FLAVOUR OF THE MONTH
If you listen carefully, the humble cauliflower will tell you everything you need to know about class, taste and snobbery in contemporary Britain
Cauliflower. Cauliflower, for heaven’s sake! How the devil has the humdrum, mundane, commonplace, one-dimensional, smelly, brain-shaped cauliflower suddenly become sexy? Cauliflower is hot. Cauliflower is cool. Cauliflower is peppering restaurant menus from Langho to Padstow. Cauliflower risotto, cauliflower couscous, cauliflower cooked, cauliflower raw, cauliflower whole, cauliflower puréed, cauliflower thin, cauliflower thick, cauliflower seared, grilled, griddled, baked and blackened.
“It’s their nutty flavour when roasted combined with its luxurious softness,” says chef Ollie Dabbous of the Michelin-starred Dabbous, in London’s Fitzrovia.
“It’s a great vehicle for other flavours,” says Damien Clisby of Petersham Nurseries, by the Thames at Richmond.
“Very good for vegetarian dishes,” says George Tannock of Treves & Hyde, in the City.
“They’re cheap and plentiful and help your GP [gross profit],” says Vivek Singh of the Cinnamon Club in Westminster.
“I haven’t a clue,” says Jeremy Lee of Soho landmark, Quo Vadis.
Mark Twain described cauliflower as “a cabbage with a college education,” and, indeed, it does belong to the brassica family. However, its historical origins are neither elevated nor clear-cut. Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder mentions something that sounds very like a cauliflower in his Natural History of around 77AD. After that, darkness descends over the cauliflower until the 12th century when botanist and pharmacist Ibn al-Baitar suggested the cauliflower came from Cyprus. This is somewhat unlikely. Since then the cauliflower has enjoyed a bit of a roller coaster reputation. It was appreciated for its contribution to a Lenten diet in Northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. The indefatigable diarist and veg man, John Evelyn, mentions “collyflowers” in Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, in 1699. He gives a surprisingly modern recipe for pickling them, a treatment to which they take kindly, a precursor of the later piccalilli. It climbed back up the social ladder in the 18th century when a cauliflower soup, Crème du Barry — named after Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress — became all the rage. And then the cauliflower again sank back down into obscurity.
Until recently, it was largely ignored by chefs, while British home cooks perpetuated the time-honoured travesty of boiling the innocent vegetable to death before smothering its distinctive, but delicate, flavour beneath a duvet of white sauce or cheese. The cooks of Sicily, Calabria and India treated their local varieties with respect and imagination, because these regions have highly evolved traditions of vegetable cookery, while in the UK, vegetables are always regarded as playing second fiddle to whatever meat they’re accompanying. But now, like Chesterton’s ass — “Fools! For I also had my hour” — time has come round for the cauliflower once more.
The rebranding of the cauliflower actually began in the Eighties, when one or two of the more enlightened chefs began to see possibilities in the vegetable. Among the first was Joël Robuchon, the most admired chef of his generation, then in his pomp at Jamin in Paris. His gelée de caviar à la crème de chou-fleur was a classic. A thick layer of caviar came encased in a glittering caviar aspic. This was crowned with a purée of cauliflower and cream that balanced the salt of the fish eggs and intensified their taste. It was a combination that was as mysterious as it was mesmerisingly delicious.
Then in the early Noughties, along came Heston Blumenthal’s cauliflower risotto with carpaccio of cauliflower, chocolate jelly and cocoa powder. This combination came about when Blumenthal was in his chemical profiling stage. He noticed the flavour profiles of cauliflower had similarities to those of cocoa and created a dish that caused the then-editor of Guardian Weekend, Katharine Viner, now editor of the newspaper, to observe it was so beautiful she wanted to cry.
Jason Atherton might be said to have kicked off the contemporary rage with his conceit of squid risotto with cauliflower in which the squid is cut and cooked to seem like rice, and fine wafers of the vegetable provide a crisp contrast. Now, Ollie Dabbous roasts it and serves it with wild thyme and bianchetti truffles. Phil Howard at Elystan Place slices it thinly and pairs it with Mimolette cheese. Chris Denney of 108 Garage has come up with a cauliflower steak. Texture’s Agnar Sverrison gives us “cauliflower textures”.
Where restaurants lead, cookery writers follow: Yotam Ottolenghi’s roasted cauliflower and hazelnut salad, cauliflower sliders, chargrilled cauliflower with tomato, dill and capers; Diana Henry’s cauliflower popcorn; Honey & Co’s cauliflower muffins; Rosie Saunt’s baked almond-crusted salmon with warm cauliflower salad and so on and so on have all lent colour and variety in the pages of food magazines. And where cookery writers take us, domestic cooks caper feverishly in their wake, all part of a familiar pattern, with kitchen wonks vying with culinary dweebs to keep pace with the latest twist and turn.
Of course, there has always been the latest, smartest, oh-don’t-you-know? don’t-youhave? for-heaven’s-sake-where-have-you-been -living? ingredient. The history of cooking is a history of fashion. Food has always been a signifier of class and wealth, of who’s in, who’s out, and where you stand in the pecking order. But in the last three decades it’s become more than that. Particular foods have become as important as particular fashion brands as social markers. The cauliflower has become the Brunello Cucinelli or Christian Louboutin of the vegetable world. But what does that say about the new class of culinary illuminati?
The section of the public that is gastronomically enfranchised is small, and the subset who follow the changing fashions within food, absolutely minute. Far from democratising the culinary universe, the internet has exacerbated the division between the enlightened and enfranchised gastronauts, and the plodding culinary dullards. It has opened up vistas of food snobbery undreamed of by earlier generations. The search for the latest, most arcane, recherché, chicest, most modist ingredient is open to everyone, and has become ever more frenzied. So frenzied, indeed, that it has propelled the cauliflower to the top of the aspirational order. Because all knowledge is now available at the clatter of a keyboard, food snobbery is no longer the province of the connoisseur. It has developed a series of entirely new social classifications. Are you a Gob, a Gonk, a Cad or a Coot?
Gob (Gastronomic Snob). Kitchen zealots who obsessively follow each fashion, micro-fashion, and pepper social media about where they’ve eaten, what they’ve eaten, the latest discovery, newest technique (with photos) as a means of boasting that they’re surfing the crest of the gastronomic wave. They’re first to the latest pop-up restaurant/street food stall/ coffee bar/patisserie/bakery; and know a great deal about the hot places in San Francisco, Modena and Sydney. Their kitchens are festooned with water baths, steaming ovens and Pacojets. They will have at least six olive oils and as many vinegars. They tidy up and wash up during dinner, while keeping up a monologue on the latest hot restaurant/ingredient/ technique/gadget as a means of conveying their superiority over your woeful ignorance. Very keen on beef that’s been aged in salt chambers. Dangerous and obnoxious.
Gonk (Gourmet Wonk). The techno-techies of the kitchen, who put gastronomic theory into culinary practice; experiment with fermentation and curing techniques; are devils with marinades; compare and contrast ingredients, sourcing them from ever more recondite producers in ever more obscure places, proclaiming ever more arcane points of difference. They buy pots of harissa (Le Phare du Cap Bon brand, naturally), za’atar (Yotam’s recipe), dukkah (or duqqa, du’ah or do’a), pomegranate syrup (from Beirut), lentils (from Ventotene), capers (salted from Salina), salts (from Guérande, Trapani, Himalayas), etc etc. Will leave the washing up until the next day. Enthusiastic, amiable and harmless.
Cad (Culinary Faddist). Quite harmless, they’re forever catching up on fashions just as they’re beginning to cease to be fashionable. They have induction hobs with touch controls (these are useless for any practical purposes) imposed on them by their designer. Their bottles of oils (olive, rape seed, argan, sesame) are arranged for aesthetic purposes. None of the surfaces on their kitchen appear to have been used for food preparation. There is always a bowl (Italian, Spanish or Turkish market?) of glowing fruit in the middle of an open space. They will speak with the knowledge acquired from close study of the weekend supplements featuring Nigella, Nigel, Yotam, Rowley and the rest. They will have good coffee.
Coot (Cooking Convert). The foot soldiers or cannon fodder of the food fashion wars, who finally catch up with a fashionable ingredient when they arrive on the supermarket shelves. Once upon a time, the world of food snobbery was straightforward, and its fashions were the province of the luxury ingredient. There was caviar, with Iranian and Russian vying for supremacy, and Chinese for the really recherché outsider. (Now there’s a freefor-all between British, German, Belgian, Chinese, French and Turkish.) Oysters gave full rein to arcane debates as to the relative merits of French or English, Arcachon Belons versus Whitstable natives, West Mersea or Rossmore. There was foie gras, too (duck or goose? French or Hungarian? Raw or mi-cuit?). For a short time, there was even a vogue for sardine vintages, although this turned out to be something of a hoax. As serious ethical questions about caviar, oysters and foie gras began to circulate, food snobbery diversified. The food industry discovered that people’s desire for novelty and culinary airs and graces could be satisfied by lesser foods. Olive oil became the first of this new wave to develop a mystique. In 1985, a particularly savage winter destroyed a substantial proportion of the olive trees in Italy. Faced with a drop in income, with typical ingenuity, the Italians developed a series of niche products for which they could charge a lot more money, marketing their oils by region, estate, olive varietal and method of production.
Since then, we’ve enjoyed the fetishisation of bread. First there was ciabatta that seemed so Italian although, in fact, it was developed by Peggy Czyzak-Dannenbaum at La Fornaia in Park Royal for Marks & Spencer. For some years now, it’s been sourdough with the concomitant refinements concerning starters, rising periods, flour sources etc. Balsamic vinegar had a vogue and still holds a certain sway, even though the industrialised, public versions that turn up in vinaigrettes are so often vulgar travesties of the exquisite, intense original. Salt — sea or rock? Which sea? Which rocks? — has had its hour. Quinoa, risotto rices, chillies, dukkah, za’atar and pomegranate syrup have all jostled for A-list recognition, and like Shakespeare’s Ages of Man, they’ve all gone through seven stages in the short hour and sweet of their pre-eminence.
Stage one: Engagement. An ingredient being selected for elevation to the pantheon of socially desirable foods usually starts when a chef is looking for something that will give their cooking a degree of distinction it might not otherwise have. There are no secrets any more in the cookery universe, thanks to the internet, and one chef’s ingenuity rapidly sparks imitation, particularly when the ingredient is cheap, value can be added to it, and the gross profit margin maintained without intimidating the customer. In the case of cauliflower, its very ordinariness is a source of wonder. Stage two: Escalation. Cookery writers and bloggers now take up the cause. The ingredient becomes the subject of wider recognition. The general qualities of the ingredient are debated, its attraction, seasonality and general provenance are established: “There’s something really appealing about cauliflowers. It’s the texture, firm and yet friable, dense but yielding. And that flavour. Meek and mild. It’s so comforting.” And so it moves to the outer consciousness of fashion-alert domestic cooks: “Oh, cauliflower. We had it at Fahrenheit 451 the other evening. Fermented, marinated, blow-torched and just dressed in a few drops of pine syrup. Phenomenal. Cauliflower cheese it wasn’t, I can tell you.” Stage three: Refinement. This is what you might call the extra-virgin stage. It’s when the base qualities of the ingredient are established. The first level of specialisation is established. Cauliflower goes from common-or-garden cauliflower to being “you realise there are cauliflowers and cauliflowers”? Oh. “Well, there is your supermarket cauliflower. A perfectly decent product in its own way. But really, you should be getting them direct from a farm, fresh-cut that day. Supermarket ones are cut, transported to a depot, packaged, sent on to a distribution hub, then dispatched to whichever supermarket. They’re several days old by the time you get them. It makes all the difference. Especially if you want to do Mark’s recipe of marinated cauliflower with chicken-of-the-woods funghi and shavings of Berkswell cheese.”
Stage four: Provenance and Production. Or, where does your cauliflower come from? A refinement of the refinement stage. Are your cauliflowers from Lincolnshire? The Isle of Wight? “From a little-known producer in Oxfordshire who specialises in brassicas.” Organic? “Don’t be silly. Biodynamic. They have to be.” Ah, yes, but are the plants fertilised with horse manure, cow manure or the manure of beavers? It makes a difference, you know. Stage five: Foreign Invaders. This is prompted by the discovery that there are rich pastures for food snobbery in naming ever more obscure varieties of cauliflowers from other countries. Look out for giant purple cauliflowers (Sicily), yellow cauliflowers (Calabria), Romanesco (Lazio), France’s finest white ones (from Brittany). This goes along the following lines: “Claire and I were in Puglia last week and… oh, you wouldn’t have heard of it. It’s a tiny place. (Name), not far from (Name). I don’t suppose things have changed much in 500 years. It feels that way. And they have these most amazing cauliflowers. You can’t find them anywhere else. They have a depth of flavour we’ve never come across before. They’re only available from November to January. Actually, we’re looking at seeing if we can import them.”
Stage six: Apotheosis. Suddenly, cauliflowers are hot everywhere. It’s not just good enough to have a decent, fresh cauliflower anymore. They have to be über-super-cauliflowers, a heritage cauliflower grown on an heirloom farm “in the Alto Adige that’s been in the same family for 25 generations on the southern slopes of a remote valley fertilised with manure from the donkeys and cattle that have only grazed on the valley pastures.” Biodynamic? “Don’t be silly. Of course.” Stage seven. Eclipse. The supermarkets get hold of specialist cauliflowers. They are grown in industrial quantities in Spain or Morocco or wherever. The über-super-cauliflower becomes as common as the muck it’s no longer grown in, and suddenly it’s, “Cauliflower! Oh my God! That’s so sad! Haven’t you tried… ?” whatever the next ingredient marked for fashionable greatness turns out to be. Celery? Fashion is transitory by its nature. Forever it demands something new, something different, something to set tongues wagging and, in this case, mouths chewing. For the time being, cauliflower represents the apotheosis of the elevation of the modest to the pantheon of culinary gods. Humble, it seems, is the new chic. The meek have inherited the earth.
THE CAULIFLOWER HAS BECOME THE BRUNELLO CUCINELLI OR
CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN OF THE VEGETABLE WORLD