SUN POWER AND UNKNOWN HISTORIES

As I write, the first volts of light generated electricity are streaming into the Brussels grid. And although a perverse EU supported mechanism will bind my ecological efforts to big giant polluters (who will be able to buy my non-pollution, pay me for my effort and go on doing their own pollution) – still I am very happy (and it is up to me not to sell to them, of course).

Yesterday I learnt from a theatre play that solar energy was already widely used in the 1910s. Solar panels covered a portion of the Sahara desert and produced electricity. These were American firms. They all went bankrupt because of the war, since military technology needed faster energy produced by fossil-fuel.

So there you have it, the reason why we have still a game of oil, war, pesticides, chemical additives, medicines, etc.

TENCH IS MY FRIEND

Tench is a small fish living in ponds. I placed five in my brother’s pond yesterday and I really hope they will find there a suitable home to live and prosper…

I also wanted to see what tench would taste like cooked. The raw eggs, color green, are just delicious, better than any silly caviar or sushi you can find in restaurants (except for sturgeon which is super expensive and non-ecological).

A steamed tech has a delicate flavor and amazing soft flesh. Really worth cleaning up a few ponds and starting to eat locally farmed fish, instead of impoverishing our seas.

SPRINGITME IN PIEMONTE – TENCH PROJECT

Two years a go I spent a month traveling in Japan and tracking down several foods I found particularly interesting. One of the highlights of my trip was the work I did around funazushi, which has been documented in an article I wrote for “Slowfood”.

Funazushi is the ancestor of today’s sushi. In a bizarre reversal of roles, the grandfather of sushi was all about the rice rather than the fish. The rice had a peculiar acidulated taste, which came about thanks to a month-long fermentation together with fish.

Funazushi is a preparation which relies on the availability of fresh fish from lakes, which is another way of saying that lakes should be clean in order for fish to be able to live in them. As obvious as this may sound, the truth of the matter is that our lakes and rivers tend to be rather unfit for any form of animal life. And it is sad and shocking to realize the degree with which this fact is either ignored or taken for granted.

The conditions, that is, the ecological “weltanschaung” of any given food, is absolutely crucial to it and should receive a lot of attention. When I visited lake Biwa, Mr. Hiroshi Tanaka showed me the vats and tools he used to make fermented fish, including a long tress of dry rice grass which contains the natural starter for the fermentation and which is placed on top of the rice and fish as a natural “lid”.

I have been wanting to make funazushi ever since. Tanaka sent me detailed instructions. One day, I even got two fermented fish in the post. He had sent them over together with a note for the custom officers, kindly asking them to let the package through. The two specimen of funazushi from lake Biwa have been hibernating in my fridge, waiting for the right season to start up the new process. In the autumn, at the end of the rice harvest, I asked an organic rice farm if I could collect some of their rice hay. I tressed it myself and stored it in the cellar, The fish was the most difficult thing to find. Funa is a small Japanese fish belonging to the family of carps. In Europe, carp farms refuse to sell small specimens and the condition of farming are never ideal. In the end, I found an Italian producer of tench, a small and soft-flavored fish living in ponds and reaching a maximum weight of 700g.

Spring is the right time to start. I drove to Cascina Italian in Carmagnola (Piemonte) and came back with a bag full of thirty or so small tench fish swimming peacefully as I whizzed along the motorway. Gutting was very hard. One should not cut the belly of the fish but extract all entrails from the neck. With specimens measuring only 10cm in length, this is a pretty damn tricky operation. Anyway, they are going to stay under salt and weights for about two months now. The next step consists in washing and drying them for a day, before placing them in a wooden vat with boiled rice.

In two months time, I will repeat the same operation with some larger fish, also from Giacomo Mosso’s farm. Mosso normally sells his tench “in carpione”, cooked and preserved in vinegar. The idea is to see whether the combination of two local products, fish and rice, fermented together, can be appreciated by an Italian public. Or to see if a bridge can be built with the few Japanese families that still make funazushi at home.

SPRINGTIME IN MILAN

Meeting the “other”, the “exotic” and then return to oneself to establish one’s own identity as a diversity.

This is the the central thesis of Nicolas Bourriaud’s (Palais De Tokyo, now Tate Britain) latest book, The Radicant. The Radicant is not a cool urban condition but a family of plants that develop their roots as they go, like ivy, adapting themselves to the soil and surfaces they can hang onto. Roots that actively shape themselves according to specific conditions. Out of the metaphor, he is talking of an identity that results from a constant re-elaboration of oneself and one’s past. Another way of saying that identity is not a definitive “given”, immutable and stable, but that it is something alive, something that needs to be re-cognized because it is like a gap (a loop of desire?) that opens within oneself and which one needs to bridge, temporarily, by saying “this is me”.

An old friend recently reminded of something that deeply shocked her, namely the day when I told her on the phone the pleasure with which I had devoured a rabbit after 5 years of radical veganism. She was shocked because she interpreted my decision as a definitive one and she believed that change would be a threat to the “identity” I had so forcefully embraced. She expected some kind of embarrassment on my part. Instead, I was adamant in saying that “in life, one changes” and stressing that change (including the weft of “coherence” that each weaves according to one’s personal narrative) is more important than an identity which remains forever identical with oneself. Cynics will cite Tomasi di Lampedusa saying “that everything must change in order for everything to remain the same”. By the same token and without the negative political connotations, identity can be seen as the result of constant change, like the trajectory of a surfer on the brim of waves.

Back to our radicant plants, it is springtime in Milan, the sky is blue and in the periphery where I live, the very few patches of free, empty land that are left on the side of roads or in between building sites, are blessed by a whole host of newly born vegetable creatures. Or should I say weed? The varieties are the result of traffic (human and automobile), nearby gardening efforts, etc. etc. The phenomenon of weeds growing goes on un-noticed, except for those very few old people who still venture out to the “fields” in search for the leaves of dandelions and other delights unknown to digital men. It is unfortunate to have to venture out on the side of speeding lorries. One feels like a reject of society or a specimen from a decimated tribe. People still pick wild herbs in more rural areas, in the mountains or at the seaside. Only a few farmers, hunters and grandmothers know how to recognize them. But looking for wild edible plants in the outskirts of Milan is a whole other business. These secondary roads traversing the few fields still left are the main arteries of illegal prostitution, with young women dotting them like living signposts. Alternatively, they turn into improvised skips, full of every kind of trash, from plastic bottles to empty cans of paint. This is brutal evidence of what “free land” has come to signify, namely a passive receptacle for abuse. In such a situation, the bucolic act of looking for edible weeds becomes a precious act of resistance, against the insensitivity to seasons and vegetable species and as the political affirmation of one of the most ancient ways in which men survived on the planet: by picking what was spontaneously growing around them.

I began picking wild plants only a couple of years ago. As the result of a trip to Japan and more specifically to a famous shinto shrine. There, the priests have a long tradition of plant picking. They search the local woods in search of a variety of tasty buds. It’s there that I learnt how delicious the burgeons of royal ferns can be (zenmai). So, once back in Italy and Belgium, I began opening my eyes. Was all this great stuff growing only in Japanese forests or could I find some along the canals and in my own local fields? I found out that I could. 

 

Nicolas Leveaux is a chef who uses wild plants in his own cuisine. Simon Beugnies is a wild plant expert collecting around up to 60 varieties of weeds that can be used for cooking. We have been picking together, using wild pepper leaves, wild watercress, borrage, burdock roots, young plants of poppy, plantain leaves to be used in many culinary preparations. 

Last week I went looking for hop sprouts in my local Italian town. The bushes along the canal had been cleared and it was hard to find any at all. In the end, I stopped on a piece of no man’s land and, with my boots deep into an unspecified mound of plastic material that had been dumped on the ground and covered by vegetation, I moved about and grabbed a pretty quantity of hop (duvertim). As my bunch grew thicker and my feet made another plastic bottle crack, I really asked myself what we have come to, letting this vegetable heritage fall into oblivion and, literally, under our trash. These are edible plants that nobody uses. Furthermore, the fact that they are wild, means that they are richer in nutrients than cultivated varieties. Picking wild plants creates a bond with one’s surroundings. One also realizes the importance of picking what one needs and in preparing it on the same day. One cannot keep wild plants for a long time in the fridge. They wilt. And this points to another silly automatism of our feeding practices, that of procuring more than we need and storing it in a sort of morgue of forgotten cadavers…
link to Japanese wild plants

SLOWFISH – Genova

This year the most abundant product at the Slowfood fish Salon was…SALT!

Pink rock salt from the Himalaya mountains, sulfur scented brown salt, black lava salt from Hawaii or from the Murray River in Australia…there were about twenty or so salts coming from exotic locations worldwide and being distributed by an American company. And more stalls offering different variations on the salt theme, be it scented or smoked or pissed on.

My impression was that we were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Next we will be meandering among decorative shells for the bathroom. Is it ecological or sustainable to create a market niche for salts that traverse the globe to create a minor surprise to our table? Not to mention the possible damage they create on the spot where they are extracted. Of course not all salts are the same. Lemon scented salt may just be an idiotic marketing fad while Hawaian salt has a heavy food miles record to clear…

The Himalaya Pink Salt comes from the mountains of Himalaya, at 10,000 feet high. It is a fossil marine salt which was formed more than 200 million years ago during the Secondary area. It is completely pure. It also has strong nutritional and health enhancing properties. Finally, it possesses an incomparable taste! Its natural pink colour and its origin make this salt a very unique product. Of all the “Himalayan Salt” on the market, only 3-5% is of the Halite Grade and quality. This is because this particular form of crystal salt must be carefully hand-mined from the deepest and most elusive parts of the caves.
Pink Salt is naturally rich in elements and minerals (Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, Copper, and Iron). Iron is the naturally rich element which creates the unique pink colour of this speckled salt. Sprinkled on raw or cooked food, it will be a delight for the senses.

I cannot even begin to imagine the reality behind this seductive product description. People actually study to write this stuff up and unfortunately not enough people study (enough) to become vaccinated against this kind of nonsense. Soit!

Among the few fish products actually present at Slowfish, my deepest admiration goes to the lactofermented anchovies of Camogli. First because they are lactofermented, basically preserved in salt without any need of refrigeration. Secondly because the fish is a local variety, a fleshy red anchovy with a marvelous, unique taste. And thirdly because they are a high quality, local and sustainable (they are fished at a specific time of the year and prepared in limited quantities by hand). I secured a jar of one kilo, which will reach many different peopel in the next few months!

WILD PICNIX,,,

 

 

I have been looking for this pic nearly two years. I could not remember who had taken it, with which camera, digital or reflex and in the end it turned out that it had been a Nikon on black film and that the roll was in the bottom of a cardboard box in my place…

This is the most glorious and symbolic of all wild picnics so far. Held on the day of the inauguration of the Atomium after years of radical renovation, it shows the impressive grassy carpet leading up to the monument being occupied by one happy party drinking champagne and eating several homemade foods. There is something retro about the whole thing: we are the only one who thought about bringing food from home and enjoying it on the grass. The large crowd of visitors just bought hot dogs and beer from two trucks stationed on either side of the Atomium. Picnics have fallen out the Western idea of fun or social habits. Even the idea of having carefully cooked food you can transport goes beyond most people’s ability to project into the future. And yet we did it and it felt great!

LOCAL LONDON FOOD

Shoreditch is the going-out area north of the City. A bit north from that, on Kingland’s Rd, you have clusters of Vietnamese eateries. All very cheap and potentially good…potentially. That Vietnamese Place had a convincing chicken soup, with chicken flesh in strings and lots of fresh coriander and lemon grass. A day before, same road but a little closer to the junction with Commercial Street, I had a fake sour Vietnamese soup at a place called Hanoi Garden…

Fake because authentic sour soup is made with a vinegar or tamarind while what I got was “tom yam” sauce (which is actually Thai) from a jar, diluted in water.

It is strange how local London food, the simple, cheap, home food you find in cities around the world, is actually associated to very exotic recipes from India, Vietnam or China. The mental set-up towards food is naturally oriented toward an “outside” made of colonial hitory and recent immigration waves. Even what is perceived as quintessentially British, such as fish and chips, was actually brought to Britain by poor Italian immigrants who took to frying the cheapest available foods and began selling them.

from Wikipedia: Deep-fried fish and deep-fried chips have appeared separately on menus for many years^{[citation needed]}, though potatoes did not reach Europe until the 17th century. The originally Sephardi dish pescado frito, or deep-fried fish, came to the Netherlands and England with the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the 17th and 18th centuries.^{[citation needed]} (History credits the Portuguese with introducing the dish to Japan: see tempura.)

…in common with the rest of the United Kingdom, Scotland experienced a wave of immigration from Italy toward the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the new Scots Italians set up friggitoria or gelateria businesses, catering for their own communities as well as for the native population. Such Italian traders in Scotland originally hawked their wares from carts selling mostly ice-cream, but with the abundance and wide availability of seafood in Scotland, fish and chip shops soon became common. TheDundee City Council claims that “…in the 1870s, that glory of British gastronomy — the chip — was first sold by Belgian immigrant Edward De Gernier in the city’s Greenmarket.”^[17] Brattisani’s in Edinburgh’s Newington district promotes itself as the oldest operational chip shop in Scotland, having traded since 1889.

 

My most British findings were desserts: Eccles cake from St.John’s restaurant (an adaptation by chef Fergus Henderson of the 18th century treat from the town of Eccles, puff pastry with a filling of raisins in a thick caramelized sauce) and spotted dick:

TRASH FOOD

I was catching the train back to Brussels when I spotted a few novel looking crisps packets at Boots and was reminded of the above article about the efforts of prominent crisps producer to revamp a swamping product.

Unfortunately the craziest ones, like “Chilli and chocolate” were not on the shelf…I had to content myself with “Onion Bhaji” and “Builder’s Breakfast” -unfortunately as bad or at least as unimpressive as article made out.

I even purchased a “gourmet” version of salt and apple vinegar hand baked chips…no hope there either.

To read the whole article (hilarious): http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/16/walkers-crisps-new-flavours-brooker

Equilibrio dei veleni: meglio aver accumulato veleni diversi che essere morti di fame…

La signora Melgrati, che mi ha deliziato con il suo spezzatino con polenta domenicale, ricorda gli anni (erano i 70) in cui alla Fiera di Milano la Montedison organizzava un complesso display rivolto ai ragazzi delle scuole, per spiegare (con tanto di impulsi sonori diffusi in un corridoio buio che i ragazzi attraversavano a piedi) che in ogni secondo nel mondo nasceva un bambino e che per sfamare la miriade di nuovi esseri era necessario rendere la terra piu\’ produttiva, ovvero utilizzare i concimi chimici della Montedison.

Dopo 40 anni, abbiamo avvelenato le nostre terre, distrutto le nostre eccedenze alimentari, ai bambini del mondo non e\’ arrivato niente, se non qualche derrata avariata. Questa la conclusione della signora Melgrati.

Urban thoughts: qahwa

The led sign on the Brussels Stock Exchange is part of Cimatics’ (www.cimatics.be) contribution to a local festival about French language in the city. It consists of an sms conversation cum seduction attempt broken up onto different buildings. The choice of the Stock Exchange was a last-minute choice, facilitated by the presence of metal bars providing an easy support for attaching the sign. The juxtaposition of the sms, personal, thought-like piece of communication to the austere neoclassical architecture, a spontaneous human layer surfacing on an institutional skin, a moment of sociality appearing on the grey piece of stone. On a similar note, IMAL (www.imal.org) is showing work from a Paris collective about ownership of world corporations which included a live stream of brokers twittering with each other…

Back to Cimatics’ urban conversation, all the abbreviations used in French are used, bits of symbols, even the Arabic name for coffee, qahwa. And that is what brings me to my point, namely the presence of Arab food culture in Brussels.

The area that goes from the South station and then along blv. Stalingrad and blv. Lemonnier has become a lively eat-out spot. On a Sunday night, one is startled by the bright red fluorescent signs of local halal butchers’. There are tea-rooms crowded with men drinking coffee and mint tea. But there are also a couple of very beautiful traditional cafes’ (Au Labureur and La Ruche, with their wonderful stained glass panels) which have been preserved and turned into alcohol-free, fresh juice and Arab-style pancakes joints. There are new halal restaurants catering for a younger generation. Social codes, space management and even the experience of ordering food is different. One example: fish restaurants where you see the raw and marinated fish at a counter, choose what you want to have grilled and pay according to the weight of the fish.