01 September 2016
Comfort Food
Some nourishment harvested from grim headlines.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Yakutsk, in Siberia, 3000 miles north of Moscow, where temperatures drop to minus 50C in winter, and the average pension is £190 a month; now, there’s somewhere that needs some serious cheering-up – and what better way to do that than to get baking? Yes, Yakutsk is way ahead of The Great British Bake-Off here; it’s reckoned to hold the record for the world’s biggest cake, an 850kg giant made fourteen years ago to honour the town’s 370th birthday.
And this year, to mark Russia’s national flag day on August 22, another huge cake was made – a 250kg beauty in the red white and blue of the Russian flag – and cut up into 1,400 slices all ready as a special treat for the town’s orphans, poor families and pensioners. However… when the town’s orphans, poor families and pensioners arrived (mouths watering and tummies rumbling, no doubt, in delighted anticipation), they found that not one of those 1,400 slices was left. Local officials had arrived 30 minutes earlier and gobbled up the lot. The table was bare, not a crumb or a fragment of icing remained.
Well, if The Great British Bake-Off is something warm-hearted and amusing like The Pickwick Papers, it stands to reason that The Great Russian Bake-Off is going to be something deep and gloomy like Crime and Punishment, doesn’t it? “This is all you need to know about Putin’s Russia” was one Russian Twitter user’s comment on the incident. This week also saw the publication of a report by the Russian opposition criticising President Putin’s United Russia party as “the party of criminal Russia”, but it was the scandal of Yakutsk’s ‘Russian national flag day’ cake which took the biscuit, as it were, for the perfect symbol of the high-level corruption eating away at the country’s heart.
Nevertheless, it may yet have a happy ending; with elections due in Russia later this month, some commentators are predicting that the outrageous fate of Yakutsk’s 250kg edible Russian flag may well persuade voters that it’s high time that the powers-that-be in Russia were no longer permitted to have their cake and eat it.
Four months ago, I commented here that the world, or at least the media reporting on it, was fixating on food and eating, and no wonder, because it was the first week in May – right in the middle of the traditional Hunger Gap. This week has seen a similar abundance of equally interesting and revealing food stories – and again, no wonder, as here we are right in the middle of the harvest season. And, harvest being a time of abundance, the food stories are a little more nourishing for the human spirit this time, even if the headlines from which they are gleaned are as grim as ever.
Could the human spirit shine through even the devastating earthquake in Italy, with its terrible death-toll and the hundreds injured and the thousands made homeless, with the accusations of jerry-building and of the misappropriation of funds for the rebuilding after the last earthquake, and with the rumours that organised crime is behind both those scandals and may well be positioning itself to exploit this latest tragedy?
Yes, indeed it can, and shine through at its best and brightest. How? Well, this is Italy, so this miracle, like that of the loaves and fishes, is worked with food. Reporting from one of the tent cities put up for those made homeless by the earthquake, The Times described volunteers donating and serving food – wine, prosciutto, crusty bread, mushrooms, salami, tuna salad. It quoted one of the survivors as saying “A psychiatrist dropped by to see if we needed help. I said thank you, but I prefer to eat and drink”. There speaks the authentic voice of the miracle which is the human spirit – practical, resilient, optimistic.
The town of Amatrice – famous as the birthplace of the pork pasta dish spaghetti all’amitriciana – was near the quake’s epicentre. At least half the buildings there have been flattened, including the Hotel Roma which reputedly made the best spaghetti all’amatriciana in the world, and which would have been at the centre of a local festival celebrating the famous dish this weekend. A graphic artist from Rome, Paolo Campana, has launched an initiative to raise money for the recovery effort; he has suggested that Italian restaurants donate €2 for every dish of spaghetti all’amatriciana served. More than 700 restaurants immediately signed up for the scheme, and many more are sure to follow. Thousands of diners enthusiastically embraced the idea; in Turin, crowds formed in Piazza San Carlo as hundreds of people gathered to take part in this ingenious way to help the quake victims. In the UK, Jamie Oliver has pledged that his restaurant chain Jamie’s Italian will take part, too.
Imagine being a four year old child, born and living in the Middle East, and never having seen (let alone eaten) a tomato, or sweets, or ice-cream, or biscuits, or cake. In Syria this week, an agreement between the rebels and the Assad regime resulted in the lifting of the four-year siege of Daraya, a suburb of Damascus. The town was surrendered to the regime, but 700 opposition troops and their families were allowed to leave for the opposition-held town of Idlib, and 4000 other civilians were escorted by government troops to the regime-held but peaceful town of Hrajela. For four years the starving inhabitants had been living on little more than grass and thin soup; but now they are discovering (or re-discovering) the joys of fresh fruit and vegetables, bread and rice and sweets and ice-cream and biscuits. Women were amazed (and shocked) when they were welcomed into Idlib by people throwing rice (so rare and precious in Daraya) in celebration, as at a wedding. Many of their children are encountering ice-cream and sweets for the first time. For those opposition troops from Daraya who might consider the agreement as a defeat, this taste of peace for their families must sweeten its bitterness.
Lastly, some black humour from Venezuela and Italy this week.
In starving Venezuela, President Maduro announced that he is putting the army in charge of food distribution, with a general or admiral in charge of each basic foodstuff. General Rice, for instance, or Admiral Potato. The irony is that the army, like the rest of the country, is starving; the generals and admirals can’t even feed their own troops, let alone the rest of the country.
In Italy, the Portuguese secret service officer arrested for allegedly selling Nato secrets to a Russian spy in Rome, denied the allegations and claimed that he was in fact selling olive oil to the Russian. Proof indeed that espionage is an oily, slippery, smelly and deceitful business, not the glamorous and exciting fantasy many of its practitioners would have us believe. Don’t put him in prison, I say. Make him work round the clock in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant, cooking spaghetti all’amatriciana in aid of the quake victims. That will teach him an honest trade, and give him a healthy dose of reality too.
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