplishment in the field, there was a serious possibility that the tome would have come in at pamphlet length. It was also the case that the role of food in my life evolved. Somehow my internal organs began to operate more independently as I made my way in the world, enabling me to follow my heart without upsetting my stomach.

I

met the woman who became my wife at a party where dinner was served. The strange thing was that on the way over, I had stopped at a store to buy a bottle of wine, saw her and a friend doing the same, and wondered why I never seemed to go to parties attended by women like them.

They were there when I walked in.

Although it’s politically incorrect to admit this, I started flirting with her friend first.

I only met my wife when we both went back to the buffet for second helpings. She didn’t make me nauseous then, nor did she a few days later when we met at an Italian restaurant, where I skipped the salmon.

Two decades on, my wife handles nearly all of the serious cooking in our house. Although our children prefer their salmon raw or smoked, she grills a fillet from time to time. I tend to eat my portion after it has been reheated in the microwave, one of the consequences of working fairly late and having to commute back to the New York suburbs.

Dining in front of my television set, the salmon tastes like it used to. But now, it’s just fish, no more, no less.

The writer is the FT’s US national editor gary.silverman@ft.com @GaryRSilverman Simon Kuper is back next week 5

I N V E N T O R Y P A U L A Y O U N G , C H O C O L AT I E R

‘At school I was told that if you wanted to be a chef, you weren’t very intelligent’ 6

What was your childhood or earliest ambition?

My mum’s a musician and I was in lots of brass bands from about the age of eight, so I always thought music was going to be the thing.

Private school or state school?

University or straight into work?

Wellfield Comprehensive, County Durham. I left at 15. I applied to Hartlepool art college because I loved art, and got in. Then, the Friday before I was meant to start, I changed my mind and said I was going to catering college. I thought I’d always have a job if I could cook.

I did my foundation course at New College, Durham. There were no celebrity chefs at the time, other than Keith Floyd. Then I heard about Marco Pierre White and thought: “Here’s somebody who will change the way chefs cook.”

Who was or still is your mentor?

Tom Young and Frances Openshaw, two fantastic lecturers who encouraged me. Marco Pierre White; I went on to work for him.

Roger Pizey, who taught me all my skills while I was at MPW. How physically fit are you?

Very! I got a personal trainer for the first time last October. He trains the mind and the body; he’s brilliant.

Ambition or talent: which matters more to success?

You have to have ambition. Some have natural talent, some need to be taught, but the drive to be the best is key.

How politically committed are you?

I wasn’t, until I started my business. Now I am quietly political with things like making sure my suppliers get paid correctly.

I’m very committed to equality: equal standing, equal voices and equal opportunity. And I support lots of charities that don’t get supported by government and need outside help.

What would you like to own that you don’t currently possess?

I’d love an Aston Martin. I view cars like pieces of art. And a brother or sister for Billington, my miniature dachshund.

What’s your biggest extravagance?

My new house. I moved to London in 1996, and I’ve only just got on the property ladder! I’ve got the kitchen I’ve wanted for a significant amount of time.

In what place are you happiest?

The kitchen. And Staithes, a small fishing town in North Yorkshire.

What ambitions do you still have?

To expand the business outside the UK, to open real chocolateries where we can train people to work from scratch. I’d like to be one of the first to do that. And I’d love to have the first dedicated chocolate school where everyone and anyone can come and learn.

What drives you on?

Our family chemistry. I was brought up with the understanding that you don’t get anywhere if you don’t work hard. I’ve got a healthy obsession with everything I do!

What is the greatest achievement of your life so far?

At school I was told that if you wanted to be a chef, you weren’t very intelligent. I’ve had books published, I’ve trained people, people listen to me. I’ve fulfilled what I set out to achieve, but I’m still learning every day.

What do you find most irritating in other people?

People who talk the talk but cannot deliver!

If your 20-year-old self could see you now, what would he think?

“You’ve survived. You’ve achieved more than you thought you would.

And you’re still relevant.”

Which object that you’ve lost do you wish you still had?

My mum’s Cona coffee maker. You lit a flame underneath, the water bubbled up. I was fascinated by it when I was tiny, I remember the smell, the sounds. She gave it to me when I got a flat of my own.

I moved into a house with granite worktops – and it shattered.

What is the greatest challenge of our time?

Sustainability.

Do you believe in an afterlife?

I believe there’s something else, but I don’t know what form it would take.

If you had to rate your satisfaction with your life so far, out of 10, what would you score?

Seven.

Interview by Hester Lacey paulayoung.co.uk

MAXINE KIRSTY SAPSFORD

Paul A Young, 43, opened his first chocolate shop in Islington in 2006. He has opened two more stores since and won many awards for his artisanal creations, including Outstanding British Chocolatier 2014.

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

WATCH ANYSPORT

I love sport. Whether it’s football, cricket or basketball, I can’t get enough. Last year, though, I covered the Olympics for the FT and suddenly had to get to grips with an array of sports that were completely new to me: from fencing to diving and Greco-Roman wrestling. It was a blast, but it was also a little bit daunting. If you’ve ever been invited round to watch the World Cup or the Super Bowl and not had a clue what was going on, you’ll know what I mean. So, if you find some spectator sports baffling rather than thrilling, here are some simple tips to help you stay on the ball.

Financial Times experts share their views on everyday challenges

Top-level sport is about extraordinary human beings performing superhuman feats. No, it’s not “just a bunch of people kicking a ball around a field”. Only a tiny percentage of the world’s population are able to move like this. Even if you don’t yet understand what they’re trying to achieve, focus on their skill and creativity.

Don’t worry about knowing the rules. Even if you don’t know what “15-love” or “deuce” means in tennis, you’ll quickly connect the action on the field to the changes on the scoreboard. All sport is about winning, so concentrate on working out how a player or team gains dominance. Once you identify key tactics, you can start to spot them in action.

THE NEXT DOWN IS CRUCIAL!

THIS REF IS HAVING A MARE!

Listening to a commentary is just like learning a language. At first, it’ll sound like gobbledygook. But, slowly, the words will match up to the pictures. If you want to sound more knowledgeable, just repeat and agree with whatever the commentators say. Most sports have a few key phrases that you can learn, from “this next down is crucial” (in American football, a “down” is the period in which a play occurs) to “oh, a glorious triple Salchow, double Axel, triple toe!” (OK, maybe don’t learn that one).

8

Great sport is about great stories and great characters. Roger Federer beating Rafael Nadal (right) in the Australian Open this year was a grand epic between two supposedly fallen heroes. Leicester City winning the Premier League was a modern David and Goliath – an underdog upsetting giants. The New England Patriots’ comeback against the Atlanta Falcons at the Super Bowl? An against-all-odds thriller.

Rules, scores and players create plotlines, myths and histories. Sport creates spontaneous narratives that we all get to discover together.

And who doesn’t like great stories?

ft.com/howto

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MATT JOHNSTONE PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY IMAGES; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

by Murad Ahmed, FT leisure correspondent

MEHREEN KHAN THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION

The politics of saying sorry

10

GETTY IMAGES

A

familiar feeling descended on European Muslims, including myself, in the aftermath of last month’s Westminster terror attack. Amid the horror, the speculation over the identity of the perpetrator held added dread for anyone who identifies with Islam – from the most devout to the lapsed practitioner.

My phone soon lit up with anxious messages from friends and family about the motives of the man who killed three pedestrians with a car before murdering a policeman. “Is the attacker Muslim?” (As a journalist, my loved ones mistakenly assume I have inside intelligence on these matters, ignoring the fact that I spend most of my day writing about inflation.)

Images of the scene soon showed the alleged perpetrator: a darkskinned man with a beard. Given the context, it was enough to provoke the sinking feeling many Muslims have grown accustomed to since 9/11. Never mind that – as it later emerged – Khalid Masood was born in Kent as Adrian Russell Elms, had accrued a string of convictions from the age of 18 ranging from criminal damage to grievous bodily harm, and did not convert to Islam until later in life. (One former friend told the media that, as a younger man, Masood had complained about his local pub being converted into a mosque.) His eventual embrace of the religion, probably in prison, was enough to fan flames of “the Muslim question” in the UK once again.

How should Muslims react following such events?

One London friend said she immediately felt the need to “overcompensate” in disavowing the attack to her co-workers. That sentiment is not uncommon.

In the days after the attack, a crowdfunding campaign for the victims was created by “Muslims United for London”, and public tributes included a human chain of mainly Muslim women linking arms on Westminster Bridge.

Highlighting these everyday acts

PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD BAKER

of Muslim compassion has become a necessary corrective in a world where invective rules the airwaves.

British Muslims, accustomed to accusations that they harbour radicals within their communities, have become increasingly assertive in condemning terrorism conducted in the name of their faith.

But persistent apologies raise questions. Why should Muslims feel the need to say sorry at all?

How often should any Muslim have to disassociate herself from individuals with whom she shares nothing but membership of a faith that numbers more than 1.5 billion?

The UK’s debate on the causes of homegrown terror has come a long way since the attacks on July 7 2005. It is now known that many Islamist terrorists share traits such as low-level criminality, often including domestic abuse, and tend to have only a very loose grasp of even the basic tenets of Islam.

Extrapolating about a group based on the actions of a violent criminal is laughable when applied in any other context. As one tweet put it: “Nigel Farage is 52 and from Kent. So is the alleged Westminster attacker.

When will we tackle this problem of 52-year-olds from Kent?”

After the attack, an image of a hijab-wearing woman walking past an injured person while looking at her phone spread like wildfire on rightwing blogs and Twitter. Behind her, bystanders were seen attending to the victim.

“This is how ‘radicals’ are able to take hold and kill thousands.

The ‘moderates’ turn a blind eye and do nothing to stop them,” said one online commentator.

Within a day, the woman felt forced to issue an apologetic statement, explaining the photograph had been taken as she contacted her family to tell them she was safe, and that she had already offered to help.

The presumption of guilt until proven otherwise has reawakened my lingering fear that Muslims, for all our apologies, will always be perceived as Europe’s integrated aliens.

In the past, I have bristled at the lengths taken to humanise Muslims in the press – the articles that fixate on the fact that we can enjoy high fashion or nice food, as if shared materialism were definitive proof that we really are “just like everyone else”.

Yet, the response to the events in Westminster have made me drop the cynicism. In an age of febrile, identity-driven politics, the task of de-vilifying Muslims has a long way to go.

And, in an age where we are told to embrace “British values”, there are few things more British than saying sorry for something that is not your fault. mehreen.khan@ft.com; @MehreenKhn Robert Shrimsley is away

Re: Leslie Hook’s “Running out of road” (April 1/2). We already have self-driving planes – only take-off and landing are intermediated by humans. And oil tankers and other similar vessels are “self-driving”, piloted in port but not on open seas.

The truck-stop towns will shrink with the arrival of self-driving trucks, it’s true. The same happened when the post-chaises and coaches were replaced by the railway in the 1820s. It’s what happens if you are dependent on a single industry and have no other reason to exist.

Nobody’s found a cure for that, yet. manticore Via FT.com @PhotoLondonFair Apr 1 Great piece by Liz Jobey on the mischievous Peter Mitchell loved his show @rencontresarles last summer

Simon Kuper sums it up (“Cold war spies: the sequel”, April 1/2).

Western institutions and political elites have been completely captured by either foreign billionaires or domestic billionaires, and this process began several years ago.

What has now changed is that you have rightwing, populist politicians (Trump, Le Pen etc) who are openly courting them, knowing that there is no societal momentum to do anything about it. When the pressure intensifies, they can throw their ignorant supporters the red meat of scapegoating and blaming those Muslims, Mexicans and immigrants.

Interesting time to be alive.

Newbie Via FT.com I’m afraid Robert Shrimsley (“Das Kaffee”, April 1/2) has exposed himself to coffee aficionado snobbery. The AeroPress almost certainly produces a better cup than his automatic machine. A good home set-up would cost more than £3k.

I blame the success of the thirdwave coffee movement and the olfactory and gustatory revolution it brought upon us. For what it is worth though, ultimately, de gustibus non est disputandum.

Dieuetmondroi Via FT.com To contribute Please email magazineletters@ft.com. Include a daytime telephone number and full address (not for publication). Letters may be edited.

Quiz answers from page 45. The link was names of beaches 1. South Korea 2. The Copacabana 3. Long (The Long Goodbye, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Long Walk to Freedom) 4. Venice 5. Miami Vice 6. “The Girl from Ipanema” 7. Malibu 8. Juno (D-Day beach) 9. Newport 10. Palm Sunday Picture quiz Dan Snow + Lucille Ball = Snowball

Reply

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

FEEDING INSTAGRAM Some 208 million posts have been hashtagged ‘food’ since the photosharing app launched in 2010. No wonder restaurateurs are placing such a premium on pretty – and pink. By Natalie Whittle.

Photographs by Luke & Nik

12

L

eonid Shutov pulls out his phone. It’s just past breakfast in London, and he is sipping an espresso at a green banquette inside Bob Bob Ricard, his restaurant on the corner of Upper James Street and Beak Street in Soho. This is the kind of place that, like fabulous wealth or a bad hangover, isn’t seen much before lunchtime. It’s too delicate.

The walls are lined with chiyogami bookbinding papers imported from Japan, a dappled pattern of silver cranes flying across an ink-blue night. At each table there is a button in which capital letters spell out: “PRESS FOR CHAMPAGNE”. A huge blousy bouquet of pink flowers overwhelms the bar, where, later on, they’ll be serving fine vodkas at -18c.

What the 50-year-old restaurateur, in his cheerful accent (half native Russian, half adopted English), opens up Instagram to show off is a photo of a drinks coaster. “Just this morning, I was looking at someone in San Francisco posting a picture of one of our coasters,” he says proudly. In the comments underneath the post, Shutov notes, somebody else had deduced from the coaster’s livery that it was from Bob Bob Ricard. “BBR” has a light gold, art deco logo that adorns much of a meal here, from the plates to the menu to the coaster to the billfold.

“There’s a value of having someone be able to recognise that. If you search on Instagram by London restaurants and food, a lot of beautifully executed shots come up on fine china but you’d be hard pressed to say where they were without looking at the geotags to identify them easily.” ▶ FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

13

◀ Food is a great feeder of Instagram – some 208 million posts have been tagged on the photosharing app with the “food” hashtag since it was founded in 2010 – and, for a restaurant like Shutov’s, it is a branding opportunity. The photographic revolution sparked by the modern mobile phone and its inbuilt camera means that a large number of consumers arrive with a nuanced understanding of what might make an appealing image on a forum such as Instagram. Increasingly, as the social sphere becomes more crowded, the challenge for a restaurateur is to anticipate the customer’s visual tastes correctly – to create tables, dishes and settings that are photographs waiting to happen.

Shutov almost always uses pictures on his restaurant’s Instagram feed that customers have taken themselves. It creates a flattering reflection of the good times people have at BBR, while also reinforcing the graphic identity of what is a relatively small restaurant with 176 covers, best known for those PRESS FOR CHAMPAGNE buttons and the gallons of fizz it drinks through as a result – “more than 3,000 bottles in a slow month,” Shutov says. “We absolutely love social media – as far as restaurants go, it’s the great equaliser. It’s amplified word of mouth. You can’t distort it easily but it allows you to bypass a lot of the conventional media. Stories that wouldn’t be big enough to make it on to conventional media will flourish on social media, and that’s very important to us.”

Which is why Shutov, who founded an advertising agency in Russia that he sold in 2007 to Ogilvy, and opened BBR in 2008, has just invested an undisclosed sum in making his restaurant more Instagrammable. That means whiter plates, clearer logos, pretty photo-catching new dishes such as chicken Kiev in a bonnet shape, truffled fries and a goat’s curd and beetroot starter that looks like a Parisian petit four. “We always had people photographing the table when it’s filled with food,” Shutov notes, with the Beef Wellington and Chocolate Glory popular choices, “however, as soon as we changed to new plates, people got excited; we know we’ve done something right.”

I

nstagram began with a yellow fluffy dog at a taco stand in Mexico. The first image on the photosharing app was taken in Todos Santos by its cofounder Kevin Systrom, of a Labrador lying winsomely at his girlfriend’s feet. After being uploaded to a test site, the photo – and Instagram – went live in October 2010. The rest, Systrom said, “is history” – people flocked to the idea of retro square-format photos that could be processed on their phone through different “filters” and edited for effect, creating public albums of whatever a person wanted to show from their life (barring full nudity).

Now Instagram is much more than that: a platform for businesses in fashion, food and media to net new interest in their products, to play with brand identity and to make instant impact when they need to refresh a corporate image that’s going stale. Not every brand uses it well, but Instagram counts 600 million monthly active users worldwide and was sold to Facebook for $1bn in 2012. Last year, to keep pace with the more youthful aesthetic of its rival Snapchat, it introduced “Stories”, a feature that enables users to upload snippets of video and photos that they’ve taken in the past 24 hours, which then disappear after a day – a little self-dissolving diary that is like an extra window into someone’s life. Like much of Instagram, it can become addictive.

14

This allure is part of what makes hospitality designers now include Instagram in their thinking right from the drawing board. Afroditi Krassa, who has her own design studio based in London, has worked for clients from Heston Blumenthal to Curzon Cinemas. She has been in the industry for 15 years so, like the original interior of Bob Bob Ricard, her experience pre-dates the explosion of social media. Should Instagram be part of the modern restaurant’s strategy? “One hundred per cent yes,” she says, sitting in Bala Baya, the Bermondsey pitta café-bar she designed and invested in. Housed in a converted railway arch, it has an open kitchen, white marble counter and a huge chandelier hanging from the Victorian brick ceiling. Over the day’s lunch special of orangeand-harissa fried chicken in fresh-made pitta wraps, Krassa explains her view of social media and its role in hospitality marketing: “It’s still word of mouth but the mouth is Instagram.

Hoteliers were ahead of the game – they sell their product through photos. They were the first to say five or six years ago, ‘How would this photograph?’. In food, the first [to use social media]

were not luxury restaurants but casual streetfood places with a younger audience.”

Every little detail counts – and, as an example of how minutely considered restaurant design can become, she cites the “Mexican eatery” chain Barburrito, which has 14 outlets across the UK. “There is an obsession with photographing the burrito in foil. People make shapes with the foil – and so it has branded the foil.” When you look at Instagram posts from people eating out, she adds, “90 per cent of the photo is food, not the space”.

Hence the branding on a foil wrapper can become important, and why the size of the plates, the colour of the glasses all matter. “I see the table as an artist would a canvas.” If you want to get people taking photos from outside the restaurant, you have to create something out of the ordinary – what Krassa calls “kerb appeal”. In Soho, she designed the Greek grill Suvlaki – and with a relatively small budget she struck on the idea of painting a Greek poem on to the restaurant façade.

And so “Ithaca” by CP Cavafy, about a craving and longing for a sense of home, often pops up on social media in pictures of the restaurant.

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

Clockwise from far left (all pictures taken at Bob Bob Ricard): a selection of dishes including pork belly pyramid, truffled fries and minted peas; a celebratory cake; Leonid Shutov; goat’s curd and beetroot cake; a floral display

‘We absolutely love social media – as far as restaurants go, it’s the great equaliser’ LEONID SHUTOV, BOB BOB RICARD

Ali Busacca, head of community at Instagram for Europe, Middle East and Africa, says that the Italian restaurant Pietro Nolita in New York is another venue that was “very vocal about keeping Instagram in consideration when designing the space; it’s entirely pink, and people were IG-ing it [shorthand for Instagramming] before it was open.”

So-called “millennial pink” is the colour of the moment. Sketch in London is another predominantly pink restaurant that pops up a lot on Instagram, Busacca says, but she also notes that there is a move away from the obvious and contrived on Instagram, and the app’s users are starting to change the way in which they photograph food and social food occasions. “We’ve seen a shift from ordered tables and menus to an over-the-top and chaotic style, with an explosion of colour, and tables filled with plates. It’s more family style and congenial, flatware is mismatched.”

For the past few years, this was not the prevailing style of food photography on Instagram – accounts such as Symmetry Breakfast, which shows overhead shots of perfectly matching breakfast portions, epitomised a technique that came to be known as ▶ FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

15

good example, as it started in Australia in August 2015 and then made its way to London. Out of New York there is a trend called unicorn lattes – a light blue-violet concoction of sugar and wellness ingredients sprinkled with fairy dust. It’s a whimsical approach to food.”

Sundravorakul is preparing to bring the “raindrop cake” to Yamagoya, the ramen pop-up above Shuang Shuang. The raindrop cake is a water jelly served with soybean powder and brown sugar syrup – an Instagram hit in New York but a Japanese creation from Yamanashi prefecture. “I’m 100 per cent sure [customers] would take a picture of it. The raindrop cake is a social phenomenon Stateside, so it will be interesting to see if it has the same effect here.”

Top and below: truffled fries; Beef Wellington

L ‘Every time people are at a restaurant they eat with their phones first – it’s a common theme now’ FAH SUNDRAVORAKUL, SHUANG SHUANG

◀ the “flat lay” – an aerial view of an invariably

enviable lifestyle. It was easy enough to achieve, if you were prepared to get the necessary height on your shot of a café’s latte art by standing on a chair.

But nowadays it has become unfashionable to be too overt about your social media activity over a meal. “Six, seven years ago, people had cameras the size of a small car; it made it a lot more disruptive,” Shutov says. “Taking a good photo on a phone is easier; ultimately, people want to take the photo as quickly as possible and then move on.”

Fah Sundravorakul, a restaurateur who runs hotpot specialist Shuang Shuang at the edge of London’s Chinatown, says: “Every time people are at a restaurant they eat with their phones first – it’s a common theme anywhere now. At the moment Instagram is not showing any signs of slowing down.”

The photosharing site can be a stranger to itself in this regard; a community of users that is as unpredictable and faddish as a community in any sphere, with trends that can cross continents.

“Things bubble up quickly and spread quickly,” says Busacca. “The Freakshake [a milkshake piled high with cookie chunks and whipped cream] is a 16

eonid Shutov travelled to the Czech Republic to find a factory that could make his new titanium crystal glassware for the right price; it’s an important cost to keep as low as possible, since glasses get broken every night at BBR, and a few also find their way out the door in customers’ bags. “As markets are getting more international, in a way sometimes the internet is making things harder to find because you’re trying to access things that are different. So we focused on creating things that were bespoke. We are very conscious that the unique look that we have gives us a very strong presence on Instagram… It’s an endorsement of your design if it’s so desirable that people want to have it.” (The Richard Caring-owned Mayfair restaurant Sexy Fish has anticipated this impulse too with a message on the underside of its chopstick rests: “Stolen from Sexy Fish” – an eminently Instagrammable picture, naturally.)

Mid-market restaurants are “getting a lot more competitive,” says Shutov. “They are able to emulate what high-end restaurants can do; if you expect people to see you as a step above, you need to give them a distinctive reason why it is so. The mid-market is very good at picking up on big design ideas and doing it convincingly.”

His new plates were made from bone china by Wedgwood, “whiter than normal porcelain, with greater contrast. They fired samples for us and we looked at all the different lighting settings that we have.” Like Pietro Nolita and Sketch, BBR also has its splashes of pink, but “it’s a complicated relationship because strong colour competes with food,” Shutov says. “On arrival the whole table is completely pink. Whereas when the food starts to arrive there’s a lot more white and gold; pink remains on bread plates, accent plates and little underplates for side dishes. There’s been a lot of trial and error.

Sometimes you think, ‘What have I done?’”

What Instagram has done is create a marketplace for everyday visual ideas, but it’s underwritten by the complexity of social impulses.

Why do people want to share photos of their food?

One answer emerges from the mini-birthday gateau with sparkler that Bob Bob Ricard offers as a complimentary cake “for anybody celebrating – it’s very West End musical. You want to make it a memorable experience. And if it makes you want to photograph, it’s probably special.” Whether Instagram is making food taste any better is yet to be seen.

Natalie Whittle is associate editor of FT Weekend Magazine FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

Waves crashing against the rocks of Gjógv. Located on the north-eastern tip of Eysturoy, this small village is one of the most picturesque spots in the Faroe Islands. With fewer than 50 inhabitants, Gjógv is named after the 200-metre-long gorge that runs from the village into the ocean

THE RESTAURANT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD Bleak, isolated, windswept and barren – not many chefs would choose to run a restaurant on the Faroe Islands. Yet one young man who does – using only local ingredients for his dishes – has just won a Michelin star Words and photographs

by Robbie Lawrence 19

20

FT.COM/MAGAZINE MARCH 2/3 2015

Facing page: skate with peas, sandseaworth and blue mussels

FOOD PHOTOGRAPHS BY CLAUS BECH POULSEN

Left: Leif Høj of fish supplier Fofish holds up a stingray from the morning’s catch.

Operating out of Runavík, a small fishing town situated towards the south of the island, Høj’s fleet of longline vessels are Koks’ primary fish supplier.

Head chef Poul Andrias Ziska says Fofish’s reliability is key to the smooth running of his business, as is knowing exactly where the fish have come from, and how they have been caught

Koks stands at the top of a steep verge leading down to the coastal village of Kirkjubøur, on the southern tip of the Faroe Islands. Jutting into the temperamental sky, this understated building, with its dark walls and turf roof, is the nucleus of the country’s burgeoning food scene. In late February, the restaurant was awarded the Faroes’ first Michelin star, an accolade that was not only celebrated by the local population but viewed as a symbol of a broader shift in attitudes towards fine dining.

For centuries, the harsh climate and isolation of the islands has made food a precious commodity.

When a sheep was slaughtered, every morsel was dried, fermented and packed for winter. Driven by a desire to bring these traditional Faroese processes out of the home and into a restaurant, Koks’ enigmatic head chef, Poul Andrias Ziska, 26, set himself the daunting task of sourcing his produce entirely from the island’s meagre resources.

Indeed, while the North Atlantic has always been a bountiful hunting ground for the Faroese, the storm-battered pastures of the archipelago yield little.

To grow vegetables or forage herbs here you have to be aware of the verdant parts of the island, and Ziska’s focus has been to gather a skilled team of foragers, farmers and divers who provide him with the likes of wild sorrel, angelica and sea purslane on a daily basis.

Karin Visth, the restaurant’s young sommelier, is keen to emphasise the vital role that these producers have played in bringing the restaurant the Michelin award. “Each of them owns a little corner of the star,” she says.

Koks is open from April 11 to September 2017.

For more information, visit www.koks.fo

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

Right: during the winter period, which stretches from October until late March, it is almost impossible to grow vegetables on the Faroe Islands. Farmer Jóannes Johannessen í Miðstovuni has countered this by setting up a small greenhouse system on his estate. Koks receives a regular supply of his vegetables from the local ferry that braves the short, choppy ride between Sandoy and Kirkjubøur

Left: head chef Poul Andrias Ziska searching for driftwood down by the Kirkjubøur shoreline.

Inspired by the natural produce that the Faroe Islands has to offer, Ziska has made it his mission to research and experiment with the most unlikely of ingredients. Despite having recently received a Michelin star for his ingenuity, Ziska aims to raise the bar further with this year’s menu

Above: an exterior shot of the restaurant, which opened in 2011

21

22

FT.COM/MAGAZINE MARCH 2/3 2015

Below: farmer Jóhan Dávur Joensen displaying mould-covered lamb shanks of ræst, which are stored in vented wooden sheds over winter.

Once ready for consumption, the chef will wash the meat, cut it into small chunks and serve

Facing page: farmer Jóhan Dávur Joensen takes a walk over the turnip patch at the bottom of his garden. Joensen is predominantly a sheep farmer. His farm, located next to the great waterfall of Gásadalur on the west side of Vágar, is brutally exposed to the raging winds of the Atlantic, which regularly batter his fields with torrential downpours

Above: the Faroese delicacy ræst – semidried and fermented mutton – on a bed of reindeer lichen with mushroom cream and elderberries

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

with local beer.

The texture of the meat is much like Parma crudo but it takes a couple of helpings to get used to the extremely pungent flavour.

According to Koks’ chef Ziska, Joensen provides the best ræst on the island Below: Jóannes Johannessen í Miðstovuni, whose family have farmed the island of Sandoy since the early 15th century. He is part of a collective of local producers who supply Koks with vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, leeks and cabbage.

While Johannessen has enjoyed his career, he has actively encouraged his children to seek other occupations and believes that when he retires, the long tradition of farming in his family will come to an end

Below: Jóannes Johannessen í Miðstovuni’s flock of sheep huddle together against an incoming spring storm. First brought to the islands in the ninth century, sheep have played an integral role in the survival of the Faroese people.

They are allowed to roam free and can often be seen calmly grazing on the most vertiginous of cliff edges. Hardened by the brutal conditions of the North Atlantic, the native breed is stocky and thick-coated

23

Observations

by Jonathan Meades

‘I am not out to make friends. The dishes are ones that please me. The only criterion for inclusion was that I have at some time or other cooked them’

Jonathan Meades The Plagiarist in the Kitchen – couldn’t that title be applied to countless cookbooks?

JM It could. But it isn’t. The majority of authors of such books decline to admit their thefts and borrowings. I guess that they reckon they can get away with them though they are sheerly obvious. You’d think that the public would see through it.

To catch a culinary thief The writer and former restaurant critic has created an ‘anti-cookbook’ – a collection of recipes inspired by other people’s ideas.

Here, he interrogates himself about why all cooking is a form of plagiarism

JM Are you really celebrating plagiarism? After all, the etymology takes us back to kidnapping.

JM Etymology, schmetymology. The Roman epigrammatist Martial did not differentiate between stealing children or slaves and lifting from someone else’s literary works. I do tend to differentiate. I’m not so much celebrating culinary plagiarism as suggesting that it’s inevitable, even when we don’t know we are stealing. We all suffer cryptomnesia, the delusion that we have invented something which we haven’t.

JM Is that what you mean when you say that cookbooks feed off cookbooks?

JM Precisely. You read a recipe or, more likely, a description of a dish, forget about it… then months, or even years later, attempt to cook it.

A triumph. Save that Escoffier did it a century ago. On a different, baser level, cookery columnists nick each other’s work and disguise their sources – with different degrees of success.

JM Your contention that cooking is at best a craft is faintly patronising – to chefs, I mean.

JM I quote Gore Vidal’s dictum that craft must always be the same, art must always be different. I don’t necessarily agree with those stipulations. But however you put it, it’s a matter of different categories. One might equally say that craft has a duty to be useful while art doesn’t. Art should engage at a level that no craft can ever attain. Of course these ▶ Illustrations by Anna Wray

24

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

25

Observations

by Jonathan Meades

◀ are counsels of perfection… Both are generally

found wanting.

JM By fessing up to multiple thefts, a lifetime’s thefts, you’re dismissing your colleagues and smugly presenting yourself as a figure of culinary probity. The prig in the kitchen.

JM That’s the first time I’ve been called a prig: I don’t like it. The French for a knuckleduster is une poignée américaine. Remember that.

I’m not embarking on a career as a cookery writer. I’m not a pro. This is the only such book I shall write. Colleagues? I know very few people who have written cookbooks. And I hardly regard them as colleagues. I admire some more than others. I tend to admire those who can write rather than those who provide mere blueprints for dishes. But I feel little commonality with them... I am no more likely now to become a member of the Guild of Food Writers or any other chapter than I was during the decade and a half when I wrote about restaurants. I’m not a joiner.

JM Very few of the recipes you include derive from that decade and a half. You wrote mainly about London restaurants. Yet there’s a bias towards Europe...

JM Approximately half the restaurants I wrote about during that period were in London, a quarter in the rest of Britain, a quarter in western Europe, America and Argentina.

The influence of London is greater than might be immediately apparent. London looks outwards – and will continue to do so despite Ingerlandland’s wanton self-harm. It is unconstrained by culinary tradition. It is, collectively, a magpie nicking from everywhere,

‘I tend to admire those who can write rather than those who provide mere blueprints for dishes’ 26

mostly from Europe, evidently. So I am, I suppose, in that regard a typical Londoner, even though I haven’t lived there for 10 years.

JM There’s little indication in the recipes that you live in Marseille.

JM Marseille’s repertoire goes far beyond bouillabaisse and pieds et paquets. The former is a restaurant con, the latter (lamb’s tripe and trotters) is not to be attempted at home. Or, rather, not in my home, much as I like them. An Italian influence is everywhere apparent. The pizza, ofter close to a tarte fine, is generally better than Naples’s. Again, it is not a dish for the home. The same goes for couscous. It wasn’t my intention to folklorically link dishes to places. As I make clear, the best cassoulet I’ve had was not in the south-west but in Paris.

Dishes are necessarily international – like people, they migrate. Theresa May’s “If you believe you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere” is the assertion of a half-wit.

JM Isn’t that just a bit boorish? Only to be expected though: there are numerous instances throughout the book of bloody-mindedness, contrarian swagger, provocative dicta and so on which are designed to draw attention to yourself and infuriate your readers should you be so lucky to have any.

JM Some may be infuriated, others not. And who else should I be drawing attention to? I am not out to make friends. I don’t have the entertainer’s or politician’s creepy yearning to be liked. The dishes are ones that please me. The only criterion for inclusion was that I have at some time or other cooked them. Nothing new, then. It meant I had, for instance, to relearn soufflés, which I hadn’t made for years. The short digressions on plagiarism, influence, appropriation and the various layers between them are, again, squibs and jests that please me. The subject is fascinating but not so fascinating that I’d want to undertake a detailed study of it.

“The Plagiarist in the Kitchen” is published

by Unbound on April 20 (£20). Recipe overleaf

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

Observations

by Jonathan Meades

Cassoulet This is one of the world’s great dishes. It should be approached with seriousness. But not with undue reverence. There is no true way. There is no definitive inventory of ingredients. There is no immutable method. There are schools and schisms and bickering factions, often within the same cook. My ideas have changed over the years, largely because indisputably the best cassoulet I have eaten was indisputably incorrect; that is, incorrect according to the prescription I had then long adhered to.

In the mid-Nineties I drove for more than a week round the cassoulet belt of south-west France in an attempt to find the cassoulet that defined cassoulet. The one. This was a daft idea that turned out to be a dismal failure. Version after version lurched between mediocre and moderate. Many of the guilty parties were big-name restaurants. This wasn’t like Marseille, where bouillabaisse turns out to be an Occitan word for “we seen you coming”. There was no scam involved, just repeatedly torpid, tired, approximate cooking.

Nothing began to approach even the foothills of the cassoulet at Alain Dutournier’s Au Trou Gascon, 700km north in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, near Omnisport Bercy. If there’s a lesson here it is that best is not to be found on home territory. And if there’s a second lesson it is that our prejudices are there to be broken down so that we can begin to build a replacement set based on empirical observations.

Lamb! Dutournier’s recipe includes lamb.

And tomato. And carrot. Heresies, all of them.

The second time I went to Au Trou Gascon, Dutournier had installed his former sous-chef Jacques Faussat and had himself moved on to his swankier Carré des Feuillants. Faussat was as good as his master. I must have eaten his cassoulet three or four times. Then one

‘I drove for more than a week round the cassoulet belt of south-west France in an attempt to find the cassoulet.

It was a dismal failure’ 28

lunchtime, well, there was something different about it. The parts were there, the whole wasn’t.

Yes, the recipe seemed to be the same… but cooking is about more than recipes. Even though I knew the answer I asked a waiter: Is M Faussat no longer here?

He has moved on.

That’s a shame.

No, no. Now we have M Godiard.

Evidently.

I still advise against tomato and carrot, on grounds of colour as much as anything, but am won round to lamb, just so long as Dutournier or Faussat (whose own restaurant La Braisière is in the 17th arrondissement) is cooking. Another self-imposed rule is no smoked meat. It is a dish that should be cooked in large quantities. This recipe is for about 12 people. *** Step 1 • 1.5kg haricot beans – Tarbes, Arpajon and Soissons are the best • Pork rind • 2 onions stuck with cloves • 1 head of garlic • 500g salt pork – not belly, a leaner cut • 1 end of raw ham on the bone • 250g diced raw ham • 1 large garlic boiling sausage Soak the beans overnight.

Bring to the boil in plenty of water. Discard the water. Bring to a simmer in fresh water with the other ingredients. Skim. Cook for 90 minutes. Discard the pork rinds, onion and garlic. Do NOT discard the liquid. Chop the meats into 4cm × 4cm dice.

Step 2 • Toulouse sausages or Italian all-pork sausages, quartered • 1kg pork loin, chopped into 4cm dice (if you are going to include lamb, reduce the pork to 500g and add the same amount of cubed lamb shoulder) • 4 onions, sliced Roast the pork loin (and lamb) and the quartered

sausages in duck fat for 10 minutes at 150C. Add the onions and cook for a further 10 minutes so they soften but don’t brown.

Step 3 • Pork rind • 2 litres stock • 10 cloves garlic • 8 confit legs of duck (take off the bone) • Breadcrumbs Assemble everything. Put pork rinds on the bottom of the vessel. Then a layer of beans, a layer of boiled meats, more beans, roasted meat/sausages, more rinds (which add to the unctuousness), garlic, beans, confit and so on.

Distribute the ingredients evenly. Add the beans’ cooking liquid and stock. A cassoulet should be quite liquid. Sprinkle the top with breadcrumbs. Spray with duck fat. Cook at a low heat, 130C, for 2 hours.

Watch it. Top up with stock if necessary. The folksy practice of breaking the crust 7 times and pushing it down into the cassoulet is inadvisable because it overthickens the liquid.

This is an edited extract from “The Plagiarist in the Kitchen”

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

THE DAIRY REVOLUTION Deep in the Somerset countryside, Polly Russell goes in search of exceptional farmhouse cheese makers – and encounters the world’s first cheddar-turning robot.

Photographs by Tommy Sussex

Wheels of cheddar at Westcombe Dairy

31

t is a cold February afternoon and I am watching wheels of cheese the size of small footstools being turned and gently brushed by the world’s first and only cheddar-turning robot. “Tina the Turner”, as the robot is affectionately called, is at the frontline of cheddar innovation in the UK. Despite the cutting-edge technology, however, this is not an industrial food factory but Westcombe, a small family-run dairy located deep in the Somerset countryside, some 100 miles west of London.

Hours before sunrise, I was driven out of the city accompanied by a trio of cheese aficionados from Neal’s Yard Dairy. We were embarking on a “cheddar run”, primed to select cheese from the Montgomery and Westcombe dairies. Our expedition leader was Owen Bailey, “senior cheese maturer” at Neal’s Yard in London, where he has worked for more than 20 years. Also in the car were Gareth Hewer and Clem Chabert, who work in Neal’s Yard shops. For my companions, cheese is a calling. Hewer joined the company three years ago after a Damascene moment with a Neal’s Yard cheddar. “It just changed what I thought cheddar was,” he says with a sigh. For Chabert, a young Frenchwoman with a background in food science, tasting Neal’s Yard cheese ended a life-long prejudice.

“I was one of those awful French people who think only French cheese is good. Then I tried some cheese in the Bermondsey store and two minutes later I was asking for a job.” ▶

I

32

‘Turning 6,000 blocks of cheese is challenging. Robots don’t get tired and they don’t get bored’ TOM CALVER, CHEESE MAKER

Above: cheddarturning robot Tina the Turner in action Left: turning set blocks of curd during the cheddaring process Far left: the FT’s History Cook Polly Russell

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

From top: part of the cheesemaking process; Tom Calver at Westcombe Dairy; extracting some cheese for tasting with a cheese iron

◀ Over the past four decades, Neal’s Yard has championed British farmhouse cheese, helping to halt a decline that began with the industrial revolution. Today the business sells 550 tonnes of cheese to retail, export and wholesale customers. When Randolph Hodgson started the first shop in the eponymous Neal’s Yard in Covent Garden in 1979, there were about 100 farmhouse cheese producers in the country, with numbers falling. Fast forward to 2017 and there are more than 200.

“Our goal,” Bailey explains, “is improving British farmhouse cheese.” This simple-sounding aim, it turns out, is fiendishly complicated. The dairies supplying Neal’s Yard mostly use raw, unpasteurised milk from their own cows.

Flavour and texture can vary significantly depending on cheese-making skills, a cow’s diet, changing seasons and maturing facilities. By contrast, mass-produced block cheddar made from pasteurised, blended milk eliminates most of these variables. This enables a standardised product but the range of flavours available is more limited.

Neal’s Yard sells 70 varieties of cheese and cheddar represents a quarter of its sales. “Cheddar is just fundamental to what we do,” says Hewer as we pull into the Montgomery dairy. The Montgomery family have been producing cheddar using unpasteurised milk since 1911. We are greeted in the farmyard by Jamie Montgomery, a third-generation cheese master with a serious demeanour and Heathcliff looks. Waiting next to Montgomery is Jason Hinds, a Neal’s Yard cheese buyer of some 25 years who is exuberant, engaging and, like the others, besotted with cheese.

Montgomery leads us across a farmyard towards a huge shed 80 metres square. Inside are more than 6,000 wheels of cheddar, neatly stacked on wood and metal racks about 18ft high. The smell – savoury, musty and dense – is mouth-watering. Each cheese is made using milk from Montgomery’s herd of 200 Friesians. To the right of the entrance stand rows of three-day-old cheeses, creamy-pink like newborn babies. “This is the nursery stage but as they age, mould covers the outside like camouflage,” explains Hinds, steering me towards the others through a platoon of cheese.

We are due to sample cheddars made in April 2015 that will be ready for sale in winter 2017. “You can tell in a batch which one will last longer, which will be mellower, which will be less forward,” says Hinds as Montgomery hands out the first sample. Hinds rolls the cheese between his fingers, feeling the texture: “This warms it up, helps release the smell. The more senses you can engage, the better.” For the next hour we taste our way through a month of cheese. Different batches are declared “very direct”, “bouncy”, “fruity”, “brassy” and “high heels and lipstick”. We try one made on April 25 and the otherwise understated Montgomery punches the air with delight.

“That’s packed with flavour. Unapologetic!” says Hinds with a grin. After sampling some 25 cheeses, Hinds and Bailey confirm which batches they want.

Different batches of cheese are described as ‘very direct’, ‘bouncy’, ‘fruity’, ‘brassy’ and ‘high heels and lipstick’

34

ichard and Tom Calver of Westcombe Dairy, a father and son team, are the owners of Tina the Turner.

Richard manages the dairy’s herd of 380 cows and Tom is responsible for making the cheese. Cheddar has been made on the Westcombes’ site since 1890 and Richard joined the business in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the dairy was buying in milk from 32 other pastures and producing block cheddar. “It was standard, uniform product made at cost,” says Tom. “We’re really proud about the quality of our milk, and we wanted to express what we do well. Block cheddar wasn’t the way.”

The Calvers decided to change tack. “We thought, ‘Let’s do something really difficult, so let’s do raw unpasteurised cheese!’” laughs Richard. Soon after, Hodgson, on the lookout for new cheddar suppliers, paid a visit.

“Randolph came down every few months,” remembers Tom. “Each time, he would taste the cheese and say, ‘It’s good but it’s not good enough.’ He must’ve known there was potential because this went on for about four years!” Finally, in 2003, Neal’s Yard placed an order for Westcombe cheddar.

R

Buyer Jason Hinds rolls the cheese between his fingers. ‘This warms it up, helps release the smell. The more senses you can engage, the better’ At first glance, Westcombe looks like an ordinary farm with its jumble of outbuildings and barns. To one side, though, is a modern concrete façade 80ft wide with stylish arched windows and oak-panelled doors.

Dug deep into the side of a hill, this is the Calvers’ cheese cave, a project 10 years in discussion that took two years to build. Tom leads us inside, a distinct bounce in his step. There we find ourselves in a cool room the size of a tennis court, thick with the smell of ageing cheese. Stacked floor to ceiling in front of us in evenly spaced rows are 4,800 wheels of cheddar.

We are here to taste cheese produced in March 2015. Tom plunges a cheese-iron into a cheddar and the tasting commences. As the group intensely discuss each sample, the atmosphere is serious but friendly and there are a few laughs too. When I ask Tom to explain the variation between batches made a day apart, he responds, smiling: “Oh that’s the farmer, it’s definitely the milk.” Richard rolls his eyes and laughs.

Before they built the new cave, the Calvers were using an old storage unit. ‘‘When you’re making raw milk cheese, there are so many variables and with storage you need as stable an environment as possible,” explains Tom. “This is why we decided going underground would be the best solution because the temperature is constant and we can control humidity.”

Encouraged by Hodgson and Hinds, the Calvers visited the Jura region of eastern France to see the Fort des Rousses. Formerly a Napoleonic stronghold, the fort was converted in 1997 into a state-of-the-art ageing facility for 170,000 comté cheeses. The Calvers returned with a blueprint

for a cheese cave, but that was not all. “When we were there, we saw these amazing cheese-turning robots,” recalls Tom. “We thought, ‘This is the future.’” Wheels of farmhouse cheddar have to be turned every two weeks to ensure a consistent texture and they are regularly brushed to reduce the risk of dust mites. “To make someone turn 6,000 blocks of cheese, it’s really challenging,” says Tom. “Robots don’t get tired and they don’t get bored.” Sold on the idea, they commissioned a Swiss engineering firm to design a bespoke cheddar-turning robot. Richard looks lovingly at the elegant, stainless-steel machine steadily working its way along a corridor of cheese. “People said we’re getting rid of tradition but we don’t carry cheese on our shoulders across the yard any more, so why not this?” The robot effortlessly lifts a wheel of cheese, turns it over, brushes it down and replaces it carefully on the shelf.

Cheese tasted and orders placed, it is time for us to leave. As we pull away from the farm, I ask Bailey about tradition. “You can spend too much time worrying about these words like tradition and farmhouse and not enough time thinking about how to be a good cheese maker,” he says.

A lively conversation ensues and it lasts all the way back to London.

Britain’s most devoted cheese makers, it turns out, can talk about cheese until the cows come home.

Polly Russell is a curator at the British Library and the FT’s History Cook columnist

Rowley Leigh

T Provençal providence

his recipe, from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food, requires you to “turn” an artichoke. I realise that “turning” artichokes, or paring away the fibre to leave the heart, may be unfamiliar territory. Most home cooks have never bothered to learn this little skill, either not eating them at all or just boiling the hell out of them and serving with vinaigrette and melted butter.

Alarmingly, I am not sure if today’s chefs can be bothered to turn artichokes either. On a recent episode of Masterchef: The Professionals, contestants were asked to perform the task and most failed abysmally. It is now possible to buy frozen turned artichoke bottoms and if you see an artichoke purée or soup on a menu it will probably be either a Jerusalem artichoke – no relation – or made with these convenient but inglorious comestibles.

When the professionals give up on something, it is time for the amateur to pick up the standard.

It is not so difficult. Except for one thing: the white artichoke heart discolours quickly and will become black if nothing is done about it. Traditionally, one dips it in a vinegar solution or lemon juice; you can also cook it in a blanc (don’t ask: Olney says this produces “one of the characteristic and recurrent flavours of international hotel cooking in which the native qualities of the artichoke are hopelessly perverted”) or coat it in olive oil, as in this recipe. The modern way is to soak them in ascorbic acid (vitamin C), which keeps them beautifully white and is pretty much flavourless. If you don’t have any, simply rub them with a cut lemon and coat in olive oil.

Many of Olney’s recipes were formed from his deep knowledge of Provence. This is a simple dish of artichokes cooked with bread, onions and garlic but it has an addictive savoury quality. Olney comments: “The surface, sides and bottom should form a richly golden brown encasement and within, the layer of artichoke slices should be of a white tenderness in their voluptuous and alliaceous sheath.” You can’t say fairer than that.

More columns at ft.com/leigh

36

Artichoke gratin Four decent artichokes will prove enough for a lunch or supper dish for four or an accompaniment for six.

The gratin tastes best warm, half an hour after leaving the oven.

• 125g dry bread, crusts removed • 1 onion • 2 large cloves garlic • 2 heaped tbs chopped parsley • 4 medium-to-large artichokes • 200ml olive oil • 50g grated Parmesan 1 — Cut the bread into small cubes and soak for 10 minutes in hot water.

Drain and squeeze out as much water as possible and then chop the bread into a sort of meal. Add the finely chopped onion, garlic and parsley and season well with salt and pepper. Coat the bottom of a gratin dish (I used a 30cm oval dish but smaller will work) with a film of olive oil.

2 — To turn the artichokes,

you will need two knives, a large serrated knife and a small, sharp paring knife.

The former is needed to cut across the base – after you have snapped off the stalk, pulling stringy fibres out of the heart as you do so – and then across the top of the heart to get rid of all the top part of the artichoke, which is devoid of interest. Then you work away with the paring knife, holding the artichoke in your left hand and paring away with a rounded action all the green and fibrous matter around the artichoke.

3 — After doing so, cut

them in half vertically and remove the hairy “choke” with a teaspoon. Turn them so the cut side is down and cut the hearts, vertically again, into half-centimetre slices, turning them in the olive oil as you proceed.

4 — To make the gratin, lay

half of the bread mixture tightly over the base of the gratin dish. Lay the (seasoned) artichoke slices on top, packing them tightly and forming a single, flat layer, retaining a little of the oil. Place the remaining bread mixture over the top, spreading it evenly and tamping it down to make a flat screed. Cover with the Parmesan cheese and then sprinkle with the remaining olive oil. Bake in a hot oven (220C) for 15 minutes and then turn down the heat to 160C for another 50 minutes, keeping an eye that it does not burn.

Wine Artichokes are notoriously difficult to match. Olney, whose wine choices were precise but occasionally eccentric, has no problem recommending a light white wine from the Loire Valley with most artichoke dishes.

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

Photographs by Andy Sewell

Jancis Robinson Wine The Indian wine downpour

I

t’s a miracle that Indian wine exists at all. For a start, the tropical climate is, shall we say, unhelpful. Extreme heat and months of monsoon rains mean that although all the vineyards are in the northern hemisphere, they are forced, by multiple prunings, into a southern hemisphere annual cycle – a first rough pruning just before the monsoons arrive in May, then a second, more precise one after the summer monsoons.

The growing season is effectively from October to March.

With a full range of wine styles, from fizz to a concoction known as Indian port (about which Peter Csizmadia-Honigh writes in his book The Wines of India, “I highly recommend that wine drinkers avoid it”), harvest is prolonged. Last year, for instance, the leading wine producer Sula was picking grapes to make base wine for the increasingly popular sparkling wine category from December 15 and continued right through until April 10. Its last red wine grapes had to be pulled off the vine before the summer heat shrivelled them into raisins.

Asian wine specialist Denis Gastin can only think of one part of Thailand that faces anything like the same wine-growing challenges as India, but by no means all of the Indian wine industry’s challenges are natural.

Prohibition of alcohol is part of the constitution (although it is not enforced in all states).

Even the word “wine” is negatively charged. So many of the holes in the wall selling hooch have been known as “wine shops” that the recently reconstituted national organisation governing wine production is known with fine euphemism as the Indian Grape Processing Board.

The tangle of vague, illogical and contradictory taxes and bureaucracy would cripple most nascent industries. Every state has its own complicated system

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

and levies its own taxes on wines imported from other states – so, for example, Grover of the Nandi Hills near Bangalore in Karnataka, the producer with the longest history, has merged with Zampa in Maharashtra, the state to the immediate north, so that it can offer wines at better prices to the lucrative Mumbai market, also in Maharashtra.

This means that wines carrying the same label will be different in different states – but since only a small minority of Indians have even tasted wine, that may not be the disadvantage that it would be in a nation of wine nerds.

It is presumably the enticing prospect of the burgeoning Indian middle class – with an estimated 35 million potential drinkers coming of age each year, according to Fratelli, an Italo-Indian joint venture near Pune – that has lured about 50 wineries, most of them tiny, into existence. Although India has As imagined by Leillo

‘The enticing prospect of the burgeoning Indian middle class has lured about 50 wineries into existence’

For wine lovers in India Recommended whites • Grover Zampa, Zampa Soirée Brut 2014 Nashik Valley • Grover Zampa, Vijay Amritraj Reserve White 2015 Nandi Hills Recommended reds • Fratelli, Sette (any vintage except 2010) Pune • Grover Zampa, Insignia 2015 Nandi Hills Drinkable whites • Sangiovese Bianco 2016 Maharashtra • Fratelli, MS Chardonnay/ Sauvignon Blanc 2016 Maharashtra • Fratelli, Vitae Barrel Fermented Chardonnay 2015 Maharashtra

• Grover Zampa, La Reserve Blanc 2015 Nandi Hills • Soma Chenin Blanc 2014 Nashik Valley • Sula Reserve Chenin Blanc 2016 Nashik Valley • Sula Riesling 2016 Nashik Valley • Sula Riesling 2014 Nashik Valley Drinkable reds • Fratelli, MS Red 2015 Maharashtra • Grover Zampa, Zampa Chene Grand Reserve 2014 Nandi Hills • Grover Zampa, Insignia 2014 Nandi Hills Stockists on winesearcher.com

Fratelli, Sette 2012 (£17.94 GP Brands) is a perfectly respectable blend of 70 per cent tangy Sangiovese with Cabernet.

India’s Supertuscan?

long been a major grower of table grapes, the total area of wine-grape vineyards is about 2,500 hectares – not that much more than its English counterpart, whose challenges are so very different.

So unfamiliar are most Indian authorities with wine that state officials require not only each separate wine label to be registered – at considerable cost – with each individual state, but also the expensive re-registration of brands every time the vintage changes.

Another problem is that by far the majority of grapes are grown by smallholder farmers who know more about pomegranates than wine, and are naturally inclined to maximise quantity rather than ▶ 39

◀ quality. The founder of Sula,

Rajeev Samant, inspired by Napa Valley during his time in California, is cool about owning just 5 per cent of the vineyards that supply the grapes for his 9.6 million bottles a year.

“We want to make fruit-forward wines rather than complex ones,” he said from his newly constructed La Source de Sula, an ambitious boutique hotel at his base, a dusty three-hour drive north-east of Mumbai. “Ninety-nine point nine per cent of Indian homes have no corkscrew or cellar, so making ageworthy wine is a conceit.”

Samant must be doing something right: Sula, close to the holy city of Nashik and offering what he calls “wine and shrine” tourism, notches up 240,000 visitors a year, he says. He also claims that the terrace overlooking his vines, his new reservoir and, in the distance, the local dam, is the single place on earth where the greatest number of people have had their first taste of wine.

Samant has introduced Sulafest, a music festival, and has an amphitheatre, two restaurants, a gift shop, a flea market and plans for a petting zoo.

N

ashik in Maharashtra, the most wine-friendly state, is where the great majority of all Indian wine is produced, despite its punishing climate. Annual rainfall is about 3,000mm (the norm for goodquality wine production is closer to 500mm). However, none of it

40

falls during the growing season, so all the vines need continuous irrigation until they are picked.

The Grover Zampa winery is also in Nashik, but south of the city – and a 45-minute-drive closer to Mumbai. Like the Gurnani family, who own the York winery down the road from Sula, the Grovers see tourism as an essential part of selling wine and have just signed a deal to build a hotel and visitor centre behind their winery, with views over their nearest dam.

In the nearest village, Sanjegaon, I observed two young women carrying giant steel canisters of water on their heads, an old man in a white tunic swinging a flask of water on his handlebars, a naked child pouring a jug of water over himself by the roadside, and a girl of about seven tending to a bowlful of washing. Like Grover Zampa’s vines, they are lucky enough to have ready access to water, but it’s so dry here that clothes are hurled over washing lines all bunched up; no need to stretch them out to get them dry.

In India’s major cities, young people can now be seen drinking wine in the smartest locales, even if the habit of combining wine with food is still in its infancy.

But wine is such a novelty for most Indian palates that I find it quite amazing that the wines I list on the previous page are even drinkable.

More columns at ft.com/ jancis-robinson

MY ADDRESSES — MANCHESTER ADAM O’RIORDAN, POET

The bar at The Refuge (above, left), in the grand Principal Hotel on Oxford Street, is where the city’s many tribes collide: drag queens, Cheshire money, Madchester survivors. Run by The Unabombers – DJs turned restaurateurs Luke Cowdrey and Justin Crawford – its “come as you are” ethos makes it glamorous and welcoming, as only Manchester can be.

From there it’s a quick cab ride to Matt and Phreds on Tib Street (above, right), one of the great jazz clubs of Europe. It’s where Dickie Greenleaf would take the talented Mr Ripley if they were in town for the night.

For Japanese food it’s got to be Yuzu in Chinatown. The gyoza and agedashi tofu are world beating – the only place I’ve eaten Japanese as good was on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Los Angeles. For Indo-Pakistani food it’s always the Yadgar Cafe in the Northern Quarter: the aloo paratha and karela and lamb are stand-out dishes, served by the restaurant’s inscrutably suave proprietor.

If I’m after a little midweek glamour I’ll head to Cicchetti off Deansgate, with its long marble bar – the little sister of San Carlo and Fumo. Its lobster ravioli melt in the mouth. If I want a place with more of a neighbourhood feel I’ll go to the Rose Garden on Burton Road, run by chef-patron Bill Mills, its sleek styling and clean lines designed by his architect father.

Lupo Caffè Italiano opposite The Lowry Hotel is the gold standard in the city for espresso and tiramisu.

For Manchester details go to ft.com/myaddresses Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection of stories, “The Burning Ground”, is published by Bloomsbury; his latest collection of poetry, “A Herring Famine”, is published by Chatto & Windus

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

Restaurants Tim Hayward

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLIE BIBBY

Breddos, London

T

here’s a debate developing on the American food scene around cultural appropriation. Restaurateur Rick Bayless, for example, has come under fire for his take on Mexican cuisine. In spite of the fact that he’s been cooking, writing about and championing authentic Mexican food for his whole career, he is, not to put too fine a point on it, a white guy from Oklahoma. Given our current febrile political ecology, this debate will probably move to our shores and it will be entertaining to have to rethink everything from Jamie’s Italian to Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking as covert works of oppression.

I don’t think the controversy will run long here. In spite of our recent behaviour, as a nation we remain resolutely multicultural in our cuisine – and it’s too deep rooted ever to be unravelled. If you doubt me, visit Breddos, a taco joint that, in one A4 sheet of daily-varying menu, sums up what relaxed, bredin-the-bone diversity feels like.

Breddos began as a food stall run by Nud Dudhia and Chris Whitney. Back then, it turned out tacos for vertical eating and all was as it should be. But going bricks-

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

and-mortar unleashed a burst of chaotic creativity. Walking in, you can tick off vinyl-and-turntable, beardy staff and a light dusting of Mexican-inflected art from your checklist, but then comes the food.

Masa fried chicken arrived on a taco and was flanked and supported by heritage tomato pico de gallo and habanero sauce. The presentation was recognisable as “Mexican” but the meat itself was the purest appeal to the palate – a fat gobbet of the interesting parts, sealed in a spiced shell, where it could dismantle itself in a bath of its own moisture and scent.

Kung Pao pork belly can be an unadventurous order in a Chinese restaurant but the soy-heavy marinade can give bland meats real depth. Replace some of the chilli heat with Sichuan pepper, bird’s eye chilli and a topping of chopped spring onion and you have… well, I’m not sure. It’s not in the Mexican textbook but now it’s too late to kiss Ava Gardner, it might be the most interesting thing that will ever pass my lips.

If there was ever a piste at Breddos we are now a couple of kilometres off it and losing track of any useful landmarks. Yes, that’s a tostada under there. They made it themselves this morning, like they make all their tacos.

‘Now it’s too late to kiss Ava Gardner, the Kung Pao pork belly might be the most interesting thing that will ever pass my lips’

Breddos 82 Goswell Road London EC1V 7DB 020 3535 8301 clerkenwell@breddostacos.com Starters £2.50-£6 Mains £7-£20

Chilmole is a Yucatán speciality made from dried chillies, burned almost to ash and then ground into a black sauce, but topped with fresh shredded Brixham crabmeat, moist, generous and clearly brought from the boat at life-threatening speeds.

Bewildering, and close to genius.

The Baja fish taco was possibly my favourite. Served with habanero sauce and a hint of white onion on a bed of cabbage was a single… well “lump” really… of meaty white fish in a batter that would shame all but the finest chippies. And if that sounds a bit coarse there was also a plate of line-caught wild seabass and wild prawn served tiradito – Peruvian sashimi style – amid cheffly dottings of verjuice, ramson oil, lemon verbena and grapefruit.

“And to accompany your mezcal, sir?” Queso fundido is – how best to put this? – a tub of hot melted cheese with a tomato salsa. It’s supplied with nixtimalised potatoes (think 2mm thick Pringles) the better to greedily hoick the boiling cheese into your drooling gob. It’s the perfect end. You’ve gone so far off piste you’re eating fondue.

And that is where Breddos leaves you. Lost and gasping just a little at the sheer inventiveness, the mad flavours. Dudhia and Whitney came from a background in advertising and there’s something of that in the menu. The shameless flitting between sources of inspiration, the easy creativity of the mash-up, but there’s also a deep understanding of their consumers. It’s clever to quote and draw inspiration but it takes a phenomenal level of self-confidence and courage to then lead your customers back through their favourite fried chicken shack, Chinese takeaway, seaside shellfish stand, sashimi counter and chip shop on the way.

I loved Breddos for its complete inability to understand the rules.

It is true that neither Dudhia nor Whitney is Mexican and they have about as much right to relaunch the taco as Donald Trump, but they are making amazing food in a city that clings fiercely to a diversity that’s almost unmatched globally.

And if you want to argue that amounts to cultural appropriation, good luck with that.

Tim Hayward is an FT contributing writer; tim.hayward@ft.com; @TimHayward 41

Paris’s sweet somethings

By Lindsey Tramuta A café for chocolate lovers Michelin-starred chef Cyril Lignac, whose pastry shop La Pâtisserie has made its mark on the 11th arrondissement, launched a chocolate-focused outpost in 2016 – his personal contribution among the phalanx of chefs working to preserve French savoir faire in chocolate making. Lignac devised La Chocolaterie as an alternative to the jewellery-box preciousness of most chocolate shops. “Everything here is meant to be accessible,” Lignac says.

“People can come drink our home-made hot chocolate, share a pastry, read the paper, and stay a while comfortably. It’s designed to be an everyday café for chocolate lovers.”

25 rue Chanzy, 75011 Paris; lachocolateriecyrillignac.com

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARISSA FAY

Pâtissiers in the French capital have become fetishists for single products – selling and specialising in just one delicious temptation

P

arisians approach sweets as joys that don’t need to be confined to special occasions. You can hardly scan a street without clamping your eyes on treats of all colours and sizes, glistening in shop windows and beckoning impressionable gourmands. These are the corner pastry shops of our imaginations, but they have been joined by a more modern style of pâtisserie and chocolaterie that plays with fresh tastes and ideas: blackcurrant chocolate ganache at La Maison du Chocolat, perhaps, or “Le Lipstick Pastry” fruit-topped almond tart at Des Gâteaux et du Pain.

So what comes after creating new recipes and riffing on old ones?

Specialisation. Not just focusing on one genre of pastry – chocolate tartes or choux-based desserts –

but winnowing the selection to one, sole dessert. The much-loved macaron helped pave the way for this approach. Pierre Hermé, Pain de Sucre and Jonathan Blot at Acide showed sweet-lovers that though simple in form, the macaron had endless possibilities.

Olive oil, vanilla and slices of green olives; foie gras and chocolate; white truffle and hazelnut – the combinations are sometimes curious but always intriguing.

More recently, Christophe Adam, éclair master of Fauchon fame, sustained the charge of singleproduct shops with L’Éclair de Génie, his wonderland of rainbow éclairs in raspberry passion fruit, lemon yuzu, Madagascar vanilla or mascarpone salted caramel.

Popelini, La Maison du Chou and Profiterole Chérie followed, with recipes developed entirely around the cream puff. You might say the cream puffs at Popelini have dethroned the king-of-cute macaroon. Parisians are beguiled by the varieties Lauren Koumetz

‘We have a resurgence of specialists – experts in éclairs, in madeleines, in meringues’ dreams up: coffee, rose with confit raspberries, salted caramel, pistachio with confit morello cherries, not to mention the chou du jour.

Meringues have also found a space to shine. Lille pâtissier Frédéric Vaucamps brought his shop, Aux Merveilleux de Fred, to Paris. Credited with popularising the century-old merveilleux recipe – an ethereally light, layered meringue mound coated with sweet whipped cream and enveloped in coatings from chocolate flakes to caramelised hazelnuts – that originated in his native northern France, Vaucamps prepares them in exactly the same fashion as when he first began churning them out in 1982.

“Focusing on one thing allows us to be competitive as pastry chefs.

I used to have a regular bakery, and le merveilleux always outsold my other pastries.” So not only was it a smart business move to listen to his clients but it also allowed him to dedicate his attention to perfecting the pastry, thereby establishing him as the reference.

Vaucamps’ shops all have discreet wooden storefronts, counters in Rojo Alicante marble, a crystal chandelier over the open kitchen, murals inspired by 18th-century art. The merveilleux are prepared in front of customers.

The modern twist lies in the recipe, far less rich than the original.

As a business, single-product shops make sense. “With a poor economy, many of us asked ourselves how we could make profitable what is effectively a métier de passion,” Jonathan Blot says. “Not only that, but people are looking for the best, so we have a resurgence of specialists.

Experts in éclairs, in madeleines, in meringues – it is reassuring to customers.”

For sisters Fiona Leluc and Fatina Faye, the single-product format fit their nostalgia for the sablé, a shortbread biscuit as tied to the French identity as the chocolate-chip cookie is to Americans’. It takes pride of place at Bontemps, their two-year-old neo-retro pâtisserie, in the form of bite-sized sandwich cookies filled with creams flavoured with gianduja, orange flower, lemon, coffee, passion fruit, bergamot and Madagascar vanilla. “We don’t just work with flavours considered traditionally French, because we love peanut, banana, mango – we listen to our cravings!”

Leluc says.

Bontemps has found a loyal clientele. The adjunct mayor of the 3rd arrondissement, whose office is across the street, came into the shop one day while I was eating some mini sablés. She said how proud she was of what the women had contributed to the neighbourhood: “Their shop is my antidepressant!” she told me.

Mine too.

“The New Paris: The People, Places & Ideas Fueling a Movement” by Lindsey Tramuta, is published

by Abrams on April 18 (£18.99) 43

Games

A Round on the Links

by James Walton

The Crossword No 329. Set by Aldhelm 1

2

4

3

5

9

10

11

12

8

7

6

00

14

13 15

All the answers here are linked in some way. Once you’ve spotted the link, any you didn’t know the first time around should become easier.

autobiography by Nelson Mandela (below)?

1. In 2013, Park Geunhye became the first female president of which country?

5. Crockett and Tubbs were the main characters in which TV series?

2. Which celebrated New York nightclub – now in Times Square – opened in 1940 at 10 East 60th Street?

6. The 17-yearold Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto inspired which song – reckoned to be the second most recorded in pop history?

3. Which word appears in the titles of a 1953 novel by Raymond Chandler, a 1956 play by Eugene O’Neill and the 1994

4. Bellini, Tintoretto and Titian were Renaissance artists from which city?

20

21

9. What’s the capital of the Isle of Wight (above)?

22

23

10. In the Christian calendar, what’s the more common name for the sixth Sunday of Lent?

Who or what do these pictures add up to?

GETTY IMAGES

FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017

24

25

The Across clues are straightforward, while the Down clues are cryptic.

The Picture Round

by James Walton

Answers page 10

18

19

8. In Roman mythology, who is the equivalent of the Greek goddess Hera?

7. Which brand of coconut-flavoured rum is now owned

by Pernod Ricard?

+

17

16

=

ACROSS 1 Very busy (6) 5 Idle, be unproductive (8) 9 Regretful (8) 10 Maiden (6) 11 Winner (8) 12 Two-piece garment (6) 13 No one at all (3, 1, 4) 15 Eye inflammation (4) 17 Skin irritation (4) 19 Avoided (8) 20 Pakistani city (6) 21 Slowing suddenly (music) (8) 22 Of the groom’s partner (6) 23 First, earliest (8) 24 Scary character (8) 25 Water spout (6)

DOWN 2 Big creature with energy to help out tiny creature (8) 3 Vitamin A I’m taking in, being grabbed by article (8) 4 Subject’s emotional rapport (9) 5 Have fun with an old seer, perhaps, without working (3, 4, 4, 4) 6 Very slow head of government’s all confused about spies (7) 7 This month incorporated time for intuition (8) 8 Nick and Henry with songbird (4-4) 14 Putin gets horribly troubling (9) 15 Bloody uprising in underwater vessel is sweet (8)

16 Florida island’s rising stormy night for sailing (8) 17 Unusually fine and tidy spot (8) 18 Shook at charge for old port (8) 19 Barry’s worried about university grant (7)

Solution to Crossword No 328 C H A R M I N G A M O R A S S

O A R A E A E A A A R A E A T

M O G A D I S H U A C A S T E

E A U A I A T A P A H A C A E

L E E W A Y A A P O A C H E R

Y A A A T A C A E A R A Y A A

A A C H E Q U E R E D F L A G

N A H A A A S A L A A A U A E

A I R W O R T H I N E S S A A

U A O A A A O A P A P A A A S

T A N G R A M A A H I C C U P

I A I A S A E A S A S A A A L

L O C U M A R E P U T A B L E

U A L A E A A A U A L A L A E

S E E I N G A F R E E R E I N

45

GILLIAN TETT PA RT I N G S H OT

Trump, House of Cards and the art of being ‘real’

46

I

n recent weeks, I have been binge-watching the Netflix show House of Cards (an update of the classic BBC adaptation of Michael Dobbs’ novel). It is addictive and compelling, largely because of the clever dialogue and plot – but also because it sheds light on the presidency of Donald Trump.

This is not just because the show, which follows the rise of an unscrupulous politician called Frank Underwood (played

by Kevin Spacey), illustrates the grubby back-room deals often involved in pushing legislation through Congress, nor because its themes are familiar – from infighting among (largely) unprincipled politicians, to battles with terrorism, job-creation schemes, Chinese trade wars and so on.

What I found most thought-provoking was that the drama’s portrayal of Washington DC is exactly what President Donald Trump loves to define himself against. If you want to understand why Trump can’t stop tweeting – and why his no-holds-barred statements are so popular among his base – watching House of Cards is a good start. It throws light on the “oppositional symbolism” that he has used so well; the way he has exploited his outsider status to appear as the opposite of all that is wrong with politics.

Released on Netflix in four series between 2013 and 2016, the show was wildly popular when it aired, not just in America but around the world.

Its success marked a powerful moment for the renaissance of television, which has become much hotter than film as a creative medium in recent years.

I believe that the drama almost certainly influenced how politicians have become seen – and discussed – by TV viewers-cum-voters. While House of Cards was not the first TV programme to depict the machinations of the White House (and its plot lines are sometimes extreme), it reflected – and reinforced – a rising public perception that 21st-century Washington DC is corrupt, selfish and unconcerned with the lives of ordinary people living outside “the Beltway”.

Just 7 per cent of the public believe members of Congress have high ethical standards, according to a recent poll by Gallup – a score that placed them below car salespeople at 8 per cent. Part of the reason why the series was so popular may be that it tapped into a pre-existing mood of distrust with politicians, if not disgust.

So how does Trump fit into this? At first glance, he might appear to be a natural fit in Underwood’s unpredictable world. Indeed, when I walked into the White House last week to conduct an interview with the president, I initially had the surreal feeling that I was on a television set.

Trump spends parts of his day sitting at that vast wooden desk in the Oval Office, surrounded by historic portraits, nervous aides and burlesque drama, moving about the West Wing just like the fictional leader.

ILLUSTRATION BY SHONAGH RAE

But there is one crucial difference. Underwood is crafty, subtle and duplicitous – a politician who has spent years in Congress and is accustomed to lying in a fiendishly clever way and cutting shady deals with rivals, friends and lobbyists while maintaining an unruffled public manner. Trump, by contrast, operates with a crass, in-your-face style that gives the impression that he is nothing like a professional politician. He wears his emotions on his sleeve (or his Twitter feed).

A cynic might argue that this is an even more duplicitous pose. Past behaviour suggests that Trump can be strategic; he knows the art of bluffing, double-dealing and playing games with the truth. But the way he talks – and tweets – creates the impression that he is blunt and upfront, a man of business not politics. And this gives him powerful symbolic appeal, precisely because he does not adhere to the bland, scripted clichés of politicians such as Underwood.

E

ver since the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss developed the theory of structuralism, anthropologists have known that cultural patterns tend to operate in binary pairs, such as “hotcold”, “dark-light” and so on. Trump’s appeal to some voters is that he has used symbols to define himself against the perceived status quo.

The White House team is now grappling with its own dramas and scandals, and some of the allegations that have started to swirl around – like those concerning Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort – seem as bizarre as any fiction. In time, the public may come to view Trump’s White

‘Frank Underwood is crafty, subtle and duplicitous. Trump, by contrast, operates with an in-your-face style that gives the impression he is nothing like a professional politician’ House as being as “swampy” as anything seen on TV; almost too bizarre to be in a Netflix plot line.

But what is fascinating to watch is what happens next – not just to Trump but also to House of Cards, which returns for a fifth series next month. Thus far, the plot has been kept under wraps. But if the fictional president Underwood now undergoes a personality shift, and starts tweeting in a crass style, the boundaries between art and life will blur again. All eyes on the Oval Office – in real life and on screen. gillian.tett@ft.com; @gilliantett Read the FT’s exclusive interview with Donald Trump on ft.com FT.COM/MAGAZINE APRIL 8/9 2017