Food Files: Steve

In my hood, all beers lead to this boy.

Like anyone else in our corner of Hackney, I'd clocked Steve round the way. Truth is, I'd developed something of an obsession. With his amateur tats and flimsy vest, Steve is the quiff-crowned King of Dalston. This is the first Food File to be snapped with a long lens, and I promise it'll be the last.

O Steve! It's as though the spirit of Hackney fermented in Ridley Road Market's putrid morass, trickled down the drains of Kingsland Road, then rose through its beer-soaked floorboards to take Dalston's stage in your human form.

I found him on the playground of depravity that is London Fields. It was a blazing hot day and Dalston's pasty denizens lay strewn over the grass like tofu wieners on a barbecue. It was summertime alright – the living was easy and we were sucking back on the silly juice.

Your preferred location on London Fields reveals much about your social identity. It's the same on Rio's Ipanema beach. To a newcomer, those sandy-toed cariocas merge into one caramelised mass. To the insider, one look reveals where they belong:

• Achingly hip, naturally beautiful and well aware of the fact? Posto 9.
  
  
• A man too handsome and too well-dressed to be straight? Posto 8.
  
  
• ... and so on.

Here's how it works with London Fields. A more detailed map will follow:

• Shady nooks east of the cricket pitch:

Yummy mummies and their cooing entourage. Chuck a frisbee at your peril.

• Lush pasture south of the Lido:
  
  

Couples and cool things with careers. A nice range of rugs and throws. Balanced discussion of the week's news.

• Outskirts of the central belt's running lanes:
  
  

Jocks, youths and office monkeys. These sporty types slurp sugary drinks, get all excited, then aim frisbees at sunbathers' gonads. The melon-balled Cereal Killah learnt this through painful experience.

• Shadowed walkways from Middleton Road to Mare Street:
  
  

An odd kind of segregation becomes evident when taking this route through the Fields. Youths from the surrounding estates congregate around the benches and menace Daily Mail readers.



(Maybe this is where the stray bullets get fired. It's certainly where my good friend, now a special advisor in the Conservative government, was chased through the park by "a tracksuit with eyes".)

• Dry patch just north west of Broadway market:
  
  

Off-duty labourers, barbecue guerrillas and assorted members of 'up-and-coming' bands. Typically, they'll be working on their new sound with some sick drum machine beats:



Hey-yo, hey-yo!

What you say... what you hear?

My name's Dave... and my mate Tim's here.



The debauch-scorched grass of this hipster's savannah is littered with fag butts and sad cases. They basically wanna be Steve.... and on the savannah is where I found him.

*

I picked my way through the beer cans and asked the King of Dalston that same question I pose to all Food Files:

"Who are you, and what do you eat?"

I realised that my voice had actually quivered in His presence. He's so rock and roll, I thought, he's so rock and roll....

Steve sent one of those spaghetti arms whirling out to a beer can. He took a long slug of Red Stripe. And then He answered:

"Eating is cheating."

Casareccia with Broccoli Arrabiata

If you believe the adverts, Italian mothers prepare their boy's favourite dish for his every visit.

Not so in the post-feminist scrum that is Britain.

I can barely drop my knapsack before mother points me to the kitchen. There, under a bombardment of dubious style tips and flying Kettle chips, I grind out her favourite dinner.

This is it.

Ingredients (serves a big strong boy and his ma)

250g of suitable pasta. We're looking for anything that would work with pesto really: trofie, orrechiette, casaraccia or even linguine.

One head of broccoli

Clove of garlic

Red chilli

Small splash of white wine

Sprinkle of toasted pine nuts

Pecorino

1. Make sure you've got some toasted pine nuts to hand. Toasting them really does make all the difference. Here's to pine nuts, people.

2. Chop the florets off the broccoli. This is broccoli a la Dubya.

3. Get the broccoli florets and the pasta into a boiling pot of water. As with the anelli recipe, this gives you a nice ten minutes to prepare the sauce. It's all you need.

4. Mash up the garlic with the back of your knife. Chop the chilli nice and fine. Scrape this pungent double act into the oil together. Turn it on low and coax out some flavour.

5. Give it a couple of minutes, then splosh in some white wine. No more than a giant gobful, preferably measured by eye.

6. Bring the wine to the boil. Soon the alcohol will have had enough of the wet heat and get out of there, leaving the wine and the oil to get together.

7. Heat down low. The wine should be on a very slow simmer. Over the next six minutes or so, the wine and the garlicky oil should emulsify into something like a hot dressing.

8. PASTA'S DONE!

   Drain the pasta and the broccoli. Leave it a little wet though – those starchy green droplets play a crucial role in our sauce. Return it all to the pan. Take a look. Looks crap doesn't it? A load of over-boiled broccoli and some dry pasta.

   Cover that shit up with the pan's lid. Next time you lift it up, you're eyes are gonna spin round your skull, your tongue's gonna come flapping out of your mouth, and you're not gonna believe what you just saw.

9. OK, find the campest oven gloves in your house and secure the pan lid to the pan. Ready? Now shake the bejeezus out of that pan and everything in it.

   It's not so much about your arms as your core strength here. You should feel your midriff hit new heights of Peter Andre, Mysterious Girl, tightness. Alternatively, you could give yourself a hernia. That's another genetic weakness I've inherited.

   Anyway, shake the pan for about a minute. Less if you feel your guts explode through a hole in your abdominal wall.

   
   
   

10. Right lift off the pan lid. What do you see? That's right – a glorious emerald slick, coating all your pasta.

    Ok, I may have oversold this sight at Step 8, but I still love it. This is the perfect base for a sauce. The texture, the nutrition, the colour is all there. Now we just need to give it some oomph.

11. Return to your saucepan of emulsified oomph - wine, oil, chilli and garlic. Pour that delicious sauce all over the broccoli slick. Take about half of the toasted pine nuts and and imagine that they had been spreading rumours about you through the kitchen store cupboards at night:

    "Cereal Killah ain't shit.... Cereal Killah doesn't know what he's doing anymore.... Cereal Killah took four goes to make an alioli..." - stuff like that.

    Crush this little rebellion.with the back of a heavy knife. Make sure this is in full view of of every single ingredient that could have heard what these bitch-ass pine nuts were saying about you. You're making an example of them. Now toss their crushed bodies into the pot.

12. Stir the pots contents about – we are producing the final sauce here. Take care to mash up and lingering bits of stalk. Imagine President GW Bush was coming round. We all know how he feels about stalks....

13. Finally, once the sauce has reached something like homogeneity, put it into bowls. Grate some Pecorino on top, and throw a few pine nuts on as a garnish.

14. Interrupt your mother's favourite midweek soap by calling out the following line from Peter Andre's Mysterious Girl, originally delivered by the great Bubbla Ranks:

"Baby girl, I said tonight it your lucky night - broccoli spicey pasta's rada nice!"



Serve.



Watch mother's face as she tucks into her metrosexual son's cooking:

Pride and shame all at the same time.

The Bushies' Broccoli Beef

It's not often you'll catch me disagreeing with George Bush, but he got it wrong on broccoli.



In 1990, the president used a White House press conference to express his profound hatred for my favourite vegetable. Result? Big laughs. Six years years later, mad cow disease rocked America and Oprah Winfrey joked she would never eat another burger. In response, the Texan meat industry dragged her through the courts in a $12m defamation suit.

Those episodes reveal much about the US food industry. Nonetheless, the influence of America's food giants has expanded beyond their industries and into the realm of politics, like a chubby backside spilling into another passenger's seat.

The combined weight of corporate and political interest in an unhealthy food system partially explains why 34% of Americans are now obese. More on that in my new 'Rusty Butz' column.

The Nixon administration tightened those links between business and politics, and Bush Senior's fortunes were intertwined with those of Tricky Dicky. In 1970, Nixon persuaded the fresh-faced Bush to resign as a Congressman and target the Senate seat of a fierce Nixon critic. The plan backfired – Bush lost. Or did he?

Always the man of honour, Nixon made amends by appointing Bush as the US Ambassador to the United Nations. In a twist of fate, Bush worked his way up to Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and it was he who ultimately demanded Nixon's resignation as president in 1974.

Despite two years at the UN and a later stint as envoy to China, Bush never developed a taste for exotic food. Nothing changed during his presidency. In 1992, served the finest sushi in the world, Bush threw up on the Japanese Prime Minister. In Japan to this day, bushu-suru – 'to do the Bush thing' – is slang for throwing up in public.



What a calamitous episode that was. Scaling back after the detente with Russia, Bush's security team must have thought Japan would be a holiday. But with their president down, they sealed the area and talked fast:

“What was the President served?! 'Red snapper?' Red snapper?! God-dammit!”

Like the Ruskies would use raw fish to assassinate someone... oh.

If you watch carefully, you'll see the President actually spring up to face down his aquatic adversary. He even punches the air in defiance. This gesture is on page one of The Big Man's Political Manual, marked “You can't keep me down!” It's what Silvio Berlusconi did after his ambush in Milan. There however, the similarity ends. Berlusconi had taken a brutal blow to the face; Bush had just copped a tuna maki.

*

When George W took the White House, there was a feeling that he was settling old family business. But while Dubya tightened the noose on Saddam, he took a more diplomatic approach towards his father's true enemy – broccoli.

In 2000, the would-be president announced that whilst he would not eat the stalks, he would eat the florets. That meeting with Broccoli Man was Bush Jr's Malta Summit. Wariness toward an old enemy was still clear, but there was hope that a new era of mutual tolerance had dawned.

Perhaps this was because Bush had seen how processed foods were nudging his electorate – and his vice president – towards a slow death. Perhaps it was because one such food – a pretzel – darn near delivered him to a quick one.

Following years of feckless snack swallowing, Dubya became a born-again pretzel-chewer. “Listen to your mothers”, he preached. “Chew before you swallow”. The memory of Bush Senior, goading his mother at the gates of the White House, gloating at his constitutional power to refuse her servings of broccoli, seemed distant. Dubya even talked peace with the foe that had nearly killed his pa.

George Bush Jr was actually a keen crop-muncher. Sometimes there was simply no stopping him. Whilst campaigning in Iowa, he snatched up an ear of local corn and tore into it raw. The president mistook the photgraphers' silent awe for admiration:

“You don't even have to cook it!” he bellowed, beaming at farmers who served raw corn only to their lowliest mules.

Speechless, but ultimately Republican, they dutifully looked away as their retching president discarded his fibrous dildo. What a waste..

Still, with a $190 billion subsidy for corn-focused US farmers, there was always gonna be plenty more where that came from...

Sicilian Rings with a Moorish Medley

Good pasta's simple: drop it in the pot and wait ten minutes. Unless you lose yourself in the Archers or overdose on heroin (or both), dinner's ready.

That simplicity explains why so many of us thrive on the Italian staple. But it's also the texture. And texture's something you lose if you go cheap.

Too many people think pasta is a mere commodity, where low price is the only distinction. They're wrong. And as a rule of thumb, if it cooks in less than ten minutes, then it's probably pants. Joyless, gloopy pants.

No middle class Londoner lives more than ten minutes from an Italian deli. My favourite one is Gallo Nero, on Newington Green Road. It's actually a fifteen minutes walk, but when I think about its owner I start skipping like a schoolgirl.

Clock him down the pub and he's just another skinny bloke with a big nose. Meet him in the deli, and his sensual Italian makes even this butch bastard swoon. His banter flows in great muddy torrents of Cockney, but his blood trickles tricolata.

They stock good pasta. I won't be a snob about it – Sainsbury's Spaghetti a la Chitarra is fine stuff – but Italian delis, with Italian brands, have an edge. I picked up two bags on my last visit – Casareccia Molisana and Anelli Siciliani:

• The casareccia I deployed in a propaganda counter-offensive against George Bush Sr. More on that later.
  
  
• The anelli ('rings') I sacrificed to a dubious voyage through Sicily's culinary history.

In short, I prepared a sauce that contained virtually every ingredient introduced by the Moors to that benighted isle:

Ingredients:

(Serves 2)

250g of Sicilian Anelli - or any other pasta that works for you here.

Red chilli, finely chopped

Garlic bulb, brutally bludgeoned

Olive oil

Handful of chickpeas

Ten raisins, chopped.

Nip of saffron

Sprinkle of pine nuts

As many fennel fronds as you can pick off the fennel bulb

Lemon

Hard Italian cheese (optional)

1. Turn on the Archers. Get some pasta. Boil some water and whack it in.

   I like these rings for this recipe, simply because they're a good fit with the chickpeas in the sauce. Shape really does matter – I surely don't need to tell you that bolognaise doesn't work with spaghetti. Or that it's not even called bolognaise.

   If you don't know why all that is wrong, I'll let Nigel break it to you gently.

   Right – you've a nice ten minute window to get the sauce ready...

2. Crumble a pinch of saffron into a thimble-sized cup. Infuse it with no more than two tablespoons of boiling water.

3. Before the oil is in the pan, get the heat on and wait for a slight heat to build. Toss the pine nuts in and rattle them around in the dry heat till they have the golden, good natured glow of all Italians. Heat off.

4. Now brutally bludgeon the garlic into a paste using the back of a knife, a wooden board and the bitter memory of some public humiliation that's been eating away at your soul.

   Chop a red chilli into small specks – only you know how much you can handle, but I'll bet it's not as much as this maniac.

   Scrape that shit into some olive oil and turn the heat on real low. We're not frying, we're coaxing out flavour.

5. Fling in some chickpeas. Just a fistful – if your pasta's any good, there's no need to swamp it with sauce. Get those chickpeas rolling around the pan to pick up the flavour.

6. Chuck in the chopped raisins. This is a crucial step if you want the sweet, sour and spicy effect that's so rare in European cookery.

   I didn't have any raisins to hand, so raided my muesli and just tried to avoid the oats.
   
   

7. PASTA DONE!

   Drain it and toss the pasta into the pan with the Moorish medley. Salt and pepper to taste. Now pour the saffron water on top. We're not done yet, so hold on.

8. Chop up the fennel fronds and throw them in the mix. Stir them about because their feathery strands do tend to flock together.

   If you've no fennel, parsley will do. Coriander or basil? Maybe, but not in my name.

9. The pasta should now be steeped in the saffron dye. Two minutes cooking in the pan really makes a difference here. Heat off.

   Lemon juice. I sometimes get too gung-ho at this point and end up squirting some pips in the mix, prompting a frenzied rescue mission.

   If you want this dish a little richer, grate in some hard Italian cheese now and stir it about.

10. Pasta into a bowl. Get the toasted pine nuts. Toss them onto the pasta. Maybe put a stray fennel frond onto its very peak.

    Swirl of virgin olive oil, a few crystals of Maldon sea salt and we're done here.

11. Eat, ideally with a chilled glass of Sicilian Grillo. Personally I washed it down with a murky glass of council pop.

Italy ain't all good

Shortly after Pavarotti branched out to the plebs, everything Italian was suddenly brilliant. Bland wines, flappy suits and shite films all won Joe Bloggs' heart simply because their producer's name rhymed with Gino Ginelli.

Inspired by Italian football – sorry, Gazzetto Italia – my friends and I even Italianised our conversations. We would wave our hands around whilst talking insistent bollocks – 'testiculating'.

There's a lot to love in that enigmatic peninsular, but our conception of Italy and the Italians is deeply flawed. Italy, as most people know it, is just a marketing strategy tailored to sun-starved, sexually-frustrated, status-anxious Anglo-Saxons. Rant over.

So here's what I do love about Italy. First, its groundbreaking television. Secondly, pasta. Everyone has their own carbohydrate league table and for me pasta sits at its summit:

1. Pasta

2. Bread

3. Potatoes

4. Rice

Stand by for some recipes....

Food Files: Gideon

Some people eat on the hoof. This guy just eats the hoof.

But this Food File is not really about Gideon. It's about the imps behind him who serve up the carnage. Introducing Ali and Momo - two paperless Afghans in a gore-strewn butcher shop.

*

Ali had a head like a pumpkin. It sat atop his slender neck like a prize-winning vegetable about to shatter the rickety village rostrum. He was 5”6' in his wellies but exuded a wry charisma.

Beside Ali stood his silent sidekick, Momo. Momo is a man who lets his meat cleaver do the talking. That much is clear from the state of his overall. Momo nodded intently at Ali's every serious point and giggled like a fool at his every joke. Everyone needs a Momo.

The pair accosted me at their shaded stall on Dalston's Ridley Road. I was perched over a macabre display of dismembered quadrupeds, wondering how on earth I used to digest this matter. Without warning, the sales pitch commenced.

Ali grabbed a hoof and waved it in my face. Drawing my eyes with the stump, he held it aloft like some torch of machismo. Even as a paid-up tofu-muncher, I was a captive audience. Momo pulled up beside him and Ali's voice called out in the rich, guttural tones of his native Pakhtunkhwa.

“Soup from this.... just one cup.... make you very, very strong....”

Momo raised an upright forearm, fist clenched, then jabbed it up and down repeatedly in the universal sign for “sweet loving”.

Ali's commentary went on:

“Your lady..... never let you go.”

Momo stopped the muff-uppercuts, and gave himself a big, long hug, his bearded face contorted in ecstasy.

“Your thing”, continued Ali, pointing respectfully at my groin, “will be like.... a cobra.”

Momo threw up his butcher's hood, stuck out his tongue, then started to sway in serpentine poise.

Ali came closer, and whispered in my ear as we both observed the man-snake:

“Always ready...”

Momo's eyes flitted from side to side....

“... and always hungry...”

At this point, Momo started flicking his tongue in and out with obscene rapidity....

Unfortunately, Momo's tongue caught the eye of a large Caribbean lady who had been buying plantains at a nearby stall. She stopped dead, stood straight and shot the man-snake a look of pure contempt. Momo snapped out of the cobra act and started toying nervously with a trayful of lungs.

Deprived of Momo's illustrations, Ali switched to a more literal tack.

His brutal anecdotes were less Mills & Boon than Taliban Hustler. The earthy Afghan was having fun trying to make the stuffy Englishman uncomfortable. I countered with a few stories of my own but it was a total mismatch. This guy rips balls off carcasses for a living.

“So how often do you eat this, Ali?” I asked cheerfully (tapping out).

Ali brought his hand to his heart and bowed slightly:

“I am vegetarian.”

“Well then who does eats this?”

“Black people” Ali replied matter-of-factly. “Why they are so big. So strong.”

I took a deep breath and prepared my standard middle-class briefing on racial stereotyping.

Bang on queue however, Gideon, 36, from Lagos, Nigeria, turned up and started rummaging through the hooves. Two caught his eye. He gave both a cursory foot massage before making his choice.

But how do you digest a cow's hoof? Here's Gideon's recipe:

Get the wife to simmer it for at least three hours. Sometimes she puts a few yams in there. Then she spices it with hot pepper and serves it as a soup.

That's a demanding recipe for Mrs G.

But then again, the lady doesn't go without reward.

Food Files: Charlie

I clocked Charlie's sporty silhouette en route to a guerrilla sports day on London Fields. Leap-frog relays, frisbee-discus, thumb-wrestling.... how does this kind of athlete maintain peak condition?

By the time I caught up with him, Charlie was already pretty focused on his first event - the polystyrene cup put. Frequently he would place his fingertips to his temples then throw them forwards as if creating his own telekinetic forcefield. Twice, without warning, he exploded into star-jumps that sent tremors down the pavement and onto the Fields – a statement of his intent.

It didn't take much to get his head out of the game however. Charlie it emerged, is a cook. He works for Sotheby's restaurant and will also be donning his toque at the Secret Garden Party festival.

Soon we were talking about whether showpiece restaurant fare could possibly be sustainable. Doesn't it promote meat, meat and more meat?

“To be honest, I could live without meat. I could go veggie like that, no problem...”

“Really?”

“But not fish. Absolutely not fish.”

“So... what's your favourite fish?”

“Skate”

“Oh yeah – I used to love skate. It's like you're eating a creature from another planet. That weird, cartilaginous wing... so how do you cook it?”

“With beurre noisette...”

“Good call.”

“... and fresh herbs."

"Oh baby..."

"And capers. Proper ones.”

“Salted, right? Not the bloated miseries that you dredge from brine.”

“Fucking right. Salted, mate. Always salted.”

I was getting too close to the Food File. So, like a bastard, I pointed out that skate is on the MSC's 'Fish to Avoid' list – boom! It was a real suckerpunch and the budding chef never saw it coming. How do you like me now, Ringo? He got a little defensive.

“Well we always try and serve sustainable fish where I cook.”

“So.... mackerel and pollack?”

“Colin.”

“Eh?”

“It's called Colin now.”

“What is?”

“Pollack. It was the worst branded fish in the ocean. Pollack. Sounds like a cross between pillock and bollock.”

“So they wanted to make it sound sexier...”

“Right.”

“So they called it Colin.”

“Errr... yeah.”